Fall 2023 | T | 3:30 – 6:15 PM | Professor Jonathan Zatlin
Fall 2023 – Jonathan Zatlin
| Days | Start | End | Type | Bldg | Room |
| T | 3:30 PM | 6:15 PM | IND | HIS | 504 |
To some, communism posed a threat to freedom; to others, it promised social justice and rights for women and minorities. This course investigates communism’s ideological origins, triumph in Russian and Eastern Europe, influence on Western European politics, and ultimate collapse.
Additional Course Material:
Extended course description
This course explores the social origins and theoretical traditions of socialist thought and political action. Beginning with the French Revolution, you will explore the emergence of the two emancipatory impulses that have shaped the global history of socialism: the struggle against social injustice and the fight against political oppression. To understand the breadth of the socialist tradition, you will compare contemporary accounts of European labor conditions, family life, and the experience of women and persecuted peoples with the political and economic programs aimed at improving their lives proposed by socialist thinkers. Because of their influence on the socialist imagination, you will focus on the theories of Karl Marx and the split between social democracy and communism after 1917. You will engage first with communism in power: the Russian Revolutions, the emergence of Stalinism, the reasons for its durability, the imposition of Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe after World War II, and the Chinese experiment. The revolutionary triumph of communism, its victory against fascism, and its eventual demise has obscured other socialist traditions in the popular imagination. To avoid mistakenly conflating communism with socialism, you will examine the development of socialism in the West, including “western” Marxism, the student movement of the 1960s, left-wing terrorism and extra-parliamentary movements in the 1970s, the shift from away from anticapitalist to anticolonialist critiques, and the growth of socialist environmentalism. You will end the course by evaluating the recent revival of democratic socialism in the United States.
Partial reading list of primary sources
Gracchus Babeuf, “Conspiracy of Equals” (1796)
Henri de Saint-Simon, selections from L’industrie (1817)
Charles Fourier, selections from various works (1816-1821)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1844)
Karl Marx, selections from Capital (1867)
Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotskii, various essays (1917-1921)
Rosa Luxemburg, “The Nationalities Question,” “The Problem of Dictatorship,” and “Democracy and Dictatorship” (1918)
Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey Into The Whirlwind (1935/1967)
Antonio Gramsci, selections from Prison Notebooks (1929-1935)
Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry” in: The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
Simone de Beauvoir, selections from The Second Sex (1949)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
János Kenedi, Do It Yourself: Hungary’s Hidden Economy (1981)
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984)
Instructor:
