Anti-Parliamentary Communism: the Movement for Workers' Councils in Britain, 1917-45

Book Review| January 01 2011 The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. William A. Pelz William A. Pelz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2011) 5 (1): 135–137. https://doi.org/10.2307/41889951 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William A. Pelz; The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1 January 2011; 5 (1): 135–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41889951 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressJournal for the Study of Radicalism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article Raymond Carr, editor. The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. (Problems in Focus Series.) [New York:] St. Martin's Press. 1971. Pp. x, 275. $10.00 and Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Translated by Tony White Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1972. Pp. 590. $12.50 Get access Carr Raymond, editor. The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. (Problems in Focus Series.) [New York:] St. Martin's Press. 1971. Pp. x, 275. $10.00. Broué Pierre and Témime Emile. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Translated by White Tony. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1972. Pp. 590. $12.50. Temma Kaplan Temma Kaplan University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, October 1974, Pages 1198–1199, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/79.4.1198 Published: 01 October 1974

Journal Article The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain Get access The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. By Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. Trans. by Tony White. London: Faber. 1972. 590 pp. Illus. Maps. Bibliog. Index. £6.00. W. Horsfall Carter W. Horsfall Carter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 3, July 1972, Pages 502–503, https://doi.org/10.2307/2612757 Published: 01 July 1972

Journal Article The Republic and the Civil War in Spain Get access The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. Ed. By Raymond Carr. London, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press. 1971. 275 pp. Index. (Problems in Focus series.) £3.90. Geoffrey Ribbans Geoffrey Ribbans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 1972, Pages 127–128, https://doi.org/10.2307/2613669 Published: 01 January 1972

The author explores responses to political violence through the materiality of three aspects of the Civil War in Spain: military lines in the battle for Madrid, a concentration camp in Extremadura and a remote settlement of forced labourers and their families. He shows how archaeology's revelations reflect, qualify and enrich the story of human survival under the pall cast by a dictatorship. Sharing the inquiry with the public of today also revealed some of the disquieting mechanisms by which history is composed and how archaeology can be used to deconstruct it.

The article deals with the analysis of publications of British Fascists newspapers 'Action' and 'The Blackshirt' during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. The main directions of image of enemy formation are studied on the example of these papers. Forms of presentation and ways of international problems interpreting by far-right publications are studied. The fascist newspaper Action, The Fascist Week and The Blackshirt spoke from the position of nationalism, Imperial identity, anti-liberalism, anti-Soviet and anti-Semitism. The concept of "communism" in the pages of the fascist press has accumulated the most precisely the image of enemy. Articles and notes shaped confusion between "Soviet", "red" and "Communist". The USSR seemed to be "the warmonger" and the "architect of the Civil war in Spain". The destructive role of Soviet Russia in the conflict was proved in the British fascist press. Soviet Union was accused of seeking to plunge Spain and Europe into anarchy. In British fascist publications trend towards stereotyping and myth-making were noticeable, they were opposed to "Western" civilization (as individualistic) and "Eastern", "Communist" (oppressive, traditionalist).

‘The origins of Spain's civil war’ examines what exactly led Spain to a state of civil war. Many forces, both internal and external, were crucial to how events panned out. It started out as a military coup that aimed to stop the mass political democracy set in motion by the effects of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, accelerated in the two decades following the First World War by the economic, social, and cultural changes in Spain and the rest of Europe. Historians have tried to explore where the violence came from and how it related to the pre-war domestic environment.

The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936, when a fascist coup aimed at replacing the left wing Republican government was met across one half of the country by armed resistance from the working class and peasantry. The outbreak of the Civil War, and the mounting wave of class struggle which had preceded and provoked the fascist coup, were greeted by the anti-parliamentary communists in much the same way that Sylvia Pankhurst had welcomed the Russian revolution nearly 20 years earlier. It was like ‘the dawn on the horizon after a long and painful night’.1 KeywordsBritish GovernmentClass StruggleCapitalist LegalityGeneral StrikeRepublican GovernmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Jurisdiction — In Ports and National Waters — Jurisdiction by Consul Regarding Disputes between Master and Crew — Civil War in Spain — Competence of Dutch Courts.

Reviewed by: Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War by Miriam M. Basilio Yves Laberge Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War. Miriam M. Basilio. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Pp. xvi + 304. $119.95 (cloth). In her first monograph (possibly a derivate from her doctoral dissertation from 2002), Professor Miriam M. Basilio from New York University positions her interdisciplinary research into three salient trajectories related to Spanish history: the visual culture and political propaganda; the politicized posters from the 1930s; and the memory of the 1936–39 civil war in Spain. These intertwined topics are not totally new if considered individually, but there are relatively few books in English that have centered these perspectives upon visual history in an effort to understand the dynamics and redefinitions of the nation in its transition into fascism. Incidentally, some portions of this substantial book have already appeared elsewhere, mainly in scholarly journals (cited on xvi, 276). Although this book primarily covers the years 1936–1940, especially in her last chapter Basilio also studies many recent retellings of the era. That time period marks the early days of modern propaganda, corresponding to the darkest strategies of public outreach practiced by Germany’s Nazi regime. Basilio’s main point is to conceptualize the Spanish Civil War through contemporary theoretical approaches, centered on citizenship, national identity, memory studies, and the public sphere (in the Habermasian sense): “I argue that rival political factions within the Republican and nationalist camps placed questions of national identity and historical memory at the forefront of visual-propaganda campaigns and exhibitions” (1). Despite the complexity of this situation, her methodological approach is nuanced, considering the various trends and influences of this era: Catholicism, the heritage of Spanish colonialism, and the sentiment of national pride (208). In her impressive corpus, Basilio has chosen a wide array of vintage images, posters, cartoons, and various advertisements, either pro or against the advent of a new republic in Spain. Most of these forgotten images are reproduced here in black and white, with a few exceptions in color. The author studies how various exhibitions of these images have been conceptualized, conceived, and perceived by audiences, as in the unforgettable Paris World Fair of 1937, for example, when “the Spanish republican government presented a remarkable modernist pavilion,” which included Pablo Picasso’s latest masterpiece Guernica (174). The analysis is broadly conceptualized into several theoretical frameworks, for example in Basilio’s study of masculinity in some sketches of the Spanish military junta (29). The number of combatants involved was impressive then: as tangible proof of these vast propaganda efforts, “the junta issued approximately 40 posters, many reproduced as postcards in editions up to 50,000” (29). This book comes into five chapters, highlighting the social construction of the imagined nation of Spain (Chapter 1); observing how art, museums, and world fairs were used as vehicles for propaganda (Chapter 2); analyzing how the new nation was redefined (Chapter 3); showing how roots and patrimony were recuperated (Chapter 4); and finally asking how the persistent memory of civil war can be revisited and represented in the twenty-first century (Chapter 5). As she attempts to address these complex questions, Basilio admits that she cannot provide answers to all of them: after so many decades, it is now almost impossible to know exactly how individual citizens really reacted to these propaganda campaigns and exhibitions—whether they adhered to or resisted them—in the early days of the Spanish Civil War (2). As such, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is not just a book about Catalan history. Chapter 5 concludes with questions about how these events are represented by contemporary Spanish artists in the twenty-first century and raises some issues related to memory [End Page 1049] (what we retain from the past), amnesia (what is forgotten or what remains undiscussed), and human rights (especially how citizens were manipulated by political propaganda and effectively forced into a dictatorship) in the context of images from artists such as Fernando Bryce (232–33). Recent images from Francesc Torres’s photography project, “Dark is the Room Where We Sleep,” such as a black-and-white photograph showing a hand...

Reviewed by: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist by Laura Beers Keith Laybourn Laura Beers, The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) Laura Beers' biography of Ellen Wilkinson, nicknamed "The Mighty Atom" because of her small size and energy, is perceptive, well-informed, and clearly focused upon Wilkinson's vital contribution to the emergence of socialist politics in the early 20th century in both a British and an international context. Beers places Wilkinson's activities firmly within the wider and conflicting politics of her age and provides the impressive associational context. Indeed, her book is a very important addition to the previous biographies. It is decidedly more critical than Betty D. Vernon's Ellen Wilkinson: A Biography (Brighton: Croom Helm, 1982), which presented Ellen as a worthy founding pillar of the Labour Party, and challenges Paula Bartley's more recent biography Ellen Wilkinson: From Red Suffragist to Government Minister (London: Pluto, 2014) by suggesting that Wilkinson was less consistent and more pragmatic in her principles than Bartley assumes. On the other hand, it rather endorses Matt Perry's excellent biography "Red Ellen" Wilkinson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), which sees "Red Ellen," referred to as such because of the colour of her hair and her fiery temperament, as a transnational figure operating in the world of international socialism and greatly affected by the various socialist and Marxists she met, including Robert Blatchford, Keir Hardie, Rajani Palme Dutt, Lenin and Trotsky – the lionesque figures of their day. Famed for her support for the Jarrow march of October and November 1936, when more than 200 men marched from Jarrow to London to present a petition to Parliament for jobs, it is often forgotten how involved Ellen was in myriad other socialist organizations and activities between the eve of World War I and her death in 1947. Though by no means the dominant socialist of her age she was, indeed, one of the ubiquitous figures in the history of the British labour movement. Ellen Wilkinson was indeed a most unusual radicalized woman. She was one of the first women to go to the University of Manchester and was active in the Manchester Independent Labour [End Page 302] Party and the Clarion movement. She was organizer of the women's section of the Amalgamated Union of Cooperative Employees after World War I. A lifelong feminist fighting for women's rights in Britain and throughout the world, she began her work with the Manchester Women's Suffrage League before being active in numerous feminist organizations and campaigns. When World War I displaced suffrage from the agenda, she was a pacifist, although perhaps less directly involved in its activities than many others she was a member of the International Committee for Women for Permanent Peace in 1915. However, the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s led her to support the National Government's move to increase spending on armaments. By that time she had become deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War where she became fervently anti-fascist. As a trade unionist she investigated, with Frank Horrabin, a married man and later member of Parliament for Peterborough with whom she had a relationship, the organization and activities of the General Strike of 1926. Initially Marxist in her thinking, and a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, she left it in 1924, feeling that its leadership was weak and divisive, with more communists out of the party than within it, to focus upon her career in the Labour Party. An inveterate attender of meetings and member of investigative commissions, she also became involved in an examination of the brutalities of the Irish Civil War and of British brutality in India against the Indian independence movement. To these activities might be added a flirtation with Guild Socialism through her association with G.D.H. Cole, Margaret Cole, and the National Guild League. She was deeply concerned and outraged with the social conditions of poor families in Britain, and particularly the high levels of unemployment in inter-war Britain. She was member of Parliament for Middlesbrough (1929–1931) and for Jarrow (1935...

The article presents an analysis of the origin of the policy of non-intervention in the civil war in Spain in 1936. The archival materials of the Foreign Office’s fund (National Archives, London) make it pos-sible to widen greatly our knowledge about genesis and character of that policy, to argue the version about Great Britain as an initiator of non-intervention. Many factors influenced this process: interests of British monopolies, strategic and political considerations, such as anti-Communism of the elite of British society, their sympathy towards the rebels of Franco, wish of official London to make it possible for the left parties in France, neighbouring to Spain, not to acquire stronger positions. Non-intervention turned against the Spanish Republic, made it easier for Germany and Italy under cover of it to carry massive intervention on side of the rebels which ensured Franco’s victory in the civil war. On the basis of unknown documents of the Foreign Office the author gives an analysis of complicated diplomatic struggle of the Powers in the beginning of the civil war in Spain.

Book Review: The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain <i>The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain</i> , by BrouéPierre and TémineEmil. Translated by WhiteTony. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1970. $ 15.00. Pp. 516.

Martin Hurcombe's and David Wingeate Pike's books set out to explore the impact of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) on neighbouring country France. Both follow a historically grounded and rigorous form of enquiry, although they have very different focuses through which to analyse the effects of the conflict on the French population. Whereas Hurcombe concentrates on reportage, essays, and fiction by French sympathizers of both Franco and the Spanish Republic, Pike turns his attention exclusively to the portrayal of the war in the French press. These books contribute to the growing field of war studies, each one enriching the existing body of literature on the Spanish Civil conflict — such as Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War (2001) and Stanley G. Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (2004) — by investigating the complexities of the French perspective. Hurcombe's findings are too numerous to list here, but he discovers a number of uncomfortable truths relating to the French perspective, which situates his book as boundary-defying in the field. He unearths in the French far-Right reportage of Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, for instance, the will to model France's divided Right (notably the Front Populaire) on what was perceived as the unified Right in Franco's Spain. Using the notions of restorationist utopia and Lévi-Strauss's idea of the bricoleur, Hurcombe adds theoretical depth to his investigation and concludes, shockingly, that ‘the Civil War appears to become a mythical event grounded in an assemblage of foundational narratives and anecdotes rather than in the author's mimetic representation of real events’ (p. 52). The author also probes the French Leftist reportage, travel writing, and novels of the time (by Jean-Richard Bloch, André Chamson, Marguerite Jouve, and Simone Téry), and discovers an equal and opposite tendency on the part of the French Left to project the Spanish Republicans as the unified ideal in order to compensate for domestic political stumbling blocks. Hurcombe concludes that, where sympathizers of the French Right conceived the Spanish conflict and the triumph of the Nationalists as a ‘restorationist utopia’, those of the French Left held on to a notion of their neighbouring Republicans as providing an image of a ‘revolutionary utopia’. Providing succinct and clear summaries of historical context, Hurcombe at no point assumes prior knowledge on the reader's part, and this makes his book accessible as well as insightful and exciting in its scope. Similarly user-friendly and even more comprehensive, Pike's book identifies four areas of investigation in the press that allow him to interrogate French reaction to the Spanish Civil War: editorial opinion, propaganda, French correspondents in Spain, and collateral events in France. The author concentrates his field of investigation on the archives in the French départements bordering Spain, making his work geographically specific and focused. Taken together, Hurcombe's and Pike's books complement one another, providing the reader with a rich gamut of cultural and historical representations in France of the Spanish Civil War. In addition, they will be of interest to anyone studying Spanish exiled writers in France (such as playwright Fernando Arrabal) and wanting to gain a thorough background knowledge of the historical shifts inflecting and shaping such writers' œuvres. Their books constitute the first major studies in English of the French perspective on the Spanish conflict. Both will surely have a long-lasting influence on the fields of war studies and Spanish Civil War studies for this reason.

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else