Radical Political Action Research Articles

De Christelijke Nationale Actie (CNA) van prof. dr. Hugo Visscher

Abstract At the end of the Interbellum and in the first years of the German occupation a specific Reformed-Calvinist political action group existed, the Christelijke Nationale Actie (Christian National Action, cna). The founders deliberately did not want to found a political party or movement, but an action group. At first, they intended an interconnection of all four existing protestant parties, but none of them wanted to collaborate. Co-operation bounced off on the interpretation of Article 36 of the Nederlandse Geloofsbelijdenis (Belgic Confession, ngb), concerning the office of civil government and the relation between church and state. The cna decided to join the elections of 1937 as a political party, but did not get enough votes to win a chair in the Parliament. In 1941 de cna was liquidated by the German occupiers.

Carl Schmitt’s Legal Fascism

ABSTRACTCarl Schmitt, the supreme jurist of the Third Reich, bestowed legal legitimacy on Hitler's dictatorial rule. A genealogy of his primary writings of the German jurist shows that his romance with the Nazis was not the result of an historical accident, and proves that there is a thread running from his early theoretical writings to his juridical position and his radical political activity during the thirties. Schmitt is a member of the ‘nihilist order’—thinkers, artists and cultural critics who promogulated the nihilistic position which at the same time was a dynamic structure on a totalitarian basis. The members of the ‘nihilist order’ generally moved from nihilistic criticism to totalitarian conclusions. Schmitt, on the other hand, took the opposite route—from totalitarianism to nihilism.

Breaking silence, bearing witness, and voicing defiance: the resistant female voice in the transmedia storyworld of The Handmaid’s Tale

ABSTRACTWith the recent success of HULU’s video-on-demand adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and widespread use of its imagery by political action groups like the Handmaid Coalition, The Handmaid’s Tale has become a transmedia property whose dystopian storyworld extends beyond the bounds of any single text. Spanning old and new media, the fictional and real, its storyworld, the Gileadverse, is comprised of authorized entertainment products, as well as fan-produced texts and activist performances. Considering the 1985 novel, 1990 film, HULU’s 2017–18 adaptation, as well as fan productions and activism, this paper surveys the transmedia shape of the Gileadverse, focusing on how this storyworld is unified by a thematic concern with the resistant female voice.

Book Review Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory

At the close of his Living in the End Times, Žižek returns to a concern that theology has become (again) a touchstone of radical political activity. Indeed, the work of socialism has always—rightly or wrongly, positively and negatively—maintained a strongly messianic-apocalyptic character in the hands of its most ardent supporters. Žižek’s correct analysis in End Times is to remind his reader that such energies ought to be handled with care, because the desire (under the insistently traumatic terms of contemporary life) is that we simply reassert the moral, agential supremacy of the “big Other” who will validate and assure socialism’s success. Such a condition leads us then to something that radical activists on the street—as an entity separate from those theorizing capitalism’s demise—might do well to call simply class consciousness. Ever the goal of organizational energies, the best version of class consciousness (à la Žižek) exists between the self and group identification, and is infused with an energetic potentiality that transcends the false activity of “struggle” insofar as it sees the raising up of one another’s class-based interests as having an actual productive end, and not (in the messianic mode) keeping up the fight in the sense of running in place until the end finally (finally!) comes.

The relationship between social capital and self-rated health: A gendered analysis of 17 European countries

BackgroundWomen live longer than men, but they report worse self-rated health. Using data from 17 European countries, we sought to test whether gender differences in social capital could account for the male/female gap in self-rated health. MethodsWe used the first release of the 8th European Social Survey which includes information about individuals’ social networks, participation in social groups, trust in institutions, and sense of belonging. Multilevel Poisson regression models were performed, regressing fair/poor self-rated health on social capital dimensions. ResultsStronger social integration was associated with lower prevalence of fair/poor health for both men and women, with the exception of religious involvement and meeting socially with relatives, friends or colleagues. For women, the presence of people with whom to discuss personal and intimate matters was protective for fair/poor self-rated health (prevalence ratio: 0.98; 95% CI: 0.97–1.00), whereas for men participation in political parties or action groups was most protective (PR 0.81; 95% CI: 0.73–0.90). When comparing across types of welfare state regimes, citizens of Eastern European countries reported lower levels of participation in social activities, institutional trust and sense of belonging. ConclusionWe observed gender differences in the specific dimensions of social capital that were correlated with self-rated health. However social capital did not explain the gender gap in fair/poor self-rated health.

Instability and modus vivendi

ABSTRACT Political theories of modus vivendi start from an assumption of deep and permanent disagreement about conceptions of the good and conceptions of justice. In response to this disagreement, modus vivendi provides an account of legitimacy as a result of a minimally restricted bargaining process. This account of legitimacy faces three major criticisms. Firstly, that the political arrangement will be unstable, secondly that a modus vivendi will institutionalise injustice, and thirdly, that it will institutionalise the status quo. I concede the objection that a modus vivendi is unstable in order to address the more serious objections that it institutionalises injustice or the status quo. Through its acceptance of instability, modus vivendi theory is no more likely than liberal theory to institutionalise injustice. Far from the conservatism it is often associated with, modus vivendi permits radical political doctrines and radical political action in a way that is precluded by mainstream liberal theory.

Decolonialization and the Anthropocene: A Trajectory of Reflections on RadicalPolitics and Human Agency From Gandhi and Aurobindo to Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour

The theme of this paper is the relation between the human ethical response to socio-political injustice on the one hand and to the reality of global warming on the other. Assessing what it means to live now in the Anthropocene, it looks back at the struggles for liberation involved in the history of colonialism/modernity and seeks to find threads connecting the ethic of justice with the new ethical demands of the current climate regime. With that in mind, the paper develops a critical framework for contrasting the accounts of radical political action and human agency in the context of the history of decolonization and in that of the Anthropocene respectively. It begins with an articulation of the “rupture in the modern imaginary” that is constituted by the emergence of the Anthropocene. It then offers a brief critical account of colonial modernism as well as an account of the post-historical reality that is the Anthropocene by reference to the works of Timothy Morton and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The paper then locates the projects of Gandhi and Aurobindo — through their parallel accounts of swaraj — as exemplars of radical political re-visioning and attempts to identify the value of their visions in the current context of the Anthropocene. It concludes by taking up a dialogue with them through the contemporary work of Bruno Latour. Latour’s idea of a post-human engagement in ‘loops’ of agency with other species ‘composing’ the Earth is compared with the earlier ideas of swaraj as a disempowerment of ego-identity.

The development of Hong Kong students’ civic attitudes under Chinese sovereignty

PurposeThe recent mobilization of many Hong Kong youth to engage in what are regarded as radical political activities is not a new area of investigation. Much has been discussed about this growing political activism and localism often giving an impression that Hong Kong youth are radical and disengaged from China as a nation. Yet little is known about the possible antecedents of such disengagement. The purpose of this paper is to identify whether there is empirical evidence of growth or decline in civic trust and national attitudes amongst Hong Kong young adolescents over the ten-year period from 1999 to 2009.Design/methodology/approachIn this study latent profile analyses were used to classify cohorts of Hong Kong secondary students according to the levels of their self-reported trust in civic institutions and attitudes toward the nation. The cohorts were separated by a ten-year gap. Comparisons were made across groups and across the ten-year time span, in order to trace changes in civic attitudes of young adolescents following the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.FindingsThree distinct groups were identified in both cohorts – Activists, who had negative attitudes to trust and toward the nation, Nationalists who had positive attitudes toward trust and the nation and Moderates who endorsed average responses to the, two variables. The gaps between the groups tended to be greater in the 2009 group compared to the 1999 groups suggesting greater polarization amongst adolescents on these measures.Originality/valueYoung adolescents cannot be assumed to be politically neutral or lacking social values. Citizenship education needs to take this into account so that values can be clarified and major issues can be discussed in a safe and supportive environment.

Escalating Criticism of the Ethics and Religious Culture Program1 in Quebec: A Cognitive Market Analysis2

The Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) program was introduced into the school system in 2008. For a decade, this program enjoyed favourable support from a majority of crucial social stakeholders in Quebec. Criticisms of the program have multiplied in recent years, leading some political groups to call for its abolition in 2016. How can this rapid rise in social criticisms of ERC be explained and how are the varied alliances among diverse political action groups to be understood? We explore these questions through the lens of the “Cognitive Market,” analyzing over 150 media articles that shaped the recent debate over the ERC program.

Национализм, сепаратизм, демократия... Метаморфозы национальной идентичности в “старой” Европе

The author proposes a new approach to the interpretation of political phenomena traditionally described in both academic and political discourse as “nationalism” and “separatism”. “Nationalism” as a concept can provide a research framework for evaluating the factors that provoke ethnic tensions in democracies and stimulate their transformation into open conflicts between the central state and regional authorities in regions possessing a certain level of cultural – economic – political autonomy, but it needs to be updated to take into account the “new nationalism” phenomenon. “New nationalism” has recently taken root in the nation states of “old” Europe in regions with a high level of civic activism and economic and welfare development. Differing nationalist agendas comprise a situational combination of cultural, social and economic factors, which are channeled into political protest. The contestation over identity issues in territorial communities within the nation state are used by political elites to promote preferential tax policies, budget autonomy and an independent social and cultural policy, especially in the use of language and in education. At the core of the political agenda is the “right to decide” and to choose the priorities of community development which is promoted by democratic political agents of diverse political affiliation, predominantly centrist, in coalition with former radical nationalists who have abandoned radical political activities. An overview of regionalist contention in Europe indicates possible future transformations in the organization of political space in democracies where identity issues in hand with consistent development strategies will be the key consolidating factors for political communities involved in the integration processes.

Radical memories: an interview with John H. Moore and documents from a communist anthropologist’s past

Though American anthropologists have long engaged in radical political activities, there remains a poorly documented history of American Marxist anthropologists’ engagements with national and global socialist and communist political parties. This article draws on an interview with American anthropologist John Moore, as well as material from Moore’s FBI file, recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, with records from a 1960s Military Intelligence investigation of Moore to document and explore Moore’s involvement in communist and socialist organizations from the 1960s to the 1990s. Moore’s reflections on his political activities highlight a continuity.

Foreign language education policy on the horizon

Language policy has developed into a major area of research that continues to expand and develop. This article examines potential directions for cross‐pollination between the fields of language policy and foreign language education. First, publication trends are examined. Database searches were conducted for the journals Foreign Language Annals, Modern Language Journal, Current Issues in Language Planning, Language Policy, and Language Problems and Language Planning. It is found that there is a dearth of studies on language policy in the foreign language–oriented journals and on foreign languages in language policy–oriented journals. Next, with these findings as a springboard, Spolsky's three‐component model of language policy—practices, beliefs, and management—is used to guide discussion about future research directions at the confluence of language policy and foreign language education. Finally, implications for political engagement with language education issues are raised, and it is suggested that professional associations might learn from the strategies of successful political action groups.

A Simple Method to Show the Economic and Educational Value of Wildlife and Wildlands

A Simple Method to Show the Economic and Educational Value of Wildlife and Wildlands

“Educating for Democratic Living”: The City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem (CWCCH), 1941 – 1947

This historical case study focuses on the origins, educational goals, and school reform activities of the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem (CWCCH), a political action group in Harlem in the 1940s. An interracial and interfaith civil rights organization with a broad reform agenda, CWCCH used democracy’s rhetoric as a vehicle for social change through an extensive public awareness campaign coupled with savvy organizing, ample organizational resources, and powerful political connections in both the White and African American communities. The article situates school reform work in Harlem during the 1940s in light of a larger citywide civil rights agenda and interracial activism.

Radical Experience and the Surveillance State

Radical Experience and the Surveillance State Elizabeth Faue (bio) Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 361 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $24.99. Andrea Friedman. Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $80.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Jacob Kramer. The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 236 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $79.50. William J. Maxwell. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, works cited, and index. $29.95. Kenyon Zimmer. Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $95.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). The recent presidential campaign has brought into public debate some of the central political issues of the past century: how democracy and radicalism are defined, how political change originates in and emanates from the marginalized Left, and how the state both constrains and shapes the margins seeking to become mainstream. While the politics of gender and race equality have infiltrated broadcast news and twitter feeds, so too has radicalism—on the left and the right—drawn reporters and crowds. Antiestablishment candidates prosper, as national polls suggest a genuine disenchantment with politics as usual. A socialist garnered significant support in the Democratic Party; white supremacists endorsed the Republican candidate. There is an open and heated debate about who belongs and does not belong in our democracy and who [End Page 136] may be kept out by a wall or denied a voice through voter identification laws. The margins have overtaken the mainstream. Understanding the relationship between radical social movements and change, and between radicals and the existing state apparatus, has long occupied historians of the Left. In these five volumes, we revisit the questions of how radical activism shaped and was shaped by the state and the discourse and practice of citizenship within that state. From covering the arguments and deeds of Italian and Yiddish immigrant radicals and the creation of the national security state under the Wilson administration, to exploring mid-century anticommunism and today’s Black Lives Matter movement, these recent studies show us how responses to radicalism not only transformed the state but also continually redefined freedom and democracy from the political margins. At heart, they offer a collective exploration of how radical ideas and practices have transformed our political culture and the meanings and consequences of that transformation. Kenyon Zimmer’s Immigrants against the State is a case in point. Anarchism in the United States has a bifurcated history. Native-born individualist anarchism dates back to the nineteenth century, when William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau positioned themselves against state-sanctioned slavery. Its heirs today are allied with libertarianism and its pro-capitalist followers. Communist—or collectivist—anarchism, an ideology that veered from authorizing political assassination to pacifist resistance to state-sanctioned violence, has been understood as chiefly European in origin, with its roots in the ideas of Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin. It also has been viewed as an immigrant ideology, not only foreign in origin but also in advocacy. Immigrant communities among Yiddish- and Italian-language speakers gave shelter to anarchists and supported radical political activities, cultural and educational institutions, and newspapers and journals. It is this world that Kenyon Zimmer captures in his account of Progressive Era Yiddish and Italian anarchists. His attention to detail is at times overwhelming, as names, networks, community organizations, and places are stacked like firewood against forgetting. Still, in trying to resurrect an anarchist movement that has been largely ignored and marginalized, the weight of information matters. And while Zimmer treads some familiar ground here—in particular, the work of Michael Miller Topp and Jennifer Guglielmo—his mapping of immigrant anarchism goes beyond these scholars to an account that covers not only the...

Why Greeks rebel: Re-examining conventional and radical political action

Recent years have witnessed a rise of contentious political activity across the world heralding what some perceive as a new major cycle of protest. Much attention has focused on Europe, where the economic crisis generated considerable social unrest deemed comparable to earlier waves of protest. This article seeks to examine the basic constituents of the social forces unleashed by this economic crisis and to assess the main motivations driving this new cycle of protest. It distinguishes between conventional and radical political activity and seeks to identify the main correlates of each. The article uses an original telephone survey designed, piloted, and conducted in Greece (n = 5025) to construct a 12-item conventionalism scale and a 10-item radicalism scale. Using psychometric techniques, it assesses the effects of various independent variables on the two modes of political action. The article finds that, even in this economic crisis-hit setting, economic deprivation has a minimal effect on the two modes of behavior. Ideology, especially on the left of the political spectrum, has the strongest effect on both radical and conventional political action. Despite the major changes in the political context brought about by the economic crisis, political action displays significant continuity with the past.

Europe Says OXI: “Online Camaraderie” and European Crisis

This paper presents a small-scale case study of the Facebook page, Europe Says OXI, and a group of political activists spread across European cities who are affiliated with the page. It focuses on how digital communications practices play a role in social movement participation, and follows these young people’s practices and stories as they move between different forms of mediated communication. This shows how activists use social media to apply mobilization frames that align with their shared ideological tenets, display emergent forms of leadership, and negotiate the use of media within moral frameworks. The argument complicates theories of connective identity and connective action, which some scholars discuss as a new mode of practice produced through the uptake of social media within contemporary social movements. It challenges the idea that these new modes are replacing older notions of collective identity by being personalized, leaderless, and eschewing ideology. Moving beyond seeing collective and connective in opposition, the paper attempts to build a concept around the emic term, ‘online camaraderie’, taking it as a felt sense of shared connection to the movement, its events, places, and its other participants. It suggests that understanding how a sense of camaraderie is mediation requires further theoretical and methodological reflection on how to trace the traversal of the affective relationships that the social movement relies on across various means of communication.

The relationship between anomie and participation of Latvian inhabitants in social activities

The purpose of this research was to investigate relations between different dimensions of anomie of Latvian inhabitants and their participation in social activities, as well as to find what social activities of Latvian inhabitants best predict their sense of anomie. In this research the secondary data from the third European Quality of Life Survey (European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS), 2012) was used. The Latvian sample consisted of respondents (n = 1009), aged from 18 to 92 years (male – 34.9%, female – 65.1%). To assess anomie three subscales of anomie – Social distrust, Social isolation and Meaninglessness – were used. These subscales [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] were constructed basing on the integrative multidimensional model of anomie, developed by Ļevina, Mārtinsone and Kamerāde [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], and using questions from the third European Quality of Life Survey [7]. To measure social activities, twenty questions of the third European Quality of Life Survey were used. It was found that all three aspects of anomie – social distrust, social isolation and meaninglessness – were negatively associated with such social activities as interaction with others without doing a specific activity with them, doing an activity with others, helping others and contributing to society (civic activities). Contact by phone, the Internet or by post with a brother, sister or other relative best of all predicted social distrust. Contact by phone, the Internet or by post with any of friends or neighbours, as well as with a brother, sister or other relative together with participation in social activities in a club, society, or an association and attending a meeting of a trade union, a political party or political action group best of all predicted social isolation. Meaninglessness best of all could be predicted by contact by phone, the Internet or by post with any of friends or neighbours as well as with brother, sister or other relative and by being a volunteer and doing unpaid voluntary work through education, cultural, sports or professional associations.

“To Be a Jew on America’s Terms is Not to Be a Jew at All”: The Jewish Counterculture’s Critique of Middle-Class Affluence

“To Be a Jew on America’s Terms is Not to Be a Jew at All”:The Jewish Counterculture’s Critique of Middle-Class Affluence Rachel Kranson (bio) In 1971, the Baltimore-Washington Union of Jewish Students published a scathing assessment of middle-class, Jewish life in America: To be a Jew on America’s terms is to go to temple on the High Holy Days for $50 a seat… To be a Jew on America’s terms is to trade in historical and religious ethics of social justice for a $60,000 house in Silver Spring or Stevenson… To be a Jew on America’s terms is to forget 2000 years of oppression because of 20 years of prosperity. The group summed up their perspective by declaring, “To be a Jew on America’s terms is not to be a Jew at all.”1 The Baltimore-Washington Union of Jewish Students represented one of the many Jewish youth collectives that cropped up in North America beginning in the late 1960s. Largely the products of well-to-do, suburban neighborhoods, these young Jews tried to reinvent American Jewish life in the spirit of the global youth revolt of the late 1960s. Referring to themselves as “Jewish Radicals,” the “New Jewish Left,” the “Jewish movement,” and the “Jewish counterculture,” they challenged the institutions and values of the established American Jewish community. Most pointedly, they rejected the culture of affluence in which they had been raised, and denied the possibility that a middle-class lifestyle could be compatible with an authentically Jewish one.2 The many, loosely organized collectives inspired by the Jewish counterculture included a myriad of residential communes, alternative prayer communities, and political action groups. They advanced a variety of causes, some of which overlapped and some that actually contradicted one another.3 A critique of the middle-class Jewish culture that had been built by the older generation of American Jews served as a common denominator linking together all of these disparate undertakings. Indeed, the “New Jews” often cited the corrosive impact of American prosperity as a primary justification for their activist engagements.4 Within much of the rhetoric of the Jewish counterculture, even causes that did not seem to be connected to the class position of American Jewry became intertwined with the presumed dangers of affluence, underscoring the centrality [End Page 59] of this critique to their activism and worldview. This article examines the ways in which members of the Jewish counterculture articulated their investments in a number of key issues, including the plight of Soviet Jewry, the inclusion of women, gays, and lesbians in American Jewish life, Zionism, and the restructuring of the Jewish religion. On the surface, none of these concerns pertained directly to prosperity or its effects. But when members of the Jewish counterculture interpreted Jewish history and created narratives that explained their activities, they often cited the wealth of American Jewry as not only relevant, but often fundamental to the problems they were trying solve.5 The Jewish counterculture’s ubiquitous critique of affluence points to the complicated relationship that these young Jews had with their relative position of privilege in American society. The middle-class background that so many of them shared, and that hinged on their acceptance as racial whites, placed them on a rather high rung of the American social hierarchy. Those who were male, and those who were heterosexual, held even more advantages. Being Jewish, for arguably the first time in American history, had comparatively little bearing on their economic or social status. Even so, many of these young Jews did not necessarily, or at least did not always, feel like part of the elite. They shared a religious and cultural heritage that the wider American culture rarely seemed to value, or even acknowledge. Moreover, they were keenly aware of the history of antisemitism in the United States and the recent genocide of Jews in Europe; indeed, a minority of American Jews in their cohort were the children of Holocaust survivors, and some had been born in displaced person’s camps. Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, an outspoken leader of the Jewish Liberation Project, represented the point of view of many Jewish...

Environmentalism of the malcontent: anatomy of an anti-coal power plant struggle in Turkey

This paper introduces the concept of the ‘environmentalism of the malcontent’ to characterise a type of environmental activism that is increasingly common in Turkey. It illustrates its argument by analysing the resistance movement against the proposed Gerze coal power plant. By so doing, it problematises the relationship between class and environmental consciousness as well as the ability of the existing literature to accurately characterise the underlying motivation of movements against development projects. It shows that the mobilisation in Gerze was not rooted only or primarily in environmental concerns but animated by disaffection with, among other things, neoliberal developmentalism, disregard of democratic policy-making and violent suppression of societal dissent by the state. ‘Environmentalism of the malcontent’ describes the way in which long-lasting dissatisfaction with broader processes marking the development trajectory of the country combined with personal experience in radical political action enabled a group of urban, mostly retired, residents of Gerze to successfully collaborate with peasant activists against the construction of the power plant by deploying arguments regarding its potential negative environmental impact.