You Don't Know What You Think You "Know" About... The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future

You Don't Know What You Think You
Author: Raymond Lotta
Publisher: Insight Press, Inc
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2014-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0983266131
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This book takes on and refutes the conventional wisdom that communist revolution has been a disaster and nightmare. In a wide-ranging, provocative, and richly detailed interview, Raymond Lotta, a political economist and expert in the history of communism, guides the reader through the “first wave” of socialist revolutions: the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917-56, and the Chinese revolution of 1949-76. This is the real history and a penetrating analysis of what these revolutions and their leadership actually set out to do, the liberating economic, social, and cultural transformations brought about, and the shortcomings as well. How did the lives of women radically change? How did revolution attack the oppression of minority nationalities? This book will show you. It also sails straight into the face of controversy. It addresses the important historical role of Stalin, the slanders directed at the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, and the wrong ways that people in U.S. society have been trained to think about society, the world, and revolution. Lotta examines why these revolutions ultimately met defeat. But he also explains why it is possible, drawing the right lessons, to go further and do better in a new stage of revolution. In this, he introduces the reader to Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism. At once rigorous and accessible, the book is an unparalleled resource. The world cries out for fundamental change—yet people are told there is no alternative. Raymond Lotta makes the case that “the whole history of communism thus far shows that the world does not have to be this way.”

Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones

Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones
Author: Bob Avakian
Publisher: Insight Press, Inc
Total Pages: 100
Release: 1999-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0916650111
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This provocative book includes a scathing refutation of the reality behind conservative Christian fundamentalist morality, a critical look at the limitations of "liberation theology," including a discussion of Jim Wallis's book, The Soul of Politics, and an inspiring look at morality from a revolutionary perspective. This work is even more timely today as it was when it was published in 1999. Bob Avakian says in the Prologue that "From whatever vantage point one looks, it is unmistakable that there is what could be called a 'moral crisis' in America. There has been, to a significant degree, 'a breakdown of traditional morality.' But the answer to this—at least the answer that is in the interests of the majority of people in the U.S. and the overwhelming majority of humanity—is not a more aggressive assertion of that 'traditional morality' but winning people to a radically different morality, in the process of radically transforming society and the world as a whole."

Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon

Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon
Author: Bob Avakian
Publisher: Insight Press, Inc
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2014-04-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0983266107
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This book makes the case for why humanity needs a communist revolution and deeply explores the means for actually bringing about such a liberating revolution. In this two-part work (“Part 1—Revolution and the State” and “Part 2—Building the Movement for Revolution”), Bob Avakian examines the contradictory dynamics of historical development in human society—and the possible pathways of change—and discusses the scientific methods and means for realizing the “Impossible Dream” of a viable and radically different world, one where humanity can soar beyond social relations characterized by domination, exploitation, and oppression. In a style that has been described as totally outrageous and eminently reasonable, Avakian punctures conventional thinking on a number of diverse themes (for example, the theory of “social contract,” notions of “human nature,” and today's “revolting culture”). In a penetrating critique, capitalism and the philosophies of the bourgeois epoch are sharply contrasted with the basic vision, principles, and approach of a new liberating society, including how this would be reflected in a constitution radically different than the current U.S. Constitution. Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon embodies the new synthesis of communism which Bob Avakian has been developing over the course of the past several decades, and provides new insights into the dynamics of social change and the strategy for revolution.

Away With All Gods!

Away With All Gods!
Author: Bob Avakian
Publisher: Insight Press, Inc
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2008-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0976023687
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Is believing in gods actually harmful? How has Christianity for centuries served as an ideology of conquest and subjugation? Why is the "Bible Belt" in the U.S. also the "lynching belt"? Why is there a rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world? In the intensifying conflict between U.S. imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, is the only choice to take one side or the other? Why is patriarchy and the oppression of women foundational to so many religions? Can people be good without god? These are just some of the questions explored in this provocative work by Bob Avakian. Bringing a unique revolutionary communist voice to the current discourse about god, atheism and morality, Avakian demystifies religious belief and examines how, even in its most progressive interpretations, religion stands in the way of the emancipation of humanity. A thread deeply woven throughout Away With All Gods! is the need to fully rupture with all forms of superstition, and to take up instead a truly scientific approach to understanding and transforming reality. Whether you believe in god, or are an agnostic or an atheist, Bob Avakian will challenge you with his powerful critique of long-established traditions and his liberating vision of a radically different world.

The New Communism

The New Communism
Author: Bob Avakian
Publisher: Insight Press, Inc
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2016-10-15
Genre: Communism
ISBN: 0983266190
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Nominee: 2017 American Book Fest, Best Book Awards. For anyone who cares about the state of the world and the condition of humanity and agonizes over whether fundamental change is really possible, this landmark work provides a sweeping and comprehensive orientation, foundation, and guide to making the most radical of revolutions: a communist revolution aimed at emancipating humanity—getting beyond all forms of oppression and exploitation on a world scale. The author, Bob Avakian, is the architect of a new synthesis of communism. This new synthesis is a continuation of, but also represents a qualitative leap beyond, and in some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed. Avakian has written this book in such a way as to make even complex theory accessible to a broad audience. In this book, he draws on his decades of work advancing the science of communism and his experience as a revolutionary communist leader, including leading the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, as its Chairman since its founding in 1975. This is a pathbreaking work, one that scientifically analyzes the system of capitalism-imperialism and its unresolvable contradictions; confronts the challenges facing the movement for revolution; and forges a way forward to making an actual revolution in this country, as part of contributing to communist revolution internationally.

From Ike to Mao and Beyond

From Ike to Mao and Beyond
Author: Bob Avakian
Publisher: Insight Press, Inc
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2005
Genre: Communists
ISBN: 9780976023623
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Bob Avakian has written a memoir containing three unique but interwoven stories. The first tells of a white middle-class kid growing up in 1950s America who goes to an integrated high school and has his world turned around; the second of a young man who overcomes a near-fatal disease and jumps with both feet into the heady swirl of Berkeley in the sixties; and the third of a radical activist who matures into a tempered revolutionary communist leader. If you think about the past or if you urgently care about the future ... if you want to hear a unique voice of utter realism and deep humanity ... and if you dare to have your assumptions challenged and your stereotypes overturned ... then take a look at this book.--From publisher description.

The Alternative in Eastern Europe

The Alternative in Eastern Europe
Author: Rudolf Bahro
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789606810
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The contemporary Marxist writer provides analyses of socialist theory, modern political struggle, and socialist societies in Eastern Europe.

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
Author: Lea Ypi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393867749
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Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.