Communist morality was created by revolutionary leaders and thinkers in the early twentieth century to serve the greater goal of building communism in the entire world and was regarded by both the communists and the Western left-wing as antithetical to the corrupt morality of capitalist societies. It is by nature a statist ethical system that always prioritizes the interests of the state and relies on state ownership of the means of production to enforce its moral principles. This essay starts with the moral interiority of socialist subjects, focussing on the transformative impact of communist morality on individuals and their motivations to accept or prescribe the newly imposed ethics by the state. Then it closely examines the official discourses of communist morality in the former Soviet Union and China and their moral practices through the social engineering project of creating the socialist ‘New Person’. The concluding section argues that the emphasis on collective identity and the centrality of institutional sociality determine the relevance of communist morality in the world today.

The chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning historiography of the People’s Republic of China, especially of the early period between 1949 and 1978, and suggests how we might integrate this new work into narratives of the Chinese past and present. In working through the research of the past thirty years the findings not only help us identify new areas of research, bur also rephrase some of the initial questions. The chapter highlights areas in which reconsidering PRC history seems especially necessary: transnational flows, violence and social transformation.

Many of the great masters of post-Keynesian economics – think of Lunghini, Garegnani, Graziani, but the list is long – are no longer with us. Those belonging to the following generation have been marginalised and reduced to irrelevance, at least in the academic arena. The ‘neoclassical group’, on the other hand, has closed its ranks and built a powerful machine of cultural hegemony. It is very difficult for those who pursue non ‘mainstream’ lines of research to build an academic career – and thus continue to do research. And still, if paradigm shifts are most likely to happen in the wake of epochal transformations, the world is changing rapidly enough to advocate for one.

The building-blocks of this ‘new’ paradigm are all there. All we have to do is to circumscribe its perimeter, and close ourselves our ranks to join forces and knowledge and provide a complete, coherent and alternative interpretative framework to the dominant one. In this chapter, I make the bold attempt to connect these blocks, giving a (non-comprehensive) list of readings, authors or research lines which could fruitfully cooperate in creating the school of thought Pasinetti is advocating for.

This chapter investigates the socio-political and ideological aspects of an event named in the lexicon of the Iranian Kurdish movement as the Kurdish Peasant Uprising of 1952-3 (Rapêr̄ini Werzeran u Cûtyarani Kurdistan 1331-2). This event took place in a period when kurdayêti was the only ideological force behind mobilising the Kurdish people to conduct collective political action. However, throughout this chapter I argue that this uprising highlighted the issue of class conflict in the rural areas of Kurdistan, and challenged the authority of the Kurdish feudal class. In addition, the KDPI’s role, as the only and major ethnonationalist political organisation is assessed and discussed. Due to the way this uprising was conducted, it has been argued to be the first collective class-inspired rebellion in Iranian Kurdistan.

This chapter investigates the socio-political and ideological aspects of an event named in the lexicon of the Iranian Kurdish movement as the Kurdish Peasant Uprising of 1952-3 (Rapêr̄ini Werzeran u Cûtyarani Kurdistan 1331-2). This event took place in a period when kurdayêti was the only ideological force behind mobilising the Kurdish people to conduct collective political action. However, throughout this chapter I argue that this uprising highlighted the issue of class conflict in the rural areas of Kurdistan, and challenged the authority of the Kurdish feudal class. In addition, the KDPI’s role, as the only and major ethnonationalist political organisation is assessed and discussed. Due to the way this uprising was conducted, it has been argued to be the first collective class-inspired rebellion in Iranian Kurdistan.