Mass Struggle Research Articles

China's Cultural Revolution and Mao's External Threat Inflation: Crushing Soviet-Style Capitalist Restoration, 1966–1969

Abstract Stoking fear and hatred of foreign countries to serve internal needs has been a recurring pattern in Communist China. This article examines Chinese discursive treatment of the Soviet Union in 1966–1969 in textual, visual, and audio outlets. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, radical followers of Mao Zedong deliberately choreographed anti-Soviet propaganda in accordance with their evolving political agenda at home. By emphasizing the need to forestall “capitalist restoration” in China, the propagandists alleged that capitalism had already been restored in the USSR. In the face of strong inner-party objection to the terror and destruction of the Cultural Revolution, Maoist polemicists discredited and attacked their domestic foes by accusing them of disloyalty and collaboration with Soviet “revisionists” to subvert China's Communist system. The radical Maoists sought to justify the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution by conjuring up the threat of a Soviet invasion, hoping to refocus domestic mass struggle on alleged sympathizers of the USSR. Yet Mao's invocation of this war scare triggered a dangerous security dilemma and turned the USSR into a strategic enemy, a striking example of a self-fulfilling prophecy in world politics.

POPULAR MOVEMENTS IN THE WESTERN REGION OF KAZAKHSTAN IN THE 1930S: THE UPRISING IN THE MANGYSTAU REGION

The article tells about the mass struggle of the people in the 20th 30s of the XX century on the territory of modern Atyrau and Mangystau regions of Kazakhstan, directed against the violent policy of the Soviet government, known in the former historical literature as the "Adai Uprising", and its ruthless suppression by the Bolsheviks with unspeakable cruelty. The violent policy of the Soviet government after the Civil War led to an increase in discontent among the population of the Western Region, and the public came out to openly fight against the policy of the Soviet state. The purpose of this article is to tell about the mass participation of the population who lived at that time against the injustice of the Soviet government, which covered not only the Mangystau region of the Adai uprising but also, above all, the Kyzylkoginsky, Embinsky districts, Sagiz, Topyrakshashkan regions of the Atyrau region. As a result of the article, data related to the Adai uprising, previously unknown to historical science, were shown. After the October Revolution, the social status of the population living throughout the republic and on the territory of the modern Atyrau region was extremely low. The failure to take into account the laws of the natural development of the economy and the incessant administration made agriculture completely shaky and sharply aggravated the situation. This caused discontent among the population and led to an uprising.

Defending the Right to Protest

Amid rising global protests, the right to protest is being increasingly objected to by business interests and curtailed by governments and legislatures. This article contends that confronted by this political reaction, the right to protest can only be defended through mass struggles rather than legal challenges – although these struggles may well include related legal battles. As history suggests, while legal cases may be important at times, ultimately their outcome will be determined by the sway and swell of political social and class forces.

Contestation of Religious Authority in Study Groups: Between Religious Authority and Mass Authority in Aceh

This article examines the religious authority contestation among study groups in Langsa City, Aceh. The existence of a diversity of study groups does not mean the people there accept the existing plurality. Apart from the growth of religious authority from the Traditional Islamic community, several things also influence it. So the diversity phenomena in religion often become a mass struggle. This research is included in field-library research with qualitative analysis. Data were collected through interviews, documentation, and observation in the study groups. The data were analyzed using a sociology approach and social theory. This article presents two significant findings, including scientific contestation developed by each study group and mass struggle as a confirmation of the authority holder. These two pieces of evidence show that the spread of religious authorities does not necessarily make people accept plurality in religion. Furthermore, Islamic law in Aceh tends to always be in religious contestation.

‘Notes on a Community Struggle’ Big Flame, the Kirkby rent strike and the ‘mass struggle of housewives’

ABSTRACT This article uses a spatial framework to explore socialist and feminist activism by mixed sex revolutionary organisation Big Flame (1970–1984). It focuses on a Big Flame ‘base group’ embedded within the working class community of Kirkby, Merseyside. It adds to the growing historiography on women-centred community-based organising to situate Big Flame amongst the groups across Europe engaging in activism around spaces for new types of politics. Activists used ‘the second front’ to engage with feminist debates and challenge gendered discourses. These initiatives, as well as having a socio-psychological impact on the activists themselves also formed part of what was to be the ‘personal and collective liberation’ which Gerd-Rainer Horn outlined as a key legacy of 1968. This article will suggest that Big Flame’s prioritisation of feminism and experience enabled them to blur the boundaries between the private, public, social and intimate everyday experience. The use of oral history interviews sheds light on the inner world of activists’ subjective experience as they navigated the complexities of the discursively connected structures of gender and class. Women in Big Flame documented their own autonomous feminist experience and as Big Flame made the personal political for working-class women on the estates, these expressions made their unseen activism as women visible.

The league against imperialism, national liberation, and the economic question

AbstractThe League Against Imperialism (LAI) was an international organization active from 1927 to 1937 that brought together communists, socialists, nationalists, trade unionists, and pacifists in order to coordinate their myriad ‘assaults against empire’. Founded with the support of the Communist International, the LAI at its peak had a membership of several hundred people, from every inhabited continent, among them prominent interwar activists and future heads of state. The organization aspired both to become an international movement and to coordinate specific instances of mass struggle. Exploring both aspects shows how the LAI interwove the global and the local in interwar anti-imperialist movements. This article draws from recent work on interwar anti-imperialism and internationalism as well as work on struggles for economic sovereignty in the 1960s–70s to argue that a critical aspect of the LAI’s anti-imperial politics concerned the relationship between political independence and the world economy. Through an examination of LAI members’ writings and public addresses, we can observe this relationship through the staging of their own claims for self-rule and control over land, labour, and resources.

The “Essential Worker” in the Time of Corona: Ethnic Studies and a Legacy Canceled in the Napa Valley

As the wrath of COVID-19 among the poor and BIPOC communities continued into summer 2021 and beyond, and so did the uprisings. Calls to defund the police entered mainstream discourse, as did calls to abolish prisons. Connecting the pandemic and the renewal of social justice mass struggle leads to a new appreciation of ethnic studies as a decolonial practice. Ethnic studies itself has become one of the “essential workers” needed to assess the present conjuncture. Yet for that very reason, ethnic studies is also presently under attack at local, national, and international levels. It is within this context that I situate how the elimination of the Legacy Youth Project (LYP) in Napa, California —the only ethnic studies program offered at some local schools—became a dangerous reality for K–12 students.

Prosecution reform and the politics of faking democracy in South Korea

ABSTRACT A public struggle in South Korea around prosecution reform brings into focus a deeper battle between forces seeking to make the state more responsive to ordinary people and those aiming to preserve the status quo. Opponents of prosecution reform turned to a mode of politics that appropriated the styles and symbols of democracy to justify the obstruction of reforms that would break down a key authoritarian legacy and source of entrenched privilege. They deployed multiple methods of “faking” democracy: assuming the mantle of anti-corruption champions, drawing on tropes from the anti-authoritarian opposition of the past, and normalizing marginal views. The politics of prosecution reform illuminates the mass struggle that defines South Korea’s democracy and also points to a dangerous and subtle mode of politics that is increasingly visible around the world yet under-appreciated in most approaches to thinking about democracy.

The Prospects or Myths of Mass Struggle to Uproot Capitalism and Implant a Socialist Order in Africa- A Review Article

Annals of Social Sciences & Management studies are an international journal which focuses to spread a vast knowledge to the readers. ASM includes various topics which cover every part of Sociology and management studies like Philosophy & Public Affairs

The Labour Side of the Story: Informalisation and New Forms of Mobilisation of Kerala’s Women Workers

Historically, in the context of Kerala, through mobilisation, electoral and mass struggles and a broad-based alliance of poor peasants, agricultural labour and workers were forged into a political constituency. This paper locates new forms of women workers’ struggles in the post-1990 context which saw a shift in the politics of labour and in the language of class and since the People’s Planning Campaign for democratic decentralisation in Kerala, when agency moved away from trade unions to a plurality of organisations serving a range of objectives but linked with local governance. There was a shift away from exclusive collective bargaining by workers to collective social activity, for example, Kudumbashree, Ayalkootam (neighbourhood groups), public works, MNREGA forums and other forms of associational activities. Identities shifted beyond that of workers to citizens, involving a range of rights with the neighbourhood and the local as an axis. This paper focusses on women labour particularly in the context of the trajectory of development and labour in Kerala and the wider canvas in which labour movements developed post the 1980s in India.

Don’t cry for me, Latin America

The upsurge of mass struggles in Latin America comes at a time when the party-based Left has lost hegemony. The far-Right is seeking a restoration of neoliberalism as part of a militarized expansion of transnational corporate plunder. Spaces that until recently exercised a modicum of autonomy, such as indigenous highlands in Guatemala and Peru, areas of the Amazon, and Colombia’s Pacific coast, are being violently cracked open and their abundant natural resources and labor supply made available to transnational capital. There is a disjuncture throughout Latin America between mass social movements that are resurgent and the institutional Left that has lost its ability to mediate between the masses and the state with a viable project of its own. The most likely scenario is a momentary stalemate as storm clouds gather.

AN EXAMINATION OF SISTERHOOD AS AN EMANCIPATIVE CONCEPT IN ALICE WALKER'S NOVELS: MERIDIAN AND THE COLOR PURPLE

Purpose of the study: The study aims to examine the concept of sisterhood as an emancipative endeavor to empower and free the Afro-American women in Alice Walker's (1942) novels: Meridian and the Color Purple, through the liberal treatment of Black Feminism. Methodology: Qualitative research aims to form speculations or facts that are derived from secondary sources. It tries to understand Walker's liberal treatment of sisterhood, in the selected novels, through the radical black feminism, and the feminist liberal lens of bell hooks. The study considered other related critics and scholars to help further illuminate the emancipative notion of sisterhood. The study is a library-based drawn on literary and critical books and articles. Main finding: The study clarifies the emancipative notion of hooks on Walker's feminist attitude of sisterhood in the selected novels as a privilege to enhance black women's growth and to strengthen the social bond to achieve women's liberation. Simultaneously, the study criticizes the Western oppressive authority as well as the traditional one-sided thinking of mainstream feminism. By a new and liberal reading of hooks' perspective, the study illuminates that the collective power and mass struggle of Afro-American women lead to self-realization and identity. Implication: This study can be used by scholars and activists to understand how Afro-American women have been undergoing a long process of transformation by radical feminist thinking, from exploitation, domination, and oppression toward the center of social, political and cultural focus. Originality/Novelty: A new reading of Walker's novels is utilized by the light of bell hooks' emancipative notion of sisterhood.

Human Rights as Hinge Principles

ABSTRACTThe standard interpretation of human rights models them on the constitutional rights of citizenship familiar from the history of liberalism. Human rights are, in this view, universalizations of nationally particular liberal rights of citizenship. This interpretation invites a Marxist critique. Like the rights of citizenship, human rights fail to address the deep causes on inequality, domination, and social violence: market forces that drive states into conflict over scarce resources and capitalists to intensify the exploitation of labour. I agree with this critique, but argue that it does not necessarily apply to human rights as such, but only to the standard interpretation. I conclude by excavating from major human rights documents a different interpretation. This counter-reading focuses on the life-value of human rights: their potential to expose the life-destructive forces that drive capitalism. Read in this way, human rights can serve as hinge principles that legitimate mass democratic struggle against capitalist oppression and violence. On their own human rights under any reading cannot solve the problems supporters think they can solve. But as hinge principles they can help legitimate the mass struggles that can solve those problems.

Education as a weapon of struggle: rethinking the parkland uprising in the age of mass violence

This essay attempts to address how the Parkland youth protesters are rewriting the nature of resistance as both an individual and collective effort by creating a new vision of hope and mass struggle. Central to their efforts is an attempt to make education central to politics itself and in doing so they have redefined education as a way of translating personal issues into larger systemic concerns, changing the way people see things, and investing a variety of modes of communication in order to use elements of belief and persuasion as appropriate weapons of struggle. Using new digital technologies and media, these young people are redefining the landscapes of pedagogy and resistance. This paper explores their efforts as a new way to connect politics and education.

South Africa and the Turn to Armed Resistance

ABSTRACTThis paper focusses on the circumstances under which various political organisations, particularly the ANC and the SACP, in South Africa turned to the armed struggle as a means to prosecuting the liberation struggle in the early 1960s. It looks at the setbacks and shortcomings that this shift in strategy and tactics suffered and the challenges that arose at the time. From the perspective of the ANC and its allies it is important to appreciate that the armed struggle was an extension of the political struggle. The paper seeks to unravel some of the complex theoretical and empirical issues that were at play across the broad spectrum of organisations that regarded themselves as opposed to the apartheid system. We focus on the features of the mass struggles in the 1950s and the repressive actions of the state culminating in the massacres at Sharpeville and Nyanga, the imposition of the State of Emergency and the mass detentions that created a climate in which by 1960-62 almost all organisations that could lay claim to be part of the struggle had concluded that the time had arrived for armed resistance to apartheid. The paper draws together the range of groupings and organisations that entered this field in the early 1960s, looks at the response of the state and the setbacks that these different efforts endured. It concludes at the point where international solidarity becomes a significant force against the repressive actions of the apartheid state and the continuation of the liberation struggle depended on the regrouping of forces of the ANC and MK in exile.

Joining the Party Critical Education and the Question of Organization

In the proliferation of educational scholarship there is a glaring omission, and that is research on the Party-form. Indeed, even when theorists like Gramsci and Lukacs are discussed in critical education their work is always abstracted from its context: the Communist Party. This article contends that if critical education wants to orient toward the overthrow of capitalism then it has to take the Party seriously. I counter the misrepresentaitons and caricatures of the Party-form by carefully reading Lenin, Lukacs, and Dean. I show that the Party is a student of the mass struggle, that it is disciplined to the full subjectivity of the proletariat, and that it is ultimately a form of unknowing and the organization of a lack. I conclude by delineating four concrete steps that critical educators can take toward building the Party.

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Tej City. Protests in Mumbai, 1988-2008

The paper aims at understanding the types, scope and contents of urban protests in Mumbai for the past twenty years. Firstly, it tries to define the nature of mass struggles within the city. Then it deals with the rather violent history of the city in the past twenty years. Thirdly, it describes the different types of urban protests and their evolution over time. Finally, it offers a typology of urban protests and discusses the changes occurring in the popular milieus. The class content of the ‘popular’ (which is not altogether dead) has been increasingly fragmented by a process of community-based assertion that led to protests led by groups representing small categories of the popular classes. In the period studied, workers’ struggles were lost while the more recent assertions of the rich who launched (near) urban protests were acknowledged and listened to. This segmentation helps to understand the limits and the ambiguousness of ‘civil society’ rhetoric.

War on Terror and Migration Trends: Rethinking Open Borders

This paper reviews the growing global popularity of the notion of, “War on Terror,” and explores how the immigrant is implicated in the complex web of connections between terrorism and transnational crime, and how a rethinking of open borders policies may serve to limit the incessant occurrence of transborder terrorism. This paper posits that the success of unilateral actions against global terrorism will remain an illusion unless measures are initiated to build multilateral and institutional capacities to combat this global menace. The paper is a contribution to the discourse on how non-military policies and responses to terrorism can be employed to deal with actors who are influenced to use extreme violence against civilians in bid to achieve their selfish goals. The author’s analysis moves beyond use of military might and strategy to winning the war on terror to exploring possible options of constructive engagement with the enemy including tight border controls. Of key importance in winning the war on terror is addressing conditions that terrorists exploit with a view to providing alternative options to mass struggles by transforming violent confrontations to non-violent interventions through peace education. In this regard, making conflict transformation a global strategy under the auspices of the UN, instead of the usual military actions by a collection of allies whose agenda are often suspect will address moral questions associated with such military engagement and also map the root causes of conflicts as the beginning of a transformation process to global peace.