Class Struggle Research Articles

Modern Revolution and Its Restorative Logic: Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx

ABSTRACT This article examines the views of Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx on the nature and extent of modern revolution and its restorative logic. I argue that, while all three supported the introduction of changes in society, they differed on how to steer the course of such changes, which resulted in a peculiar meaning of modern revolution. Each of them proposed good and bad versions of modern revolution, offered specific ways of protecting the good versions from producing perverse effects, and warned against the ugly consequences of a failed revolution. Burke’s conservative revolution favored incremental change against radical social transformations. Contra Burke, Tocqueville acclaimed the egalitarian tendency as a preordained path and advocated democratic revolutions insofar as political liberty could be rescued from the ills of social equality. Marx drew the possibilities of a proletarian revolution from the future the history of class conflicts had prepared. Particularly in his later works, Marx rejected Blanqui’s abortive version of conspiratorial revolution and social revolution without democratization. Overall, each of these thinkers—Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx—reconciled political and social revolutions in their own way, acknowledging that in order to prevent social and moral decay, modern revolutions inevitably gravitate to the Christian logic of restoration.

Exemption from Taxes: A Class Act or Class Conflict?

Exemption from Taxes: A Class Act or Class Conflict?

L’aspetto vero della Sicilia: Nature and aristocracy in Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo

This paper examines the representation of the Sicilian natural environment in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo. I first highlight the anti-anthropocentric stance that emerges from the novel. Next, I explore the ambivalent relationship between Sicilian nature and the class conflict between aristocracy and bourgeoisie central to the narrative, also emphasizing the influence of Leopardi’s late works, particularly La ginestra. On the one hand, through the contemplation of the natural environment, the protagonist, Fabrizio, manages to ‘zoom out’ from contemporary historical events, gaining a perspective that diminishes social conflicts by comparing human insignificance to the eternity and magnificence of nature. On the other hand, nature in the novel shares key characteristics with aristocracy, creating a striking affinity between the two. Consequently, nature becomes entangled in the same class conflict it seemed to transcend. By aligning itself with the aristocracy, nature serves as a tool for the resentment of a historically defeated class, with the bourgeoisie's modernizing mission in Sicily ultimately undermined by the inherent qualities of the Sicilian landscape.

The Limits of the Law: Work in the Light of Capitalist Reproduction

ABSTRACT The article explores alternatives to capitalist work from the point of view of reproduction of capitalist relations. The latter occurs in a cyclical manner as capitalist structures—the economic, juridico-political and ideological levels—co-constitute and reproduce one another. Given the difficulty inherent in breaking the cycle of reproduction, a reflection on alternatives to capitalist work requires that work is reconceptualised, to the extent possible, beyond current structures: as transformations at any one individual level cannot produce radical change, alternatives to capitalist work require a holistic reimagining of the social totality, transcending, for example, mere legal or mere political reform. The force that can disrupt the cycle of capitalist reproduction and open space for such holistic reimagination is class struggle. The latter becomes embedded in the process of redefining work in so far as it is the force that can precipitate structural and unforeseeable change. It also acts a reminder that the substantive redefinition of work is a collective process, and cannot be the task of any single individual situated externally to that struggle.

The revival of radical popular education in Italy as a new form of cultural and class struggle: The case of popular schools in Rome

The aim of this article is to examine the revival of popular schools in Italy, focusing on the ‘network of Roman popular schools’. This is a little researched but highly relevant topic in sociology nowadays, due to the innovative way it links politics and education in an increasingly unequal society. Inspired by research gathered over 4 years of participant observation and 28 in-depth interviews, I describe the way in which popular educators combine social mutualism, typical of Italian Antagonistic Left movements, with critical pedagogical practices: education is considered by activists as a way of doing politics by other means, in line with the origins of popular education enacted by the labor movement in the two past centuries and in particular with the pedagogical experience promoted by Lorenzo Milani, in turn capable of uniting Gramscian and Freirian thought. Popular educators address their educational actions to the social recognition of subaltern students, who are otherwise stigmatized by the dominant culture. In this way, a very interesting counter-hegemonic practice seems to be generated that entails not only the learners’ identity but also that of the educator themselves. This analysis leads to the identification of new popular education as a form of class and cultural struggle aimed at restoring social recognition to the working class.

Хлібозаготівельні кампанії у південно-східних областях України як форма терору проти селянства регіону

The topic of the Famine of 1932–1933 was and remains sensitive for Ukrainian society. The 90th anniversary of this tragedy coincided with no less tragic events caused by Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. In both cases, we are dealing with an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian people, destroy their state, reshape culture, annex memory. Each of these efforts of the totalitarian regime can be considered both individually and comprehensively, through the prism of the use of special mechanisms of terror. The Soviet Union was the state that, from the first days of its existence, turned terror into a tool for “working” with society. It was he who was used by the Bolshevik regime to “solve” the national question. In parallel with the promotion of the idea of internationalism, the Soviet government embodied, initiated and intensified the class struggle. Its scale was fully felt by the Ukrainians, who in the 1930s became hostages of an artificially created famine. However, the proposed article offers an analysis not of famine as such, but of the preconditions that led to it through total bread harvesting campaigns. The focus is on highlighting their scale in the region, the population of which, a priori, could not become hostage to hunger, due to the agrarian potential of the southeastern regions of the Ukrainian SSR. Based on statistical data obtained from a large number of archival documents, the article demonstrates the evolution of state policy in relation to the implementation of grain procurement campaigns. On the example of government decisions, the expansion of the scale of bread procurement and their forcing at the highest state level is demonstrated. Therefore, the author draws attention to the occurrence of a food collapse among the million population of the region, for which the actions of the state authorities were a priori incomprehensible. Along with this, the formation of the personnel policy in the Ukrainian SSR to ensure and support the grain procurement terror is not left out of the author’s attention. Thus, according to the article, specific persons delegated by the state government were behind the bread procurement terror in the South-Eastern regions of Ukraine. And this is only once again confirming that mass grain procurement campaigns in the Ukrainian SSR were clearly directed, coordinated and were a manifestation of the concentrated rejection of the Ukrainian factor by the Soviet Bolshevik system. Keywords: bread procurement campaigns, South-Eastern regions of Ukraine, soviet terror, Ukrainian SSR, the Holodomor of 1932–1933, Ukrainian peasantry.

The Strategic Plan of the Working Day

“The Working Day” chapter of Capital makes sense today as an illustration of collective struggle over the sale of labor power by the hour. The historical materials in the chapter are instructive if read under the tutelage of Gertrud Kugelmann, considering the advice Karl Marx offers to her on where to start. A reassessment of Marx’s writing process is possible via his various plans in letters, his comments on method, the various sources used, and evaluating the role they have in Capital volume 1. Several scholars read Marx on commodities that “speak” but may sometimes miss idioms in English translation. Reading the German text can help us when searching for theoretical and political strategies for contemporary emancipation. With implications for replies to critics of Marx on slavery, my case is that the staging in Capital offers diagnostic potential where attention to the Parliamentary Blue Books might generate new research agendas, addressing current problems of time, social reproduction, climate, and class struggle. JEL Classification: B14

Implications of Contemporary Totalitarian Imperialism for the Communist Perspective

Abstract Starting from a brief analysis of the structural characteristics of contemporary totalitarian imperialism, as a dialectical supersession of classical imperialism, and of the continuing crisis of capitalism, we focus on the new characteristics of global capitalism, which are arguably crucial for the unfolding geopolitical conflicts and the struggle for socialism. Referring more specifically to the emerging divide and conflict within world capitalism, between western NATO forces (US, EU, et al.) on the one hand, and the rising block of the BRICS countries on the other, we take a critical stance against those (left-wing) commentators or political currents, which consider this conflict as a typical inter-imperialist rivalry and argue for the need of taking an equal distance from the opposite poles of this rising confrontation. As argued, though the revolutionary forces struggling for socialism worldwide should not, by any means, identify with the BRICS coalition, the equal-distance approach should be criticized on the ground that a multi-polar world would be a more favorable condition for a communist perspective. What is more essentially argued is that, independently from the emerging two poles of geopolitical confrontation, there is an urgent need for a transnational class struggle (from below) towards communism, and that the fundamental capital-labor contradiction and the social question should be prioritized as against any national (or capitalist block) contradictions or national liberation struggles. As historical experience has asserted, the opposite prioritization will always work against social emancipation and the prospect of communism.

(Re)Inventing Feminism within the Discourse of Class Struggle: Women and Intellectual History in the Trade Union Movement of Late Colonial Bengal (1920–1947)

Abstract This paper envisages (re)constructing the intellectual praxis of women trade unionists in late colonial Bengal. By arguing how political practice habitually translates to political thought, the paper devises a methodology to address the gendered discourse of intellectual history in the Global South. It focuses on intellectual output, primarily journal articles of women trade unionists like Santoshi Kumari Gupta, Maitreyee Bose, and Kanak Mukherjee, to trace a genealogy of how class struggle was perceived by women labour activists across the ideological spectrum of nationalism, socialism, and communism between 1920 to 1947 in Bengal. The piece is an effort to transcend the manifold marginalisations that plague the establishment of feminine political praxis within the regulating structures of colonialism and capitalism. In the process, it bids to unfold an alternative narrative of the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal narrative of the decolonisation of South Asian intellectual thought.

The Social Dialectics of AI

In this deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence, Pietro Daniel Omodeo employs the frameworks laid out in Matteo Pasquinelli's The Eye of the Master to weave a sociological history of AI that begins with the class struggles of the Industrial Revolution and continues into the context of early twentieth-century computing, which eventually gave rise our current Information Age. "AI," he concludes, "sheds light onto the intellectual component of labor in all ages."

O herói improvável e o elixir das concórdias

The reproduction of pleasant myths, the fabrication of heroic predecessors for present political movements and the upkeep of useful lies for the defence of noble causes should not constitute the aim of legal historians. On the contrary, it is their scientific duty to point out the inappropriateness of such conducts and the lack of plausibility of narratives produced this way. Showing how the legal community of São Paulo has reconstructed its memory, the article offers a new interpretation about the path of Goffredo Telles Junior as a political militant and State theorist. Re-examining forgotten remains of such path and reinterpreting the already known sources, we aim at demonstrating that his adhesion to Integralismo, far from having been an insignificant and episodical juvenile whim, was a decisive moment which affected his ideological views along four decades. From the thirties to the hardest times of the Military Dictatorship, his texts abounded with typical elements of the far-right antidemocratic thought: the obsession with corporatism as a supposed antidote against class struggle, the repugnance for liberal democracy, the disdain for the opinions of the average citizen, the strong attachment to hierarchy and to the “Principle of Authority”, the rejection of individualism and the belief that small élites, superior to the “mass”, should show the Nation its way. Obvious as well in the first integralist party as in its postwar successor, Goffredo’s longstanding loyalty to that far-right movement tends to be disregarded by his admirers, thus wiping out decades of the jurist’s political activity.

HOUSE OF DREAMS, OR NOT

In this paper, we will discuss the role of the built environment as storytelling in the context of Oscar winner Parasite, a film by director Bong Joon-Ho (2019). We will look at the potentiality of the built environment in unveiling film narratives, especially regarding immanent forms of class struggle and exploitation in everyday life. We will investigate the troubling power relations between the rich and the poor in contemporary society and the ways that the concepts of alienation/estrangement, objectification/reification and commodity fetishism can be used to bring these relations to the fore when analyzing the movie. Keywords: Parasite; built environment; inequality; class struggle; alienation; everyday life.

From Conflict to Cooperation: Norwegian Labour Market Institutions in the Making

Moving a relationship of widespread conflicts and distrust into a virtuous circle of trust and cooperation is challenging, yet the case examined in this article shows that it is possible. A problematic start can indeed lead to a positive outcome. In the early twentieth century, Norway experienced the highest levels of labour conflict in Europe. Class conflicts were intense and often violent, with deep mistrust between the parties in the labour market. This situation changed markedly when the Norwegian Employers’ Confederation and the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions signed the Basic Agreement in 1935. This agreement not only led to a lasting decline in labour conflicts, but it also marked a crucial early step towards a system of close collaboration between labour and capital in Norway. By focusing on the intimate relationship between beliefs, trust, and cooperation, this article explores how the labour market parties transitioned from widespread conflict and open struggle to a system of peaceful negotiations and compromises. Changes in beliefs enabled the parties to coordinate on a new cooperative equilibrium, an equilibrium that continues to characterise Norway’s labour market today.

“We Were Put Out of Good Jobs”: Women Night Workers in New York and the Origins of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League

Abstract In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and what kind of work women should do at night was a conflict about class, motherhood, and self-determination. This article profiles three leaders of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League—printer Ella M. Sherwin, transit guard Margaret Hinchey, and streetcar ticket agent Mary A. Murray. All three were devoted union members whose opposition to women-only laws made them dissidents within their unions. They remained shift workers their entire lives while lobbying state legislatures and Congress to demand formal legal equality for women. Histories of the early Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) have emphasized the support of upper- and middle-class women. These working-class women, who had long opposed protective legislation, later demanded the ERA—not in spite of the prospect that it would nullify single-sex labor laws, but because they hoped it would. Theirs was a minority position, and paying attention to it reveals the complexity of class conflict at the root of a feminist dispute which persisted long into the twentieth century.

Synchronous (In)significance: Recording Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage in Real-Time

ABSTRACT Synchronous (In)significance argues for the recognition of a mode of heritage conservation within war-torn Ukraine that is already underway. The paper examines the digital initiative Polycam: Backup Ukraine which allows for everyday users to record, upload and share three-dimensional scans of places, sites and objects that they deem significant within their immediate environment. This evolving contemporary archive is positioned by its founders as a tool for citizen empowerment through the shared availability of the technology and storage of items for heritage capture. The resulting collection provides an unconventional account of the sites, spaces and objects at risk in Ukraine, creating a constellation of high, local, formal and idiosyncratic personal entries. Through this portal, a broad and unsanctioned account of Ukrainian heritage is revealed. This paper draws on the work of Tracy Ireland, Steve Brown and John Schofield which examines the dichotomous relationship of significance and insignificance in the practice of value creation and negotiation of heritage identity. Through this lens it examines how notions of sharing; shared technology, shared ownership and shared access might allow for the creation of a contemporary heritage archive, that interacts with memory, place and things, but does so in ways that “are often not possible in the context of official heritage regimes because of rigid aesthetic paradigms, urban or class conflict, identity politics, or dominant national narratives.” 1 The archive, which draws together digital records of well-regarded heritage sites with unexpected spaces and objects of the personal and the everyday, becomes a means of assessing notions of significance and (in)significance in real-time. This in turn, provides a mechanism for re-evaluating what aspects of the war-torn country are considered worthy of recording and sharing.

Política social de Assistência Social e a garantia de direitos sociais: entre ambiguidades e contradições

The field of Social Policies, with special attention to Social Assistance, continues to be a subject of investigation in the peripheral areas of capitalist centers. This study aims to explore the contradictions present in the interaction between social assistance policies and social rights. To this end, it adopts an approach that conceives of social policy as a process influenced by the historical conditions of capitalism and class struggles. It highlights the determining role of the state and capitalism in the formulation of social policies and their incorporation into the realm of social rights, especially in the Brazilian context, where only since the 1988 Federal Constitution has social assistance become a state policy, assuming responsibility for guaranteeing and providing social rights and social protection. The aim of the article is to problematize the perspective of rights in the Brazilian capitalist state and in the National Social Assistance Policy (PNAS), proposing an analysis of a materialist-historical-dialectical nature. The text adopts the structure of a theoretical essay, beginning with a reflection on the capitalist state and social policies, and then addressing the interrelationship between the state, law and social policies, characterized by contradictions inherent to the preservation and perpetuation of capitalism. The conclusion is that the reasons for the state's difficulty in guaranteeing social rights lie in the fact that the relationship between the state, law and social policies is marked by contradictions, since social assistance seeks to guarantee rights in the legal system, which, in turn, are also geared towards the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism.

Income Distribution and the Elasticity of Substitution in the Works of Joan Robinson

ABSTRACT Independently devised by John Hicks and Joan Robinson, the elasticity of substitution (σ) plays an important role in mainstream theories of inequality. This paper examines the role of σ in Robinson's writings, charting the differing ways in which she used it to examine questions of distribution. Robinson initially applied the concept to examine distribution in a Keynesian framework, proceeding to downplay its importance later on in spite of having played a central role in its formulation. Her criticisms of the nature of neoclassical production functions led her to dismiss mainstream theories of distribution as tautological, while seeing σ as an expression of the potential for rising profit shares under full employment. The use of a single parameter such as the substitution elasticity in mainstream frameworks neglected the important role played by investment and institutions, drawing focus away from an understanding of the ‘rules of the game’ that determined distributive shares in capitalist economies. Given the primacy of σ in discussions today — in textbooks and in the works of economists such as Thomas Piketty — her writings offer an important critique of established frameworks, while also advancing alternatives that stress the role of institutions and class conflict in modern economies.

The Myth of the Classless Society: Henry Carey and the Anti-Labor Origins of U.S. Political Economy (1820s–1830s)

Abstract The essay argues that the idea of the United States as a classless society was never a faithful representation of the U.S. socioeconomic reality, but constituted a myth elaborated since the 1830s by the first generation of U.S. economists to oppose the insubordination of Northern white workers, their mobilization through strikes, their politicization of class, and their critique of wage labor. It was precisely to counter the workers’ discourse, the essay maintains, that the first U.S. economists, most importantly Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), developed an ideological representation of U.S. society as a classless structure devoid of fixed boundaries, in which industrious individuals could improve their condition through labor and in which social positions reflected a scale of talents and merits. By studying the early writings of Carey, but also of Theodore Sedgwick (1780–1839), Francis Wayland (1796–1865), Henry Vethake (1791–1866), Alonzo Potter (1800–1865), and Francis Lieber (1800–1872), the essay shows how economists used the myth of the classless society to scientifically legitimize the coming of capitalism to the United States, as well as to delegitimize class conflict. This anti-labor reaction, the essay argues, marked the very emergence of political economy in the United States as a science aimed at justifying the order of society through a mystified representation of its power relations, while the myth of the classless society would persist as a fundamental ideological pillar in the legitimation and naturalization of American capitalism.

Debunking Patriarchy: A Feminist Critique of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), a renowned Victorian woman writer, is best known for the novel Jane Eyre (1847), which portrays the struggles of the protagonist Jane Eyre for becoming a successful and self -reliant woman in a male dominated society. In this novel, the writer focuses on class conflict, women’s identity crisis and inequality of sexes, and thus tries to establish equal rights for both male and female by portraying the brave character Jane Eyre who is not like other traditional women of Victorian age because she has tried to be a successful woman in life fighting with her ill fate and social taboos of patriarchal society throughout her journey of life. This paper, using feminist lens, tries to explore the obstacles of women to become successful and self-reliant in a male dominated society by focusing on Charlotte Bronte’s female protagonist Jane Eyre who, as we know, is the representative of Victorian women.

The Battle of Blair Mountain and the News Media: Professional Ideology and the Coverage of Bloodshed in West Virginia

In 1921, “labor trouble” was the euphemistic phrase used by newspapers to describe the often-bloody conflicts that took place between working miners and their bosses in West Virginia. The Battle of Blair Mountain was one such conflict, a well-known clash between striking miners and mine operators that was made famous because airplanes were used, however unsuccessfully, to drop bombs on the miners during the hostilities. This study examines the coverage of this event by the New York Times and Washington Post to understand the ideological assumptions of professional journalists at the time toward this brutal conflict. Using a historically informed analysis of newspaper content, this study shows how the professional norms of journalism culminated in a highly ideologically informed coverage of labor struggle, revealing upper and middle-class anxiety toward class conflict in early twentieth century America.