Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

Naming and defining the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society, an impassioned critique of modern capitalism argues that the countervailing impulses that exist within deep alienation present an authentic alternative to nihilistic consumerism. Original.

During the founding of North Korea, competing visions of an ideal modern state proliferated. Independence and democracy were touted by all, but plans for the future of North Korea differed in their ideas about how everyday life should be organized. Daily life came under scrutiny as the primary arena for social change in public and private life. In Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, Kim examines the revolutionary events that shaped people’s lives in the development of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. By shifting the historical focus from the state and the Great Leader to how villagers experienced social revolution, Kim offers new insights into why North Korea insists on setting its own course. Kim’s innovative use of documents seized by U.S. military forces during the Korean War and now stored in the National Archives—personnel files, autobiographies, minutes of organizational meetings, educational materials, women’s magazines, and court documents—together with oral histories allows her to present the first social history of North Korea during its formative years. In an account that makes clear the leading role of women in these efforts, Kim examines how villagers experienced, understood, and later remembered such events as the first land reform and modern elections in Korea’s history, as well as practices in literacy schools, communal halls, mass organizations, and study sessions that transformed daily routine.

By providing a rich ethnography of wartime social processes in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist People's War (1996–2006) transformed Nepali society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with people who were located at the epicentre of the conflict, including both ardent Maoist supporters and 'reluctant rebels', it explores how a remote Himalayan village was forged as the centre of the Maoist rebellion, how its inhabitants coped with the situation of war and the Maoist regime of governance, and how they came to embrace the Maoist project and maintain ordinary life amidst the war while living in a guerilla enclave. By focusing on people's everyday lives, the book illuminates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution of crafting new subjectivities, introducing 'new' social practices and displacing the 'old' ones, and reconfiguring the ways that people act in and think about the world through the process of 'embodied change'.

How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.

In the midnineties, New York’s Lower East Side contained a city within its shadows: a community of squatters who staked their claims on abandoned tenements and lived and worked within their own parameters, accountable to no one but each other. With gritty prose and vivid descriptions, Cari Luna’s debut novel, The Revolution of Every Day, imagines the lives of five squatters from that time. But almost more threatening than the city lawyers and the private developers trying to evict them are the rifts within their community. Amelia, taken in by Gerrit as a teen runaway seven years earlier, is now pregnant by his best friend, Steve. Anne, married to Steve, is questioning her commitment to the squatter lifestyle. Cat, a fading legend of the downtown scene and unwitting leader of one of the squats, succumbs to heroin. The misunderstandings and assumptions, the secrets and the dissolution of the hope that originally bound these five threaten to destroy their homes as surely as the city’s battering rams. The Revolution of Every Day shows readers a life that few people, including the New Yorkers who passed the squats every day, know about or understand.

"This book was the starting point of the subversive current which first appeared in May '68 and is now re-emerging in the anti-capitalist movements of today. It outlines the theory, which lays bare the reasons for our own alienation from modern life."--Page 4 of cover