Class Struggle Research Articles

Causes And Solutions for Low Turnout Rates in Chinese Local Elections: From A Plebeian Perspective

There have been ample academic efforts discussing prospects of liberalizing the authoritarian regime in China, but most of them primarily addressed possible institutional reforms by the party and to some extent overlooked importance of the mass. Therefore, this article attempts to identify factors that dissuade or refrain Chinese citizens from voting in local elections and devise corresponding solutions, for their political enthusiasm to be improved independently of state sanctions, while the finding may provide a novel theory regarding weak correlation between the level of political freedom and turnout rate in liberal democracies. By considering subjects as economic agents in cost-benefit analysis, the combination of underestimated benefits and overestimated costs of voting is highlighted as one fundamental reason for non-voting, which comprises of antiquated cultural norms, aloof social relations and inappropriately handled class struggles. In response to phenomenon of apoliticism, political cynicism or political inactiveness, this paper suggests eligible voters to keenly defend their interests, for instance studying publicized government information, participating in trade unions and respecting their suffrage, as the prerequisite for becoming genuinely and consistently active in political affairs.

Breaking up the state and lopping off the parasites: Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as the state that is ceasing to be a state

This article examines the key features of the dictatorship of the proletariat as theorised by Lenin in the heat of Russia’s revolutionary process in 1917 and stresses its special character as a ‘state that is ceasing to be a state’. The dictatorship of the proletariat represented a new form of the class struggle, the turning of centralised coercive power against the few by the many, the dissolution of the centralised force of the state through its subjection to popular sovereignty, and the emancipation of the growing state from private relations of production through the ‘lopping off ’ of parasitic monopoly capitalists.

Power Struggle liberating Class Consciousness: A Marxist Analysis of the Novel "The Verdict" by Osman Hanif

The study is an exploration of Osman Hameed’s novel "The Verdict" through a Marxist lens. The study aims to investigate the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeois class, as well as the power struggle between them, which results in class consciousness. The research follows a transformative paradigm.The research is qualitative in nature. We analyze the textual lines using a Marxist lens. The findings reveal contrasting differences between classes, with the bourgeoisie class maintaining hegemony and marginalizing the proletariat class through legal, physical, psychological, and economic oppression. Furthermore, this class struggle contributes to the development of class consciousness in the proletariat. The study is significant as it contributes to understanding the power structures and the class struggle in society.

The Bubble Metropolis: Manhattan Island Crises in Contemporary Science Fiction

As “the island at the center of the world,” Manhattan has inspired countless writers and has served as a spatial archetype in science fiction’s world-building. From the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and economics, this article discusses the crisis imagination of the “bubble metropolis” in five contemporary Manhattan-related science fiction novels including Cities in Flight (1970), The Blister (1975), Terminal World (2010), Zone One (2011), and New York 2140 (2017). The spatial variety of Manhattan Island in these science fiction novels is closely combined with its economic condition. The characters, plots, and spatial imagery of these novels gather to reflect the different stages of the operation of a bubble economy, illustrating a historical cycle of capitalism that can never be escaped. Manhattan Island has long been the symbol of the world’s rush for wealth. The fear of economic recession, environmental degradation, and class conflict have formed the special geographical features of the island in the future. The crisis imagination of the “bubble metropolis” also seeks to stimulate critical thinking on economic ethics, urban design, and high technology, calling for social justice and public welfare.

He’s No Spartacus: Jesus, Slavery, and the Utopian Imagination

Abstract James Crossley and Robert Myles’s Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict is a considerable accomplishment in its situation of Jesus as a figure inseparable from the material conditions of labor exploitation. The present review discusses two topics that the book touches upon only briefly, but linger under the surface of their analysis: Jesus’ treatment of enslaved laborers and utopian social experimentation. This article juxtaposes Jesus with the roughly contemporaneous figure of Spartacus to consider about the availability of social experimentation and the location of slaves within class-based analyses of Roman antiquity.

‘Hai, Man! . . . We Don’t Have Democracy’! The Transport Crisis and Working-Class De-Citizenship in South Africa: Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Affordable and safe public transport underpins effective citizenship and freedom as well as work. Citizens expect the democratic state to be caring and reciprocal. Using in-depth interviews with residents and community leaders in Khayelitsha, we look at how worsening public and private transport – mainly mini-bus taxis – not only significantly extends the working day but also destroys political hopes – a process called de-citizenship. We show how mobilities are fundamentally rooted in radically bifurcated spaces of classed citizenship – a new class apartheid – in turn reflecting the structural contradictions of Cape Town and its class struggles.

McCabe on Marx

ABSTRACT Herbert McCabe was unique amongst the grammatical thomists in making significant use of the thought of Karl Marx. He engaged, moreover, with two topics in Marx which have generally been avoided by Christian theologians: class struggle and atheism. This paper examines McCabe’s treatment of both themes, and concludes that he effected a compelling incorporation of them into Christian thought. With respect to class struggle, McCabe understands there to be an intrinsic antagonism in capitalist society. He holds that an antagonistic society is antithetical to Christian norms, and concludes (with Marx) that this kind of society ought to be done away with by engaging in the side in the class-struggle – namely the working class – which has the capacity to do away with class society. He situates this view ironically, however, relativising the claims made about socialist society in the light of God’s Kingdom. With respect to atheism, McCabe brings his thomistic doctrine of God into conversation with Marx’s atheism, arguing that what Marx rejects when he rejects ‘God’ is a thing in the world, whereas God is – by thomistic hypothesis – not one more thing in the world. A radical view, therefore, is sustained by a traditional theology.

Labour segmentation in NCR Delhi’s automobile sector: a political response of capital to labour struggles

This paper aims to understand the changing dynamics of internal labour market segmentation intertwined with the history of working-class struggle in an industrial belt in India’s National Capital Region (NCR). Nuances of workers’ class struggle in the automobile sector in Delhi-NCR over the last 15 years have shown that unity between permanent and contract workers was key to several successful struggles against worsening work conditions and management control within the global value chains of automobile production. Our fieldwork findings, along with direct and indirect political engagement in the region, reveal that increasing salaries and allotment of supervisory roles to small sections of permanent workers, coupled with the simultaneous fragmentation a lower strata of workers into multiple categories with very low salaries, benefits and heavy workloads, have been significant attempts by capital to break class solidarity among different sections of workers. Relatively pro-labour legislation and trade unions tend to concentrate in high-wage zones, while low-wage and precarious employment remains unprotected by such institutional mechanisms. Labour segmentation is inherent to capitalist exploitation, guarded by institutional mechanisms. Advanced mechanisation reduces distinction of skill requirements between highly paid permanent and lowly paid contract workers. In this context, labour segmentation is a political response to trade unionism from the side of capitalist management.

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

Abstract This is a review article of James Crossley’s and Robert Myle’s, Jesus in Class Conflict (2023). After a chapter by chapter summary, the review provides some assorted critical reflections on among other issues the ‘biographical’ approach still apparent here, despite a critical effort to distance from ‘great man’ approaches to history.

CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON

ABSTRACTIn this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth‐Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a “structured process” that moves from class struggle to class consciousness, a theory that complicates the frequent description of Thompson as a “voluntarist.” In the second section, I take a more critical position toward Thompson's understanding of class, discussing a tension between this notion of class as structured process and his numerous invocations of class as a form of “lived experience” whose diversity and unpredictability exceed theorization. This tension aside, Thompson claims that, in the case of the nineteenth‐century English working class, to which he dedicated so much research, lived experience coincided with the more general structured process he posits. In the third section, therefore, I more fully elaborate on this specific process of class formation as Thompson portrays it, identifying and discussing three intertwined threads: (1) a movement from a past‐oriented defense of traditional institutions to a future‐oriented demand for reforms, (2) the development of oppositional, class‐specific pedagogical institutions and practices, and (3) the creation of a distinct class culture (which Thompson closely aligns with the achievement of class consciousness) that is aware both of itself and of its antagonism with other classes.

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

Abstract This essay is a review of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict by James Crossley and Robert J. Myles, a historical materialist exploration of what we know about the life of Jesus and the Jesus movement in first-century Roman Palestine. This review focuses particularly on the ways in which Crossley and Myles engage with considerations of gender and masculinity as part of their engagement with the historical materials.

Jesus, the Crowds, and Historical Agency

Abstract Crossley and Myles’s Jesus: A Life in Class Struggle offers an innovative and accessible reading of the movement around Jesus in terms of class struggle. The authors combine a breadth of knowledge about first-century realities, acumen in exegesis of the Gospel texts, and contemporary crowd theory to reach new conclusions regarding Jesus and his disciples, especially in his last days, and regarding the ‘failure’ of their movement. This review examines their understanding of the ‘Jesus movement’ and its relationship to the Galilean peasantry and their methodology in extrapolating from the Gospels; and proposes a more thorough Marxist theorization of the Gospels’ role in producing the ‘failure’ they describe.

Thoughts Turned to Jesus (or someone very probably, almost certainly, clearly somewhat like him) on Reading Crossley and Myles, Jesus

Abstract This essay is an extended review of, and engagement with, James Crossley and Robert J. Myles’s Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (2023). The review particularly commends them for a work which addresses the difficult question of whether one is able to recover an ‘historical’ figure from tradition, and notes that effort, in many ways, becomes a compelling form of reception criticism. It notes, as well, some key places for future consideration (e.g., the implications of their work for masculinity studies).

A Note on Homelessness and the Moral Economy: How Thompson's Moral Economy Presents in Modern Day Homelessness

In this research note, I propose a theoretical framework that centers class struggle in order to better understand the micro‐level interactions that take place within homeless communities and the systems that structure them. I suggest that researchers can gain clearer insights into marginalized communities by taking a radical interactionist approach, as described by Athens. To start, I propose revisiting classic theories emphasizing the impact of power and dominance in the development of social systems as ways to understand interpersonal social interactions. Specifically, in this note I propose revisiting E.P. Thompson's original theory of the moral economy as an analytical basis and grounding point in the effort to explore homelessness and the communities it creates. Thompson's moral economy suggests that in communities facing oppression and class struggle, an economic and social system develops in which the central tenant is fairness and morality. By revisiting this theory, I suggest that researchers may better understand the ways in which homeless communities structure themselves, not only in relation to one another, but also in relation to the broader social world around them.

Navigating Contradictions in Chinese Diplomacy: The Dual Narratives of Peaceful Rise and Class Struggle in Soft Power Discourse

Navigating Contradictions in Chinese Diplomacy: The Dual Narratives of Peaceful Rise and Class Struggle in Soft Power Discourse

What Made the Jesus Movement Tick?

Abstract This article offers a rejoinder to the five critical reviews appearing in jshj of the book by James Crossley and Robert J. Myles, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (Zer0 Books, 2023).

Literary Condemnation of the Slave Trade and Wealth as the Cause of Corruption Represented in the Light of English Literature

This article has illustrated how, within the framework of English literature, the slave trade and money are both literarily condemned as the root causes of corruption. When the slave trade was prohibited in the British Empire in 1807, the idea of equating labourers with slaves was highly controversial. That had happened very swiftly after a campaign that had only really begun 20 years before. Both slavery and the trade in Africans have already been condemned on occasion and in literature. The social objective of imitating the great landed nobility was examined and criticised by Adam Smith. The literature of the eighteenth century was also afflicted by the contradiction between the social and moral hierarchy. It is significantly more focused on the landed classes than the corporate sector, even though it is sometimes considered a bourgeois art form. Contrary to popular belief, writers of the late eighteenth century did not promote bourgeois principles in opposition to those of the aristocracy. Conversely, in the last decades of the century, they favoured a rural way of life and resisted urbanisation. They tended to side with the underclass against their new rulers, the industrial bourgeoisie, in the class struggle that industrialization sparked.

Speculative Evolution in Herbert George Well’s the Time Machine

Herbert George Wells The Time Machine indeed remains a significant work in science fiction literature, offering a reflection on social issues and class distinctions of his time projected into a distant future. The story’s exploration of humanity’s potential evolution and the portrayal of a divided society have left a lasting impact, influencing various adaptations across different media. Wells ability to use speculative fiction to comment on contemporary issues highlights his foresight and literary prowess. It seems like you’re referring to Wells classic science fiction novel, The Time Machine. In the story, the Time Traveller indeed creates a machine capable of traversing through time and ventures to the distant future, where he encounters the Eloi and the Morlocks, two distinct species evolved from humanity. The novel explores themes of evolution, class struggle, and the nature of time itself.

An Analysis of the English Translation of The Class Struggles in France Based on AntConc

Studying Marx’s analysis of class struggles in France provides insight into historical socio-economic dynamics, revealing patterns of oppression, resistance, and revolution. It elucidates the role of the bourgeoisie and proletariat in shaping societal structures, informing contemporary understanding of power dynamics, inequality, and potential pathways for social change. Based on the English version of the Class Struggles in France, the language use and organization of it are analysed by using the retrieval and analysis functions of AntConc. Through the analysis, its language features are concise, clear structure, strong logicality, key terms centred around the main theme, and a coherent logical relationship. The vocabulary used exhibits emotional tendencies, particularly concerning communism and capitalism, highlighting the author’s emotional attitude.

“The Deeds You Do. . .”: The Worker Priest Movement in France, 1946–1954

AbstractThe worker priest movement in France between 1946 and 1954 was a significant attempt by the Catholic Church to reach out to the increasingly alienated working class. It foundered on the rocks of elite opposition, worker priest embracing of class conflict, Cold War currents of thought, and government willingness to sacrifice the movement in the name of collaboration with Rome on a suite of issues, most notably free education. The historiography of the movement has proven similarly complex, with observers allowing contemporary trends and values to color their perception of this unique moment in French history and remembering and forgetting both playing a role in the image of the worker priests handed down to future generations.