Revolutions

by Michael Löwy

The photographs collected in this unique book provide a startling visual documentation of seminal revolutionary events, from the Paris Commune of 1871 through to a series of "Unfinished Revolutions", from May 1968 in France to the Zapatista uprising in the mid-1990s. The immediacy of the images tells the story of these struggles in a way that texts rarely can, with revolutions appearing as complex and messy events driven by the actions of real, breathing humans who make their own history. Commentary on the images is provided by leading historians Gilbert Achcar, Enzo Traverso, Janette Habel, and Pierre Rousset, and Michael Löwy. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Photography

550 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2020

About the author

French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is presently the emerited research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, he received the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 1994.

Reviews

[Köstebek35]

It would be better without criticizing Stalin OUT OF CONTEXT.

[Matt Sautman]

This collection of photographs and brief histories gives readers glimpses into the lived histories of revolutionaries in the late 19th and 2oth century. Moments covered include the Paris Commune, the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, the Hungarian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cuban Revolution. Not every photograph is necessarily of a high resolution, yet the ability to peer at this images gives readers an insight that prose could never fully replicate. Those readers interested in Leftist movements may especially find the threads that flow throughout these chapters fascinating.

[Antonio Zambrano Allende]

Un recorrido interesante por la historia de la fotografía durante los procesos revolucionarios desde la revolución francesa hasta la Cubana. A pesar de tener presentaciones cortas de cada una de ellas, los textos permiten entender y aproximarse con datos claves a cada uno de estos momento, anclando la historia en las imagenes.

[Montana Goodman]

This is a nice overview of a number of revolutions all over the world and the photographs that survived. Each revolution has a short summary along with some descriptions of the photos, written through a Trotskyist lens.

[Hamzah Randhawa]

Cool but I still hate the French