Left-wing Movements Research Articles

In a counter-revolutionary hour, what next?

The worldwide rise of the far right has drawn attention to the ‘crisis of democracy’. Beyond recent conjunctural aspects, it is possible to trace the criticism of the social aspects of democracy back to the origins of neoliberalism, understood as a counter-revolutionary political movement. The question of democracy has moved to the centre of the work of left-wing movements, which requires reflection on the political content of bourgeois democracy and the ways of acting in a counter-revolutionary moment. This paper deals with Rosa Luxemburg's formulations on the importance of democracy and on the actions of the socialist movement in periods of political reflux through her work on the Russian Empire. By critically recovering the ideas of the Polish revolutionary, it seeks to contribute to the formulation of possible responses to contemporary political challenges.

Нетипичный коммунист Леонид Иванченко: постсоветские годы

The article is devoted to the post-Soviet period of the biography of Leonid Andreevich Ivanchenko (1942–2016), a well-known participant of the left-wing movement of modern Russian history, one of the key political figures of the Don in the 1990s and early 2000s. After resigning from the position of chairman of the regional council, he focused his attention on working in the structures of Russian parliaments – People’s Deputy (until 1993), deputy of the Federation Council (1993–1995) and the State Duma (1995–2007), chairman of the Committee on Federation Affairs and Regional Policy (1996–2002). On the Don, Ivanchenko participated in the restoration of the structures of the previously banned Communist Party, was the leader of the Rostov branch. He unsuccessfully participated in the elections for the post of head of the regional administration twice (1996, 2001). As one of the leaders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 2003–2004, he publicly ex-pressed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the party. In the summer of 2004, he became one of the leaders of the “schismatic” movement in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the founders of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and after the failure to realize this project, he retired from politics. He died in Rostov-on-Don in 2016.

Social movements and Europeanisation: framing ‘responsibility’ and ‘responsiveness’ in times of multiple crises

ABSTRACT Movements on the Right and Left have long contested EU politics and policy choices. By analysing public opinion data and the positions of right- and left-wing movements, the article highlights increasing criticism of European integration on the Right, and a persistent critical vision on the Left which challenges the content of EU policies rather than the existence of a European polity. Far-Right movements have moved from Euroscepticism to radical EU-refusal, while the Left has remained anchored in critical Europeanism. We present how these debates are linked with public opinion before looking in some depth at frames in Left and far-Right social movements. We then reflect on how these frames have targeted or reconfigured the meanings attributed to EU responsibility. While addressing how social movements voice and bring citizens’ opinions into the policy-making process (responsiveness), our research illustrates the contested nature and construction of the idea of ‘responsible government’. We find a clear line of demarcation between the Left and the Right concerning the legitimate territorial scale of the EU’s responsibility: while the Left calls for responsibility to expand beyond the continent to the global scale, the Right criticises the intrusion of the EU into national policy making as illegitimate.

Heritage Mobilisation as Radical Politics in a Left-Wing Social Movement

ABSTRACT Left-wing movements are said to invest mainly in class struggle to address global capitalism and the growing dominance by the far right. Recent left-wing movements, however, increasingly invest in culture. This article explores this investment with a focus on the mobilisation of heritage (historical architecture, cultural traditions, histories, and narratives). Through the case of Dresden’s No-Pegida movement, I show that heritage is an often-unrecognised sphere of mobilising radical politics from the left. Attention to how the left mobilises heritage can indicate that investments in culture occur in intersectional and transversal ways. This article uses examples from a qualitative study of No-Pegida to discuss heritage mobilisation in demonstrations and community work. I show that heritage comes to matter for the left when responding to heritage populism from the far right. The left’s heritage mobilisation can be understood as a refusal of authoritarian populism and an opposition to the far right’s spatial cleansing attempts. It is further an important step for reconfiguring the local creative middle-class through the inclusion of refugee and migrant artists and for centring subaltern philosophies about culture.

Framing and social movements

This article explores the notion and method of discourse and frame analysis in social movement studies. Different cases of frame analysis applied to various types of social movements and contentious politics in Europe are used to illustrate the argument. As stressed in the introduction to this special issue, although the concept of frame and framing is used in several disciplines and approaches in the cognitive, language and social sciences, research on social movements still presents some gaps. One is the prevalent application of frame analysis approach to progressive left wing movements, leaving aside actors on the Right. A second weakness is the scarcity of empirical research combining the micro (i.e. activists) and meso (i.e. organizations) level of framing and exploring dynamics of frame ‘(dis-)alignment’. Third, there is mainly a focus on the framing of national rather than transnational contention, although as this article shows, social movement research is increasing on this regard. The fourth weakness is the scarcity of applications of framing and frame analysis to collective actors and policies - a promising line of research to which social movement studies could make valuable contributions. This article will address these issues to highlight promising venues of research and application in social movement studies.

Is gender-critical feminism feeding the neo-conservative anti-gender rhetoric? Snapshots from the Italian public debate

So far, the Italian literature on the genesis and development of anti-gender mobilisation has focussed on right-wing and Vatican strategies, discourses, and alliances. However, in recent years debates around “gender theory" have prompted political and cultural conflicts inside Italian feminist, lesbian and secular left-wing movements and parties. These political fractures – mirrored also in the debate on TERF and “gender-critical” feminism - have become visible in the Italian public debate on the Zan Bill (an anti-homophobia provision rejected by Italian Parliament in 2021). Although “gender critical” feminists do not belong to the anti-gender movement - in Italy largely monopolised by right-wing and Catholic activists - I argue that the unexpected convergences towards the fight against “gender ideology” are relevant for, at least, two reasons. On one side, the idea of “gender theory” has reinforced its role as a keyword orienting Italian public discourse on sexual rights. On the other hand, criticism of various (although inconsistent) definitions of “gender theory” has broadened their cultural circulation outside conservative or religious groups, in both cases associated with processes of ideological colonisation. These two shifts can be considered to enact a relevant normalisation of anti-gender narratives within Italian public and political discourse fostered by media vulgarisation and popular understandings of the meaning of “gender”.

Eugene Onatsky and his work in the diplomatic mission of the UPR in Italy: transformative experience

This article analyzes the experience of the political activist, historian, journalist and diplomat Yevhen Onatsky (1894–1979), which he acquired while working in the diplomatic mission of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Italy during 1919–1923. This experience will be considered as transformative, as experience that led to a fundamental transformation in his views, primarily political. In the article, the concept of transformative experience (by cognitive scientist and philosopher of consciousness Laurie Ann Paul) is applied, as well as the related taxonomies of researchers who contribute to the evolution of this concept. It is emphasized that the implementation of this concept in the humanities has not yet become widespread and does not have established methodological schemes of application. This makes the very idea of such an implementation somewhat risky, but, in the opinion of the author, somewhat promising.The analysis of the radical transformation of Onatsky’s centre-left views towards the authoritarian-nationalist positions of the later period aspires to illustrate the path taken by the generation that began its political and social activity within the framework of the most influential left-wing movement at the period of the Ukrainian Revolution, and that in its mature years, which fell on the period of growth of right-wing movements throughout Europe made its choice in favor of the latter. The article illustrates how Onatsky’s various experiences influenced the change in his beliefs, with special attention to Onatsky’s experiences while working at the UPR Mission in Rome. This experience was gained in the context of radical geopolitical changes, namely the establishment of the Soviet system and the suppression of democratic Ukrainian statehood, as well as the rise of fascism in Italy.The article is based on published and unpublished ego-documents authored by Onatsky, in particular, published notes related to the period under study, which shed light on the personal motivation of the author and on the factors that determined his later choice.

Transregional by design: The early communist press in the middle east and global revolutionary networks

AbstractThis article traces the circulation of newspapers and journals as physical objects to reconstruct Middle Eastern communists’ global connections. I argue that post-First World War Middle Eastern and North African revolutionary militancy was closely linked to global networks. The extensive transregional and transimperial circulation of the communist press discussed here traces these close connections. The Communist International represented a novelty as a self-proclaimed centralist worldwide party. Distinctively, it brought together the means and the will to centralize (much of) global radicalism. This argument also serves to locate the early and mid-1920s as a transitional period in the history of left-wing movements: the means provided by a World Party intersected with the network-like structure of the pre-Comintern revolutionary milieux. The article aims to contribute to global history by discussing a regional – Middle Eastern – political current, not as the aggregate sum of its national components, but as a product of a global process.

Между церковью и государством: католическая ассоциация мексиканской молодежи в борьбе за христианский общественный порядок

This article focuses on the history of the Mexican Catholic Youth Association (MCYA), one of a few Catholic organiza-tions that emerged in Mexico in the early twentieth century. By examining the ideological foundations and activities of MCYA, the author identifies the reasons why this youth or-ganization became the major social force in the conflict be-tween the state and the church in Mexico in the second half of the 1920s. According to the author, the conflict was based on ideological confrontation: the idea of the Christian social or-der as an ideal type of social structure of the state collided with the new political course pursued by the Mexican gov-ernment. In this situation, MCYA, which was conceived as a non-political organization, quickly shifted from participants' joint religious practices and social assistance to civil rights activism in response to anti-clerical state policies. The article also draws attention to the fact that MCYA was the forerunner of several other associations which were supposed to fight against various left-wing movements and, above all, socialist movements.

The lusophone world of Iberoamerica: between the “left wave” and the “right turn” (the example of Portugal and Brazil)

The authors analyze political cycles of the Portuguese (Lusophone) world, which is based on Portugal-Brazil civilizational axis. The authors seek to prove the existence of synchronicity and parallelism in the context of the movement of political pendulum from right to left and back within the Lusophone world of Iberoamerica. The main thesis of this study is that the Ibero-American transcontinental macro-region is sandwiched between a “left wave” and a “right turn”, with the conclusion that further continuation of the “left wave” with right-wing fluctuations in the current context is going to continue. As far as Portugal is concerned, the case of the municipal elections of September 26, 2021 is used as empirical material and is subjected to a detailed analysis from the perspective of the Portuguese party-political landscape. In addition, some attention is paid to the early parliamentary elections of January 30, 2022 in Portugal. The authors also assess the development of populism in Portugal, given that in European countries, left-wing and right-wing populist movements are gaining popularity. Similarly, the authors consider the results of the 2020 municipal elections, and political situation in Brazil on the eve of the 2022 presidential elections. We give a forecast about further shift to the left of the Ibero-American Lusophone world, if after the confident victory of the Portuguese socialists under the leadership of Costa the socialist president Lula da Silva comes to power in Brazil, and, as a result, about formation of the left-socialist power pole within the framework of the Ibero-American Lusophony.

When the revolution did not look like you thought it would: the Yellow Vest Movement through radical-left activists’ imaginaries

ABSTRACT The radical left in France has been in decline in France since the 1980s, with union-membership falling and working-class voters moving towards the populist radical right. When the Yellow Vest Movement (YVM) appeared in 2018, it seemed to encapsulate the very demographic that the radical left had lost touch with. However, the YVM did not appear as a straightforward left-wing movement, with unions and radical-left parties branding it as a petty bourgeois tax-protest or as the radical right in disguise. This article is based on interviews with radical-left activists that decided to join the YVM to wage ideological combat within it. Building on a grounded theory approach concerned primarily with culture, I investigate how Marxist social imaginaries shaped the activists’ interpretation of the YVM. In particular, I explore the key concepts ‘vanguardism’, ‘revolutionary spontaneity’ and ‘false consciousness’ to understand the interviewees’ often contradicting rationales and interpretations of the YVM. I find that the radical-left activists got involved in the YVM with the objective of turning it into a left-wing movement, while at the same time appreciating the disorganized, horizontal anti-intellectualism of the YVM.

The return of neoliberalism in Argentina: Toward a critical theory from (and for) the global South

The victory of Mauricio Macri in the 2015 Argentine presidential election led to a kind of return of neoliberalism, soon resisted by the people and the political opposition. In this paper I will address the question of how recent regressive neoliberal policies and austerity agenda have been defied and counteracted by progressive forces and the Argentine left-wing movements. To do so, I will periodize this country’s recent history and map the positions occupied by the local left in order to argue that neoliberalism has never been entirely hegemonic in Argentina. By doing this, I hope to contribute to the development of a critical theory from (and for) the global South.

Virginia Woolf in China: translation, study, and influence

Abstract The translation and study of Virginia Woolf began in the late 1920s out of pure artistic interest, then became stagnant due to the extreme tendencies of the left-wing movement. In the new era, when the literary exchange between the East and the West resumed, the Chinese translation and study of Woolf came to flourish in literary circles with the second wave of Modernism and the rise of feminist criticism. This paper, by combining the historical development with the cultural context, conducts a full-scale inquiry into the features of the Chinese translation and study of Woolf during the period of the Republic of China (1929–1949) and the period of the new age since the reform and opening-up (1978–) and gives a detailed analysis of the spiritual connection between Woolf’s cultural view of feminism and contemporary Chinese feminist writers.

The Cominternist Origins of Current Socialist Bolivarianism

Introduction. The article examines the Comintern “trace” in the formation of modern “Bolivarian socialism”, proclaimed by the leaders of Venezuela at the beginning of the 21st century. Communist postulates (in the Comintern perception) were, certainly, not the only source of the formation of the ideology of the ruling Socialist United Party of Venezuela. At the same time, a number of the postulates were formulated back in the 1920s by activists of the Venezuelan Revolutionary Party (later they became members of the country’s Communist Party) and the Socialist Party of Ecuador. A number of similar concepts were the subject of discussions between the leadership of the Comintern and the Peruvian People’s Revolutionary Alliance and were also debated during one of the congress of the Communist International. Another important aspect explored by the authors is the analogy between the processes of the formation of a united left party in Venezuela in the 1930s and in the 2000s (as a comparative example, the pattern of creating a united revolutionary party within the framework of the Castro revolution in Cuba was also used). Methods and materials. The study uses a set of methods of analysis adopted in historical and political science, namely documentary analysis, systemic and comparative analysis. Analysis and Results. The cases presented in the article prove that Socialism of the 21st century is not the exclusive creation of Hugo Chavez, but is closely related to ideological discussions in the international left-wing movement of the first half of the 20th century. The article is based primarily on archival documents, which allowed the authors to show little-known pages in the history of Latin American left-wing parties. Authors’ contribution. V.L. Jeifets and L.S. Jeifets made joint analysis of the archival documents, carried out the study of historiography, and developed the theoretical framework of the research. The conclusions also are the product of joint work.

The Sanders-Bookchin Debate

ABSTRACT Throughout the 1980s, the politics of Burlington, Vermont, were dominated by two of the American Left's most prominent figures: Bernie Sanders and Murray Bookchin. While there was considerable overlap between the two in terms of their general critique of capitalist exploitation, Sanders and Bookchin were often at odds with each other regarding renewable energy, economic development, and direct democracy. Bookchin accused Sanders of promoting an out-of-date “bread-and-butter” form of socialism that neglected quality-of-life concerns, specifically the need for greater democracy. In turn, Sanders thought Bookchin had a “back-to-the-woods mentality” that failed to consider that significant economic growth was necessary to end poverty. This article will examine the differences between Sanders's and Bookchin's approach to socialism within the context of Burlington's politics. It will explore the implications for these approaches in building a broad-based and highly democratic left-wing movement.

Donald Trump and the Paranoid Position

This article situates Trump in the context of what Daniel Bell called the New American Right and analyzes the mass or group psychological basis of his charisma. Originating with McCarthyism, the New American Right was a reaction to the New Deal—a defense of the “real,” that is, rural, America against urban elites and immigrants. Richard Hofstadter’s famous characterization of the New American Right as “paranoid” drew on the Frankfurt School yet remained essentially descriptive. To deepen Hofstadter’s idea, I utilize Melanie Klein’s distinction between the paranoid (schizoid) and depressive (intersubjective) positions. This distinction helps clarify the difference between the mass psychologies of right-wing and left-wing movements, including in our time. By describing Trump’s relation to his followers, I explicate the paranoid basis of his movement’s violence and provide some clues to its underlying dynamics. Finally, I identify the liberal antagonism to mass movements as a weakness in the struggle against Trumpism.

Black left feminism in pre-revolutionary Cuba: the life and work of Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa (1901–1958)

ABSTRACT This article studies the life and political thought of the Afro-Cuban, communist, feminist activist and lawmaker Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa and her historical context. The article builds on the existing literature by using new periodical and archival sources from institutional collections of communist organizations and personal correspondence with feminist leaders. The paper’s main objectives are the following. First, to demonstrate that Sánchez Mastrapa simultaneously engaged with Afro-Cuban, feminist, and communist organizations. Second, to illuminate how these platforms offered a productive space for some women activists like Sánchez Mastrapa to conceptualize a simultaneous critique of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. And third, to analyze how she used these institutional platforms to articulate an early intersectional feminism as part of a growing transnational left-wing movement fighting in favor of Black, poor, women workers.

Insurgent Afterlife: Latin America, the Left, and Contemporary U.S. Multiethnic Literature

ABSTRACT This article explores how a range of U.S. writers have generically, representationally, and linguistically engaged with radical left-wing social movements in the Global South. In staging their revolutions in Latin America and in employing insurgencies “from below” as a mode for imagining a political afterlife for the United States, these writers employ a deterritorialized and relational use of the term “Global South” to broadly refer to the kinds of “resistant political imaginaries” shared by persons of color and marginalized communities across the hemisphere and the world. However, this article argues the Global South in these multiethnic works is more than a simple device to connect to a collective memory shared by marginalized communities in the United States and populations who suffered under dictatorial regimes in Latin America. In fact, its deployment mimics the most effective counterinsurgency campaigns launched in the Global South. By taking the Global South as a dynamic framework for analyzing multiethnic U.S. literature, my essay prompts us to read the canon of U.S. multiethnic literature very differently and to see the long afterlife of the limits and failures of coopting Latin American social movements to imagine alternative futures in the United States.

The Diplomacy in a Revolutionary Labyrinth: the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, the Comintern and the Mexican Left-Wing Movement in 1920s

This article is devoted to the role played by the Soviet diplomats in the development of the Mexican Left-Wing Movement. The research is based on some archive materials, and the author demonstrates various important aspects of participation of the Soviet Envoys in different episodes of activities by the Communist Party of Mexico and other structures affiliated with the CPM. These interactions were quite regular and reflected the dualistic character of the Soviet foreign policy. However, the links and influences were seriously determined by the personalities of different Soviet envoys and transformed notably in the 1920s.

University Reform of 1918: Establishment of the Continental Network of Scientific, Educational and Student Community in Latin America

The transformation of the university system in Latin America, initiated by the reform in Argentina in 1918, marked the beginning of a period of democratization and modernization of society. The university reform was the result of a stubborn and dramatic struggle of students against the clerical-aristocratic order in the universities of Argentina. Ideologically, the movement was based on radical anti-clericalism, on the ideas of the conflict of generations, the special role of the young, on the Kulturtraegerism, on the concept of Arielism — a term coined by Enrique Rodo. The student movement, supported by progressive intellectuals and left-wing political parties, almost from the point of its inception, created a network of contacts and solidarity with other countries of the continent, which showed its high efficiency in disseminating ideas, political programs, and forms of struggle. This ability of the intellectual movements to create cross-border networks of influence and activism is relevant today and not only in Latin America. Thanks to this, the reform spread throughout the continent with various and sometimes contrary results, somewhere very successfully, and somewhere met with fierce resistance. The further ideological evolution of the movement and its leaders led to the emergence of new ideological and political currents, such as revolutionary nationalism, which became the dominant political trend in Latin America in the 20th century world. The spread of revolutionary nationalism, the main ideologist of which was the student leader in Peru, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, relied on the same network of youth structures that led to the spread of the movement for university reform. The reform movement also resulted in the emergence of powerful left-wing movements of the intellectuals, such as the Latin American Union, closely associated not only with the student movement, but also with the labor movement. University reform was not only a political, but also a cultural phenomenon that marked a profound change in Latin American society, which chose the path of modernization of all spheres of life. This work is devoted to the study of this process.