Leftist Critics Research Articles

‘Change is Gonna Come’: Critical Legal Studies and the Legacies of the New Left

Whilst it has long been established that there are significant, if complex links between the New Left and Critical Legal Studies (CLS), the relationship of CLS to ‘the movement’ has not been properly understood. CLS inherited the New Left’s fraught relationship with race and gender and splintered in the face of Feminist and Critical Race Theory (CRT) critiques just like the New Left before it. This essay argues that it is more accurate to see CLS/New Left thinking actually continuing into Feminism and CRT. This is not to repeat a variation on the argument that ‘good’ left critique turns into ‘bad’ identity politics; rather, that CLS, CRT and Feminism wrestle with the same ongoing problematic of radical community.

The “Albert Maltz Affair” and the Debate over Para-Marxist Formalism in New Masses, 1945–1946

This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials.

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s by Milton A. Cohen (review)

Reviewed by: Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s by Milton A. Cohen Marilyn Walker Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2010. In Milton A. Cohen’s Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s, he convincingly argues that literary critics marshaled political and intellectual activism to persuade middle-class poets to write on behalf of the American worker. Before the Great Depression, Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), Robert Frost (1874–1963), and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) were praised by literary audiences. They had autonomy to write about a myriad of topics ranging from nature to observations about daily life. However, with the advent of a national economic crisis, the previously mentioned poets were bestowed with new responsibilities such as contemplating the politics of the Great Depression and representing socially and economically disenfranchised people. According to Cohen’s scholarship, critics such as Mike Gold, Malcolm Cowley, and Eda Lou Walton, encouraged Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams to write about the working class and the challenges they encountered in modern society. Interestingly, predating Cohen’s cadre of poets, working-class life infused poetry, fiction, and drama. For example, in the Victorian period (1832–1901), writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1901), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) composed sympathetic portrayals of laborers during the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850). Likewise, during the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940), writers such as Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Claude McKay [End Page 72] (1889–1948), and Langston Hughes (1902–1967) also expressed working-class concerns through setting, dialect, and attire. Furthermore, the scholarship of William J. Maxwell and Arnold Rampersad has chronicled McKay and Hughes’s association with the political left and communism. However, Cohen’s niche is mapping the artistic advocacy of literary critics and poets and illuminating the influence of leftist critics upon American modernist poetry. Consequently, accompanied by histories on literary magazines such as The Liberator and New Masses, personal letters, and explications of verse, Cohen’s Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics examines the responses of Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams to economic disaster and working-class suffering. Thus, Cohen close reads the structure, style, and content of each writer’s poetry from the 1930s and their resistance or conformity to the political environment. Whereas Cummings crafted poetic homage to the working class, Frost emphasized individualism for the proletariat. Simultaneously, as Cohen identifies the distinctive qualities of each poet, he also demonstrates their efforts to craft socially conscious verse. Although Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics comprehensively analyzes a dimension of being a modernist poet in the 1930s, Cohen could have also emphasized the perils of literary critics influencing poetic production. Instead of inspiration guiding the poet, leftist critics were insisting upon a criterion for literature and attempting to manipulate the creative process. Ironically, the leftist critics were also imposing a supply-and-demand dynamic for a specialized literary sub-genre and jeopardizing the authenticity of artistically progressive verse. Despite the aforementioned reservations, Cohen’s book revels in the poetry and politics of the 1930s. Marilyn Walker National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute for Technology Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Logic of the Apocalypse: A Clerical Rejoinder

Apocalyptic and millennial rhetoric is recycled in countless contemporary literary and cinematic works and is central in versions of progressive political critique. The first part of this essay describes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a dystopian allegory mired in Judeo-Christian temporality and which, as a consequence, promotes a sentimental version of human salvation. The second considers the ways in which analogous renditions of catastrophism permeate (new) new left social and political critique. It argues that apocalyptic imagery and discursive structures stunt analysis by indulging simplistic patterns of history and event. The final section of the essay documents a project by Johannesburg-based artist, Jacki McInnes, and the photographer, John Hodgkiss, concerning the lives of the city’s informal recyclers. Their daily journeys are presented in (discursive and visual) counterpoint to the epic southward trek of the father and son in The Road. “Recycling” is presented as a trope of a contrary temporality, which suggests some of the ways in which apocalyptic logic is too teleological to capture the complexities of the lived realities of late-capitalism.

The Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011; The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde, Ruth Jennison, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

AbstractInThe Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth Jennison’sThe Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Gardeseeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle.

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, by Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2009; 232 pp: 9780822345053 (pbk) 14.99 [pounds sterling] Leftist assertions in different parts of the world are confronting capitalistic and imperialistic forces through their convoluted political interventions. The specificity of any leftist assertion is under question due to the resuscitating forms of identity politics which emerged through leftist inertia on the historicised understanding of exploitation based on gender, race, ethnicity, caste, sexuality and so on. At the same time, proliferation of communicative media, too, challenges the nature of the left in a significant manner. This book provides a reflexive take on the left in the USA during George Bush's regime and the global war on terror. The first chapter is an interesting reading of the role of how communicative capitalism justifies neoliberal interests by propagating a culture of democracy. The 'left' in the USA, for Jodi Dean, failed to critically engage with the politics of the Bush regime and capitalistic crisis. According to Dean, this political crisis of the left is embedded within the electoral transitions that are driven by communicative capitalism, which includes the 'materialisation of ideals of inclusion participation in information, entertainment' and communicative technologies that accelerate 'global capitalism' (p. 2). She argues that the parts of the left that deployed communication media only achieved the circulation of the messages, failing to construct any message that was essential for the leftist critique, and that could transcend the media (p. 20). The change that is anticipated through this particular political practice is reduced to the field of the media. Thus, it resulted in 'deadlock democracy', which is incompetent in producing any major political insurrection (p. 22). Paradoxically, the ascribed and much celebrated revolutionary potentials of peer-to-peer publishing became vital in structuring forms of ownership (p. 27). It determines the 'technological fetish' through 'condensation', 'displacement' and 'denial' (pp. 38-41). Condensation, Jodi Dean writes 'occurs when technology fetishism reduces the complexities of politics--of organisation, struggle, duration, decisiveness, division, representation and so on--to one thing, one problem to be solved and one technological solution' (p. 34). The next form of displacement, for Jodi Dean, displaces the political will based on industrious mobilisation of people to that of 'networked communication strategies' (p. 40). This media-based dialogue with politics cannot replace the genuine energy of forging potential political solidarities and praxis. The final form is 'denial', which encompasses denial of the 'failure of democracy', 'inability to secure justice', and operates through the circulation of information and registering peoples' opinion. Thus, the internet, as a space of communicative capitalism, operationalises itself within the 'networked transactions' of global capitalism (p. 43). lt revives the 'global', and Dean asserts that this phase leads to the access of a privileged section of people to neoliberalism-driven media technologies; simultaneously, their appropriation and cultural capital related to those technological forms acts as an obstacle for the fruition of political determinations. The second chapter, entitled 'Free trade: The neoliberal fantasy', probes the way neoliberalism produces inversions in the subject positions of leftist political practices. Drawing on a Zizekian reading of Lacan's psychoanalysis, Dean delineates the construction of the fantasy of free trade through the neoliberal ideology. She recovers the ideas of Zizek in a productive fashion. Thus the left, for Dean, is caught in a quandary that emerged out of the lack of collectivities related to problems that affect people and also share the retrogressive paradigm of 'there is no alternative' (p. …

Is Resistance Futile?: Cultural Studies at the Zenith of Neoliberalism

Is Resistance Futile? Cultural Studies at the Zenith of Neoliberalism Rebecca Hill (bio) Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. By Jodi Dean. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. 232 pages. $79.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America. By Gillian Harkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 336 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era. By Janice Peck. New York: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. 288 pages. $125.00 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. By Gregory Sholette. 256 pp. London: Pluto Press, 2011. 256 pages. $96.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). After years of relatively optimistic arguments about resistant readings of mass culture texts that were meant as a corrective to the dour attitude of the Frankfurt School, new books on neoliberal culture by Jodi Dean, Gillian Harkins, Janice Peck, and Gregory Sholette indicate a move by cultural studies writers toward a more pessimistic view of capitalist hegemony. As Cotton Seiler noted in a review essay in this journal, “Putting the Market in Its Places,” the term neoliberalism has become almost as popular a framing device as postmodernism once was.1 These books demonstrate the impact of two major approaches to neoliberalism in cultural studies scholarship. The first is a Marxist analysis, as articulated by the geographer David Harvey, whose Brief History of Neoliberalism provides the definition and history of neoliberal economic policies for all four books. The second analysis is Michel Foucault’s interpretation of neoliberal “biopolitics,” introduced to the English-reading scene in the 1990s by the sociologist Nikolas Rose and popularized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire in 2000.2 [End Page 345] Harvey, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri all agree on the economics of neoliberal capitalism, but there are fundamental differences in their accounts of the state and in their theories of subjectivity. Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism defines it against the laissez-faire of traditional liberalism as government by “permanent vigilance, activity and intervention.”3 In contrast, Harvey argues that the neoliberal state operates inconsistently in whatever way serves to support the ruling class, so that there is a basic contradiction between neoliberal ideology and neoliberalism as a practice whose purpose is to “sustain elite power.”4 Foucault also argues that neoliberalism has produced an “enterprising self,” a characterization of the neoliberal subject that appears in all four books under review. In economic terms, their authors agree with Harvey, Hardt, and Negri that one of neoliberalism’s major characteristics is “financialization,” by which they mean that finance capital has overtaken material production. While a number of Marxist economists support this analysis, which comes from the work of the economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, others do not, and lively debates between explanations of the current crisis as caused by financialization or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall continue to rage among Marxists. As part of that debate, Harvey, in a sort of “neo-popular frontism” that attacks the Far Left as the handmaid of the Right, blames leftist critiques of the welfare state for the rise of neoliberalism itself. Dean echoes Harvey in arguing that and the Left’s “failure to defend core Keynesian commitments . . . is the fundamental political trauma affecting the contemporary left.”5 Hardt and Negri retain the critique of Keynesian economics and, more importantly, promote a neo-anarchist strategy of autonomous resistance, while Harvey argues for collectively organized resistance through labor unions and political parties.6 Among the authors reviewed here, only Harkins critiques the welfare state instead of calling for a return to it, and she is the only one of the authors to suggest that small, localized examples of micropolitics will suffice. Written in the context of the Great Recession, the failure of mass international mobilizations against U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to have much impact on national policies, the continued growth of mass incarceration, and the disappointment with Democratic Party leadership, Dean, Harkins, Peck, and Sholette begin from the perspective that we are in a moment of neoliberal hegemony...

The Culture of Capitalism and the Crisis of Critique

The article deals with the transformation of the Left critique of neoliberal capitalism from explicit opposition to acceptance of its basic tenets. The author notes that neoliberal ideology has created its own forms of political participation and activism, which permeates across social classes, religious and cultural affiliations and political prejudices. The evolution of neoliberalism and its impact on capitalism, developmental activities and political praxis are discussed.

Race and capitalism redux

ABSTRACT Pitcher's article deals with a revival of interest in the relationship between race and capitalism. The old reductionist arguments that once held that capitalism was ultimately to blame for racism have been subject to a peculiar inversion, and now capitalism is being conceived as having anti-racist outcomes. Engaging with arguments that suggest that anti-racism similarly serves as an agent of neoliberal capitalism, Pitcher suggests it is necessary to rethink the terms of the imputed relation between race and capital. He goes on to interrogate some of the pieties of contemporary race politics, and argues that common blind spots in left critique constitute an obstacle to understanding the articulation of capitalism and race.

Whose Liberation? A Partly-Forgotten Left Critique of ANC Strategy and Its Contemporary Implications

At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of left intellectuals and activists sought to press the then-exiled African National Congress (ANC) to adopt a change of strategy which would have given priority to the organized collective action of workers and the poor: they were expelled and their proposed remedies ignored. But, while it had little impact on political practice at the time, the implied debate between the dissidents and the ANC raised issues crucial to understanding the challenges which face South African democracy today. Although the dissidents’ approach was based on a flawed analysis of the processes which produce social change, it did highlight an aspect of anti-apartheid resistance strategy which has made achieving a more egalitarian and democratic South African more difficult.

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 266. $32.50.)

<i>Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s</i>. By Milton A. Cohen. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 266. $32.50.)

Beleaguered poets and leftist critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s

Beleaguered poets and leftist critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s

The Arithmetic of Aspiration: Josephine Lawrence's If I Have Four Apples

In 1931, middlebrow historian James Truslow Adams wrote The Epic of America, a onevolume history of United States that went on to become a best seller in 1932 after becoming a Book-of-the-Month Club selection (Decker 97). Adams's book is widely cited as first use in print of phrase Dream. While he acknowledges that Dream has been the dream of a land in which life should be and and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement (374), in his view Dream had come to mean a better and richer life, in narrow, materialist senses of terms, to detriment of Americans. Rather, says Truslow, we must ask, is and what is richer? (377). What are our standards, as Americans? What are our values? Truslow specifically criticizes keeping up with Joneses (380), questioning materialism that had come to overshadow everything else. During first part of twentieth-century literary critiques of values emanating from America's then-emerging consumer economy came mostly from political left, and they often were written in tradition of literary naturalism, which typically showed individual men and women to be at mercy of larger social forces, such as business and government. Influential American novelists from period with pronounced anticapitalist sensibilities include Frank Norris (The Octopus, 1901), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906), Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, 1922), and John Dos Passos (U.S.A. Trilogy, 193036). Less overtly political writers such as Edith Wharton (Custom of Country, 1913), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; The Great Gatsby, 1926), and arguably, even William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!, 1936) also explored spiritual degradation associated with excessive materialism and obsession with social status. But Josephine Lawrence stands out as a rare, politically conservative, best-selling author of Depression era who also condemned ethos of unbridled consumerism. However, while most leftist critiques centered on ethical shortcomings of social institutions and of individuals who wielded power and wealth, Lawrence insisted that fundamental responsibility for one's lot in life still resides with each individual, who must not only behave morally, but also act wisely, free from self-deception, in an informed and realistic fashion. In a 1936 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, Margaret Culkin Banning defined task of contemporary woman writer this way: [L]ife is not one vital problem but a succession of small problems, most of them recurrent, many of them incapable of solution. It is these I personally think woman novelist should tackle. . ..Most women wake to no breakfast or no job, to a child with a cold, a husband with a boil, tender memory of a love scene. They wake to a reality of which few write. Why have we no Jane Austen? Why have we not even a Louisa May Alcott?. . . It's been a pretty long time since we had Main Street or Babbitt (16-17) Josephine Lawrence had set just that task for herself several years before Banning's essay. Children's author and journalist, Lawrence began writing fiction for adults in 1932. With publication of /// Have Four Apples (1935), a Bookof-the-Month Club featured selection in 1936, Lawrence placed before book-buying public problems of lower-middle-class life in hard times. She brought a journalist's eye to contemporary scene, her goals as a novelist strikingly consistent with aims of solid reporting. She once told an interviewer, Stylistically, my endeavor is to be clear, to be understandable. But my real job is to tell, as ably as I can, truth about some aspects of my own time. After all, I am capable of honesty. And if what I write is honest, that is enough (Fraser 2:1). Born in 1890 in Newark, New Jersey, daughter of a physician, Josephine Lawrence attended Newark public schools and later took courses at New York University. …

The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism By Lara Trout

Reviewed by: The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism David A. Dilworth Lara Trout . The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 362 pp. with Index. In this book Lara Trout provides provocative but problematic food for thought. She crafts an exegesis of Peirce's concepts of evolutionary agapism and critical commonsensism as resources for a theory of social justice aligned with contemporary race and gender theories. Conforming Peirce's tenets to her own agenda, she develops a radical politics of societal inclusiveness by way of analyzing and critiquing putative "nonconscious biases" in the "background" beliefs of broad segments of the contemporary populace. Unfortunately, this steers Peirce's ship on an unrecognizable course. Trout's strategic word, straight out of the Foucaultian-Frankfurtian play-book, is "hegemonic," which she repeatedly applies to "white males," "heterosexuals," "able-bodied people," "stable wage earners," and like targets of leftist criticism. She contrasts such "hegemonic viewpoints that are circumscribed by whiteness, maleness, economic security, heterosexuality, and so on" with those of "oppressed groups, such as the poor, GLBTQs, people of color, and women." (The capitalized letters refer to persons who do not consider themselves heterosexual, such as "those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, or questioning.") Through this problematically mixed polarization of societal groups—a kind of Nietzschean theory in reverse drive—she both coopts Peirce's philosophy for her communitarian concept of social justice and critically contests it—pointedly, as I will indicate below, by proposing a concept of "everyday science" or "communal science" in lieu of Peirce's concept of "real science." Needless to say, such a politicized "consensus" theory collides head-on with Peirce's objective realism—his sense of truth and reality that is independent of you, me, or any group or epoch of persons. By itself, Trout's polarization of social groups is an ingenious blame game. The accompanying problem is that her political solution seems logically to entail a system of social engineering not only over nurture but also over nature—shades of the flattened-out, dumbed-down populace of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. [End Page 524] For his part, Peirce's career followed in the wake of such leading 19th-century proponents of democratic social theory as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Though never directly framing a theory of the State, Peirce's Pragmatism (later Pragmaticism) wrote the so-to-speak epistemology of democracy in its essential logic of free inquiry and accomplishment in a merit-based society. (Continuing this heritage of the American cultural symbolic, James and Dewey, though arguably in more attenuated versions, wrote democratic scripts to the same effect.) Whitman's magnificently inclusive "Song of Myself " and Democratic Vistas followed in the lead of Emerson's "Politics" of 1844. In the latter Emerson inscribed his two laws of identity and metamorphosis, which in turn grounded his twin political principles of equality and property.1 The first of these principles Peirce generalized into his broad-banded Pragmatist sense (fallibilist, self-corrective, open-ended, cooperative, inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-generational) of equality of opportunity in the domain of conceptual activity. Any dedicated, competent person can cast a vote, so to speak, in the open-ended arena of the pursuit of truth—as inscribed in his guiding maxim of keeping open the road of rational inquiry. And for Peirce (as for Emerson and Whitman) differential property did not reduce to material gain—to the contrary, all three American thinkers inveighed against the Greed Gospel of their own century—but rather referred to the freedom of productive invention and achievement, and thus to the intellectual and moral property an individual person, or group of persons, or even nations and epochs can contribute to the progress of civilization. By and large, passages of Trout's book range competently over Peirce's social semiosis, and her overall vision of societal inclusiveness is preciously endearing. But her superimposed "biological survival model" crimps Peirce's more balanced pluralistic episteme of spontaneous orientations and creative achievements as ideal ends of nature and society. Trout's vision is transparently agenda-d. Adopting a contemporary "pragmatist-feminist" perspective, she goes so...

Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: Conservatism as a Liberation Movement

Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression investigates cultural conservatism’s predilection for incorporating the relativistic intellectual temper of the left into its critiques of the left. Where the multicultural left critiques the hegemonic cultural aspirations of the white Eurocentric male, conservative claimants of cultural oppression critique those of an arrogant class of liberal elites, which exploits the legal system in order to foist its parochial moral and cultural predilections upon recalcitrant ordinary Americans - a sentiment that has been repeatedly invoked by the likes of Justice Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. If Lochner era jurisprudence reflected the interests of the traditional capitalist class, so expansive interpretations of the First and Fourteenth amendments now reflect those of the new verbal class. Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression asks whether these much-advertised feelings of cultural oppression are delusional, the thesis set forth by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, or whether there is in fact a sense in which expansive interpretations of some constitutional freedoms can be culturally oppressive to those who do not embrace them.

Engaging Civil Society in the Nagorno Karabakh Conflict: What Role for the EU and its Neighbourhood Policy?

The conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, opposing Armenia and Azerbaijan, is the longest conflict in the OSCE area and a fundamental security threat to the South Caucasus and surrounding regions, preventing full and inclusive economic development and constraining regional relations. This chapter takes the ENP as a conflict transformation tool and looks at how the EU has used this initiative to reach civil society organisations (CSOs) and improve their performance as peace-builders in this protracted conflict. Building on the theoretical framework presented by Tocci (2008), the chapter assesses EU involvement in the civil society domain, mapping the types of organisations privileged by the EU and the potential impact of their activities on the conflict. It puts forward relevant arguments regarding the suitability of the EU’s goals and instruments to the dynamics on the ground and concludes with a categorisation of the EU’s approach according to three hypotheses: The Liberal Peace, the Leftist Critique and the Realist hypothesis. It is argues that work with civil society is a crucial part of the EU’s approach, despite the difficulties of making such engagement a central part of its peace-building and conflict transformation activities.

The EU and Moldova’s Third Sector: Partners in Solving the Transnistria Conflict?

With the formulation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2003-2004 and the signature of the EU-Moldova Action Plan in 2005, the EU became a more active player in Moldova, including on solving the Transnistrian conflict. This report sets out to analyze the EU’s engagement with local civil society organizations (CSOs) in their efforts to transform the conflict and also to assess their impact and effectiveness in doing so. In the first section, the report provides a brief outline of the conflict. Next, the report considers the domestic environment in which CSOs operate in Moldova/Transnistria, which provides a first insight into the potential for effectiveness and impact in transforming the conflict. The third section looks at the EU’s policies towards Moldova/Transnistria and in particular at its involvement in the resolution of the conflict. In the fourth section the EU’s engagement with civil society in Moldova is analyzed (in particular the EU’s ability to change the structure in which CSOs operate). In the fifth section 16 CSOs (8 from Moldova and 8 from Transnistria) are studied in terms of their activities, impact and effectiveness relating to conflict transformation. The sixth section tests the three hypotheses (the liberal peace paradigm, the leftist critique and the realist critique). The conclusion provides a synthesis of the three hypotheses and is followed by a series of policy recommendations. The paper argues that support for civil society activities appears to offer more possibilities to change the conflict’s status quo than mediation efforts, especially considering the growing consolidation of civil society in Moldova.

Creating Happier Children and More Fulfilled Social Workers: Neoliberalism, Privatization and the Reframing of Leftist Critiques in Britain

To differing degrees, governments in Europe, North America, and Australasia have, over recent years, given particular attention to the reform of services for children and families. However, the aim of this article is to focus on Britain and to examine plans to transform social-work services for children and young people who are “looked after,” that is to say, in public care. It is argued that these plans, focused on the introduction of what are termed social work practices, are best grounded and interpreted within an analytical framework that recognizes the centrality of neoliberalism. Furthermore, social workers and others working in related areas of human services provision should take account of how the plan to install social work practices is being discursively constructed and organized. Important here, it is maintained, is how this strategy seeks to deploy selectively leftist critiques of social work that have emerged over the past two decades.

The Liberal Difference: Left and Right Conceptions of Global Injustice

In left critiques of globalization, it is often argued thatliberal-egalitarian principles are inadequate for thinking about andstruggling for global justice; that they are, in fact, part of the problem.For the case of identity politics as a left alternative, the paper pointsat two fallacies in this notion, regarding two ‘liberal’ elements:individualism and universalism. (1) The paper examines groupidentityclaims in far right conceptions of global injustice, and showsthat cultural diversity of groups does not necessitate or even favourequality and democratic participation. (2) It then examines the leftgroup-based claims in the global justice discourse, showing that theaspirations for equality and freedom assume the liberal notions thathave been often rejected as inadequate. The paper concludes thatthis ambivalent position undermines the democratic and egalitarianaspirations of left critiques of the global order. The analysis is basedon manifestos and publications of political parties and movements inWestern Europe (France, Germany and Austria).

Confronting the ‘New Class’ in Communist Poland: Leftist Critique, Student Activism and the Origins of the 1968 Student Protest Movement

This article aims to discuss the origins of the student protest movement that appeared in March 1968 in communist Poland. Its main purpose is to portray the evolution of the critique of the communist system by a group of leftist students in Warsaw whose activity from 1956 onwards would provide the spark that ignited the student milieu in Warsaw and the rest of Poland in the spring of 1968. Simultaneously, this article will reflect upon some of the consequences of the so-called ‘March events’ in the Polish student milieu from a generational point of view. Furthermore, it will present the ‘Polish 1968’ in comparison to the broader international context of student protest, the emergence of the New Left and subsequently the Far Left.