Dictatorship Of The Proletariat Research Articles

Empathy and Identification in Von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, set in the German Democratic Republic in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been called the first accurate depiction of the psychological terror wielded by the Stasi, the East German secret police, who safeguarded the dictatorship of the proletariat. The film is about the psychological and political transformation of a Stasi officer, Wiesler, who undertakes the surveillance of a prominent playwright and his actress lover. The mechanisms through which Wiesler comes to empathize and identify with the subjects of his investigation, as he observes and listens in on the rich blend of passion, poetry, and politics that characterizes their lives, are explored in depth. Wiesler's transformation is based in part on the capacity to form implicit models of the behavior and experiences of others, based on the mirror neuron system, that Gallese and his colleagues call "embodied simulation." Underpinning the processes of empathy and identification so central to this film, embodied simulation is an unconscious and prereflexive mechanism through which the actions, emotions, and sensations we observe activate internal representations of the bodily and mental states of the other. Embodied simulation also expands our understanding of the power of the primal scene, which has long been identified as a major organizer of unconscious fantasies and conflicts throughout life, and which forms the central metaphor of the film. Embodied simulation scaffolds our aesthetic response to art, music, and literature, underlies the dynamics of spectatorship, and potentially catalyzes resistance to totalitarian mass movements.

Affirmation of the Lost Object: <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Peppermint Candy</span> and the End of Progress

Affirmation of the Lost Object:Peppermint Candy and the End of Progress Todd Mcgowan (bio) Nation without History The interconnection of individual development with the evolution of a nation has served as a subject since the birth of the feature film. From D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929) to Zhang Yimou's To Live (1994) and Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), filmmakers have used the development of a particular individual or individuals as a way of telling the story of the nation to which the individual belongs. For Griffith, the trajectory from blissful peace to tragic suffering to radical awakening that Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) undergoes mirrors the trajectory of the emergent united American nation. In a related way, Eisenstein's film follows the life of an ideal citizen, Marfa (Marfa Lapkina), whose development occurs in conjunction with that of the emerging proletarian state. For Yimou, in contrast, the constancy of Fugui (Ge You) and his desire simply to survive enables the film to register the movement of Chinese history insofar as he remains the same throughout this movement. And Loach's film reveals the violence that occurs with the founding of the Irish state through a depiction of the struggle between two brothers who end up on different sides of the historical conflict. While Birth of a Nation and The Old and the New aim at building support for what they see as a fledgling nation, To Live and The Wind That Shakes the Barley instead focus on the human cost involved in the development of a nation or national identity. Despite their vast differences, these four films—and the myriad others that adopt a similar structure—share an investment in the idea that national identity develops through history, that it is the product of a historical evolution that cinema can capture and even explicate through juxtaposition with [End Page 170] the destiny of an individual or individuals. National identity is in each case inextricable from the linear movement of time forward and the progress that occurs through this movement. The link between nation and the forward movement of time supports Susan Hayward's claim that "it seems more than appropriate that cinema was born in [the] age of nationalism" (5). Forward-moving time provides the arena in which the nation as such is able to emerge. Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy (2000) follows the structure of films such as these four insofar as it tells the story of South Korea's recent development from a military dictatorship to a modern capitalist democracy through the life of Yong-Ho (Sol Kyung-Gu). The film consists of seven sequences shown in reverse chronology, beginning in 1999 and ending in 1979, which chronicle the life of Yong-Ho leading up to his suicide in the opening sequence. Lee separates the sequences with single shots from the back of a train in which the film itself moves backward (so that in these shots the spectator sees people walking backward, smoke going back into a chimney, cars moving in reverse, and so on). Each major sequence begins with a title that indicates the place and time in which it occurs. The titles have the effect of making the film's reverse chronology self-evident and linking Yong-Ho's activities to particular moments within recent South Korean history. Yong-Ho's activities themselves and their trajectory through the different sequences also highlight this intersection.1 With the focus on the intersection of Yong-Ho's personal history and Korean national history, the reverse chronology of Peppermint Candy would seem to indicate the intent of showing the development and ultimately the origin of contemporary Korean national identity. This narrative structure shows Korean history from the perspective of the present, which allows the spectator to view historical events while knowing what they portend. Beginning at the end confers a sense of teleology on the historical origin when the film finally arrives there. But Peppermint Candy never arrives at an origin, and the film's reverse chronology serves to undermine, rather than confirm, a teleology...

LENIN’S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Through an examination of his pamphlet The State and Revolution, this article seeks to understand how Vladimir Lenin, on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, conceptualized proletarian state violence. Building on certain key works on Lenin and his thought, both recent and not so recent, it demonstrates that the apparently large disparity between The State and Revolution and Lenin’s years in power in the Soviet Union is, in fact, quite false. It is to be argued here that Lenin, in fact, envisaged a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ not far removed from the violent and oppressive regime that emerged in Soviet Russia during his years in power. Lenin is to be understood as a complex theorist, whose conception of proletarian state violence was somewhat ambiguous but nevertheless clear in that force was to be the midwife not just of revolution but of full communism as well.

Russian Anarchism and the Bolshevization of Bakunin in the Early Soviet Period

The rise of anarchism, in its many different currents and doctrinal manifestations, became one of the distinctive characteristics of the Russian Revolution. Although recent research has shed new light on the fate of the anarchists under Soviet rule, the nature and extent of anarchist activity after 1921, as well as the Bolsheviks' struggle against it, remains beyond the scope of most studies. (1) Despite systematic repression by the state and its security organs, anarchist thought and continued to survive during the first decade of Soviet power in the pamphlets of the Voice of Labor (Golos truda) Publishing House as well as within legal institutions, principally the Kropotkin Museum. It saw its boldest expression in the anarchists' defense of their most legendary representative, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76). Notwithstanding its fierce opposition to Marxian state socialism, the ideological legacy of Bakunin survived in the early Soviet period thanks not only to the anarchists but also to the need within early Soviet culture to elevate the Revolution's romantic, promethean impulse. Thus, at the same time that Bakunin inspired the anarchists with passionate rhetoric against authoritarianism, his words and deeds also provided official Soviet culture with an exemplary model of unrelenting libertarian struggle. In their efforts to appropriate Bakunin's legacy throughout the early 1920s, however, Bolshevik publicists had to seek strategies to commemorate Bakunin without implicitly challenging the notion of proletarian dictatorship. As I seek to demonstrate here, the publications and events surrounding Bakunin's 50-year jubilee in 1926, in particular, laid bare the contradiction inherent in the Bolsheviks' celebration of an anarchist legacy within an ever-strengthening state. Early Soviet interest in Bakunin reflected the resumption rather than the beginning of controversy over his image. Before 1917, the formation of the Bakuninist legacy evolved consistently along two diverging trajectories. The first, positive dimension of Bakunin's profile emerged during his own lifetime, when he won the respect of younger Russian populists through his many acts of revolutionary valor. (2) Alongside the heroic moments, Bakunin's reputation preserved highly inauspicious moments as well, thanks mainly to his brief but direct collaboration with Sergei Nechaev, his suspected co-authorship of pamphlets advocating methods of and his formation within the International workingmen's Association of a secret, conspiratorial alliance explicitly opposed to the leadership of Marx, all of which severely damaged the credibility of Bakunin's theory and practice of revolution. (3) By the turn of the century, violent manifestations of Bakuninist revolt made their reappearance in the motiveless terror, armed expropriations, and other acts of propaganda by the deed carried out by the more militant factions of newly formed anarcho-communist groups in Russia. Responding to the growth of anarchist moods throughout the 1905 period, Georgii Plekhanov frequently reminded fellow Marxists of the harm and demoralization Bakunin caused to the proletarian movement through his preference for spontaneous social upheavals and his contempt for organized political struggle. (4) The opposition between the heroic and the villainous aspects of the Bakuninist heritage naturally grew with the Bolsheviks' seizure and consolidation of power between 1917 and 1922. From the standpoint of many social democrats and other advocates of political gradualism, the dissolution of the Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly in the name of an immediate proletarian dictatorship suggested the triumph of a purely regressive doctrine. In 1917, they undoubtedly found further confirmation of a growing Bakuninist threat in the resurgence of anarchist groups that in effect provided at least indirect support to the Bolshevik cause through their agitation for the instant transfer of all political and economic authority to the laborers themselves. …

Marxism and the Relative Autonomy of the Capitalist State

Marxist theories of the state adopt either a functionalist view of the state as absolutely or relatively autonomous from the ruling class and capitalist economy, or a dialectical view of the state as a form of capital that leaves no scope for autonomy. This paper argues both views are one-sided. The paper is in two parts. Part One, presented here, argues that the contemporary capitalist state takes on an increasingly relatively autonomous relationship with the ruling capitalist class and the capitalist economy in the context of a declining value relation that can best be explained in terms of the negation of abstract labour. The example of social democracy is discussed to illuminate this argument. Part Two will argue that the development and decline of abstract labour best illuminates Marx's and Engel's view of the state as, on the one hand, the mechanism for the suppression of the proletariat and, on the other hand, an entity that the proletariat simply cannot ignore with respect to the dictatorship of the proletariat in the context of a transition to socialism.

Did the Progressive Movement Have a "Class Problem"?

Did the Progressive Movement Have a "Class Problem"? Glen Gendzel (bio) Shelton Stromquist. Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 304 pp. Notes and index. $50.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper). If the progressives were alive today, what would they think of their historical reputation? Surely they would be mortified. American reformers in the early twentieth century believed that they served the eponymous cause of progress and nobly "battled for the Lord," as Theodore Roosevelt put it. But in the decades since the progressives shuffled off the political stage, American historians have cast serious doubt on their sincerity, their motivation, their respect for democracy, even their very coherence. The progressive movement was neither progressive nor a movement, according to the distilled historiographic wisdom of the past fifty years. Despite a lot of meretricious rhetoric about "the people" versus "the interests," the progressive movement, by most accounts, was a top-down plot to weaken democracy, cut off immigration, stamp out pluralism, institutionalize racism, repress popular amusements, tame radicalism, spread bureaucracy, and protect capitalism. But at the same time, we are told, the progressive movement was fragmented, diverse, and divided, a congeries of disparate groups with clashing agendas. Accordingly, the picture of progressivism that emerges from the historical literature is so confused and contradictory that the prestigious Companion to American Thought (1995) once likened the movement to a science-fiction monster that "cannot be killed."1 Into the breach steps Shelton Stromquist with a bold new interpretation. Recent books on progressivism by Alan Dawley, Robert Johnston, and Michael McGerr have cautiously praised the movement's democratic, even "radical" spirit—based on intentions, if not results.2 But Stromquist, like Nancy Cohen in another recent book, prefers to resurrect the familiar charge that the progressives were domineering elitists at heart. This view first gained ascendancy in the 1960s when Samuel Hays and others portrayed the progressives as disingenuous crypto-conservatives ("corporate liberals") who wanted to rationalize industrial capitalism while heading off Populism and [End Page 499] Socialism.3 Later historians fleshed out this unflattering portrait by reminding us that the progressives were racist, sexist, nativist, and imperialist, too.4 Stromquist updates these classic critiques by taking a pseudo-psychiatric approach. Rather than accuse the progressives of conspiring against democracy, Stromquist diagnoses them with a psychic blind spot toward what he terms "the class problem." Progressives, it seems, wished that everyone were the same—racially, ethnically, and most of all, economically. The industrial revolution had wrought many changes in American society, but none bothered progressives more than the sharpening of class distinctions between the toiling many and the privileged few. The opening of this social chasm created a "class problem" for progressives. The problem was, first, that classes existed, and second, that classes were in conflict. The mostly middle-class progressives wanted class distinctions to melt away and everyone to be happy with their station in life. Stuck in denial about class conflict, they could not bring themselves "to accept a world indelibly demarcated by classes" (p. 6). Of course, Marxists and other radicals dreamed of a classless world, too, but progressives accepted capitalism and private property, so a proletarian dictatorship was hardly what they had in mind. Rather, according to Stromquist, progressives envisioned a tranquil social order of classless comity. The progressive dream was that somehow they could persuade the clashing classes to recognize their shared interests as Americans, cease their strife, and cooperate for the common good. The "problem," as Stromquist sees it, was that the progressives ignored the intractable nature of class conflict in industrial society. They were committed to "the search for social unity and a harmony of interests," as if such a thing were possible or even desirable (p. 83). The insidious "contradiction" that "lay at the heart of the Progressive movement" was "the movement's inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that class mattered" (p. 130). Instead of hearing the voices of the victims of industrialism, the progressives, according to Stromquist, wished the restive masses would just shut up, sit down, and be content with their lot—or at least with whatever "meliorist" reforms...

Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR

Introduction Part I: Communism 1. A General Class Theory The Classical Tradition Our Basic Terms Utopia and Communism: A Brief Digression A Concrete Communism Communist Class Structures: Centralization versus Decentralization Culture, Politics and Economics of Communism Appendix: How Societies Differ: A Methodological Problem Endnotes 2. The Many Forms of Communism Class and Property Class and Markets Class and Power Classless Communism and Proletarian Dictatorship Socialism and Communism Endnotes Part II: State Capitalism 3. A Class Theory of State Capitalism Capitalisms and Exploitation Justifying the Label Value Analysis for State Capitalism: A Technical Digression Capitalisms, Communisms and Socialisms Endnotes 4. Debates over State Capitalism Conflicting Concepts Power as the Theoretical Key Weakness of Power Theories Endnotes Part III: The Rise and Fall of the USSR 5. Class Structures and Tensions Before 1917 The Fundamentals: Feudal, Ancient, Capitalist and Communist The Complexities The Contradictions and the Revolution Endnotes 6. Revolution, War Communism, and the Aftermath Changing the State and Class Structures Organizing the New Class Structures A Class and Value Analysis of War Communism Class Contradictions After War Communism Endnotes 7. Revolution, Class, and the Soviet Household Bolshevik Class Blindness New Economic Policy/Old Household Policy Endnotes 8. The New Economic Policies of the 1920s Relations Between Agriculture and Industry: An Overview The NEP in Class and Value Terms A History of NEP Contradictions Adjusting State Industrial Capitalism Revolution and NEP as a Transition to State Capital 9. The Transformations of the 1930s New Complexities and Contradictions Communism in Agriculture State Capitalism and Industry The Industrial Workers Stalinism and Class Appendix A: The Value Equation for Collective Farms Appendix B: The Value Crisis of Collective Farms Endnotes 10. Class Contradictions and the Collapse Class Structures After World War Two Postwar Culture Postwar Politics Postwar Economy State, Enterprise, and Household Transitions The Collapse Appendix A: The Value Equation for Military Expenditures Appendix B: The Value Equation for International Terms of Trade Endnotes References

Golfo Alexopoulos,Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xi + 243 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Golfo Alexopoulos begins her first chapter by analyzing a 1917 Soviet poster titled “Autocratic Structure.” At the top of a stratified pyramid is Russia's tsar, whose fur-trimmed cloak is draped around four layers of oppressors: the priests; the judges and bureaucrats; the police; and the landowning and bourgeois elite. Holding everyone up with their toil at the bottom of the pyramid are the workers and peasants. All but that last stratum were expected to disappear under the proletarian dictatorship because members of the exploiting classes, the former people, would stand outside the embrace of revolutionary society. The 1918 constitution of the Russian Republic codified their outsider status, specifying that they could not vote, receive public assistance, or work in the civil service or military. They also languished on the lowest rung of the Soviet ladder when it came to securing housing, jobs, and ration cards, and, by the decade's end, became candidates for exile and forced labor. Through her examination of Stalin's outcasts, Alexopoulos demonstrates that the meanings of social class and, by extension, citizenship, shifted in response to policies and historical circumstances. In other words, notions of what constituted a Soviet citizen evolved in tandem with the changing definitions of who was to be excluded from the polity.

The war of the end of the world or the end of ideology

Michel de Certeau once proposed that the practice of writing history – of producing, in other words, an intelligibility – always presupposes an encounter with alterity. Always because, in the last ...

Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era

Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era Mark von Hagen Mark von Hagen professor in the department of history Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar He teaches modern Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian history; his fields of specialization include civil-military relations and comparative empires and nationalisms. He is the author of Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (1990) and co-editor of Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: The Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire (1997); After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (1997); and Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945 (2003). He is currently writing a history of the emergence of modern Ukraine in total war and revolution (1914–1923) and co-editing a volume of essays on the role of regions in Russian and Soviet history (forthcoming). Von Hagen has also taught at Yale, Stanford, Indiana, and the Free University of Berlin. He holds grduate degrees from Indiana and Stanford universities. Author Notes The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 2, April 2004, Pages 445–468, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.2.445 Published: 01 April 2004

Speaking in Soviet tongues: language culture and the politics of voice in revolutionary Russia

From the classical dialogues of Plato to current political correctness, manipulating language to advance a particular set of values and ideas has been a time-honored practice. During times of radical social and political change, the terms of debate themselves become sharply contested: how people reject, redefine, and reappropriate key words and phrases gives important symbolic shape to their vision of the future. Especially in cataclysmic times, who one is or wants to be is defined by how one writes and speaks. The language culture of early Soviet Russia marked just such a tenuous state of symbolic affairs. Partly out of necessity, partly in the spirit of change, Bolshevik revolutionaries cast off old verbal models of identity and authority and replaced them with a cacophony of new words, phrases, and communicative contexts intended to define and help legitimatize the new Soviet order. Pitched to an audience composed largely of semiliterate peasants, however, the new Bolshevik message often fell on deaf ears. Embraced by numerous sympathetic and newly empowered citizens, the voice of Bolshevism also evoked a variety of less desirable reactions, ranging from confusion and willful subversion to total disregard. Indeed, the earliest years of Bolshevik rule produced a communication gap that held little promise for the makings of a proletarian dictatorship. This gap drew the attention of language authorities most notably Maxim Gorky and gave rise to a society-wide debate over the appropriate voice of the new Soviet state and its citizenry. Drawing from history, literature, and sociology, Gorham offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of this critical debate, demonstrating how language ideologies and practices were invented, contested, and redefined. Speaking in Soviet Tongues shows how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled verbal creativity and utopian imagination while sowing the seeds for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian newspeak known to the modern era.

'Not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Comradeship of All': Methodism and the Newcastle Labour Movement

A number of historians have noted the importance of the Methodist Church (now part of the Uniting Church in Australia) for the British labour movement. This is especially the case for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The activities of those members of the labour movement who were also Methodists is an important topic for research. Methodism was important in a variety of locations as well as for certain professions and occupations in Australia as it was in Britain. Methodism had many core value systems that were co-extensive with what may be called craft unionism. These values were also widely held throughout professions such as finance, teaching, nursing, police and administration. Geographical areas where Methodists were a significant component of the overall population were often also key areas for the emergence of the values of Taborism' in Australia. Examples include the various coalfields of NSW and the copperbelt of South Australia. Newcastle with its coal miners provides one area where there is considerable evidence of this activity. These mines required skilled workers. Engine drivers, under managers, deputies and the contract miners had to be recruited from those areas in the UK where coalmining occurred. Among these were Durham and Northumberland, the very areas in the UK where the Methodist link was of greatest significance. Consequently Newcastle's religious affiliation was very different to NSW as a whole. The critical statistic is that, in 1891, Methodists made up 31.1 per cent of the Newcastle colliery district population compared to 10.1 per cent for the whole of NSW. For non-conformist potestants as a group (including similar denominations such as Congregationalists and Salvationists) the total was 52.8 per cent for Newcastle versus 25.9 per cent for the state.1 Given that Newcastle itself had administrative, business and port functions we can assume that the Methodist component was even stronger in the various mining centres. These townships included Lambton, Wallsend, Minmi, Adamstown, Dudley, West Wallsend, Kurri Kurri, Weston and Cessnock.

Promises, Promises: Speech Act Theory, Literary Theory, and Politico-Economic Theory in Marx and de Man

The term “Marxist aesthetics” might mean Marx’s own aesthetic theories. The term may most often be taken, however, to name an aesthetic theory derived from Marxism. This would be a secondary construction based on Marx’s critique of political economy, that is, his ideas about labor, production, commodities, value, circulation, money, capital, surplus value, fetishism, class struggle, ideology, the superstructure, the coming dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. Marx did not, except here and there, for example in his celebrated references to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Hamlet, have all that much to say about literature, art, music, or aesthetics, though he often makes easy, and usually ironic, citations from Shakespeare and other writers of literature to reinforce his own argument. It has been left, scholars tend to assume, to subsequent Marxists, Lukacs for example, or Adorno, or Benjamin, or Eagleton (to stick with European theorists), or many others around the world, for example Fredric Jameson or Michael Sprinker in the United States, to construct a Marxist aesthetics. What is striking about these theories is their somewhat dismaying diversity and heterogeneity. I am not a Marxist aestheticist, but when Jacques Derrida in Spectres de Marx makes a similar assertion and says “I am not a Marxist,” he follows it by asking “Are there any?” If there are any, they certainly do not hew closely to any single line of filiation with Marx. It might be better to return to Marx’s own writings, as I propose to do here, to see if they might contain already Marx’s own aesthetics or might even be, essentially and fundamentally, an aesthetic theory. It may seem implausible to claim, as Jennifer Bajorek does in a recent brilliant dissertation prospectus, that Capital is itself through and through a work of literary theory, that is, exemplifies a subset of aesthetic theory. It may seem even more implausible to claim, as Bajorek also does, that Capital, understood as a work of literary theory, is congruent with Paul de Man’s literary theory or that de Man’s literary theory is also, like Capital, a critique of political economy. Marx a literary theorist! De Man a political theorist in resonance with Marx! Nevertheless,

Regimenting the Public Mind

Lecturer in Political Science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. The research for this article was begun on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and completed with the help of a research grant from the University of Canterbury.CCP[Symbol Not Transcribed] [copyright]China in the 21st century is a post-communist society with a communist government. How does the Chinese Communist party (CCP) maintain its political acceptability as it goes about dismantling the socialist system? How can the government maintain popular support when the uniting force of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology is spent and discredited? And what has taken the place of communist ideology? Since the two major political watersheds of the last ten years of the Mao era and the dramatic events of 1989, the CCP has undergone a repackaging, similar to the re-invention of the British Labour party under Tony Blair.(1) The CCP would like to extend its rule over China indefinitely; to do so, it is attempting to move from a revolutionary party to a political party. In the post-1989 era the outward symbols and the all-important name brand CCP[Symbol Not Transcribed] [copyright] remain, but the content and meaning of the party's activities have changed significantly.Rather than the revolutionary romanticism of the Mao period, 'scientific guidance' is the new theme of CCP rule. Party strategists now acknowledge the collapse of faith in Marxist revolution and in the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marxist economics, but they have yet to find another means to justify the one-party state in China. The new economic and political goals of the post-Mao era are symbolized by the Four Cardinal Principles and the Four Modernizations of Deng Xiaoping. In practice this has meant adopting marketization and other capitalist style systems - but never calling them that - while maintaining the CCP dictatorship. Post-1989 and throughout the 1990s, Prime Minister Jiang Zemin attempted to forge a new consensus in China, a logic for continuing CCP rule indefinitely. The party leadership is determined that the CCP will avoid the fate of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and that it will learn from its mistakes.(2) Party thinktanks are also studying the fate of other long-term one-party states, such as Mexico, and trying to learn from their mistakes and successes. In 1999 Jiang Zemin announced the 'three represents,' which called for the party to represent the 'advanced social productive forces, the forward direction for China's cultural advancement, and the truest representative of the fundamental interests of China's vast population.'(3) Now party leaders are refining notions of turning the CCP into a 'party for all the people' (quanmin dang). At meetings for senior leaders at the resort of Beidaihe in September 2001, Jiang hinted that the CCP's long-standing goal of class struggle had been abandoned. He said that the party had to open its door to the 'new classes' of private business people and professionals and that in the current era business people and professionals had displaced workers and peasants as the 'vanguard' of society.(4)Propaganda is playing a central role in the repackaging of the CCP. Propaganda - publicizing the government's activities and educating the population - has always been an essential element of the CCP hold on power. The Central Propaganda Department (Zhongyang xuanchuanbu) of the CCP sets guidelines for the Chinese media, film, drama, art, news, literature, and education and disciplines those who break the rules on what can and cannot be presented in those media.(5) The propaganda system (xuanjiao xitong) remains one of the key groupings of bureaucracies within the Chinese political system.(6) This article surveys the modernization of the propaganda system in China and examines continuities and new developments in the system, particularly attempts to manufacture consent for the re-invention of the CCP. …

The in vivo evaluation of copper‐64 radiolabeled DO2P, DO3P, and DOTP complexes

The <i>in vivo</i> evaluation of copper‐64 radiolabeled DO2P, DO3P, and DOTP complexes

Opposition at the Local Level: A Case Study of the Hammer and Sickle Factory

THE STUDY OF OPPOSITION GROUPS and tendencies has long fascinated scholars, and for good reason. Whether or not ordinary citizens responded to their calls for change, and how authorities treated organised dissidents, say much about early Soviet society and the legitimacy of the Bolsheviks' claim to speak for the working class and a proletarian state. Source problems have, until recently, limited the investigation of opposition groups, however. Scholars of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks have had to rely on problematic emigre sources or official Soviet press accounts, while studies on the Workers' Opposition, Trotskyists and Bukharinists have focused on individual leaders and emphasised political manoeuvring within the upper echelons of the Communist Party. Even the classic works by Carr, Cohen, Daniels and Deutscher deal only superficially with discussions and activity at the grassroots level.' Many scholarly studies have focused on the Trotskyist resistance to Stalinism, but before 1991 the dearth of new primary sources meant that advances in the historiography of rank-and-file Opposition activity were meager. The most notable exceptions are Michal Reiman's The Birth of Stalinism, based largely on dispatches from Russia to Soviet representatives in Berlin, and Isabelle Longuet's thorough examination of the Trotsky Archive. Official Soviet publications did not provide adequate primary materials for reconstructing a view from below, and historians could therefore add little to Trotsky's writings and the memoirs of the few United Opposition survivors of the terror: Victor Serge, Ante Ciliga, Michael Baitalsky and Nadezhda Joffe.2 The opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union offers unprecedented opportunities for new insights and perspectives on the main Bolshevik political currents to challenge Stalinism: the 1923-24 Trotskyist Opposition and the 1926-27 United Opposition. Vadim Rogovin's series has reintroduced Trotskyism to Russian historians with a focus on demonstrating that there was an alternative to Stalinism. Michael David-Fox's study of Soviet higher education in the 1920s shows that majority support for the Trotskyist Opposition in many universities led to profound changes and financial cuts in the Soviet education system. Jeffrey Rossman's recent work on resistance to Stalinism in Ivanovo tangentially illustrates worker identification with Trotskyism well into the first five-year plan.3 An examination of oppositionists within a single, strategically important factory offers a new window on worker-state relations. The Hammer and Sickle Factory was the largest metalworking factory in the Soviet capital and Central Committee

Issue: The Clear and Present Danger Test

Issue: The Clear and Present Danger Test On October 13, 1999, Howard University law professor Kenneth Tollett moderated a discus­ sion on the clear and present danger test. The following are the introductory remarks made by the participants, Walter Bems and Philippa Strum. Walter Berns: Justice Holmes writing in the Schenck case: “The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to pre­ vent. It is a question ofproximity and degree.” I have long thought this test inadequate as a rule of law. Rather, it is a rule for prosecu­ tors or, perhaps, legislators. They, better than judges, are likely to know whether a danger is clear, and present—or, after the Abrams case, clear and “imminent”—or whether the “evil” is substantive—or, again after the Abrams case—“substantial” or “serious.” It seems to me that my doubts about the test, about its ad­ equacy as a rule of law, are confirmed in the history that Professor Laycock presents. The Court’s decision in Dennis v. United States was the decisive event in this history. As Professor Laycock rightly says, “clear and present never recovered from Dennis.” As I read his account, Dennis, a leaderoftheAmeri­ can Community Party, would not have been convicted under the test as formulated by Holmes. First, as to the new or reformulated test: it was drafted by Learned Hand in the Second Circuit Court ofAppeals and adopted by the Supreme Court. It read as follows: “In each case, courts must ask whether the gravity of the “evil,” discounted by its improbability, 188 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY justifies such invasion offree speech as is nec­ essary to avoid the danger.”1 Professor Laycock believes this is significantly different from the test as formulated by Holmes in the Schenck case. I doubt that. Secondly, under the Holmes version, Schenck went to prison; underthe Hand version, Dennis went to prison. And, in each case, politics played a part, just as it played a part in the 1942 Korematsu case in which the Court upheld the relocation ofthe West Coast Japanese. My conclusion, and Pro­ fessor Laycock’s, is that something other than the clear and present danger test is needed to protect the right of free speech. That “something,” he believes, was pro­ vided by Justices Black and Douglas beginning in the Barenblatt case. As they made clear in subsequent cases, that “something” was to make free speech something ofan absolute. In doing this they went back to Holmes, not the Holmes who wrote in Schenck, but the Holmes who wrote in his dissent in Gitlow v. New York, where he said, and became famous for saying, “If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be ac­ cepted by the dominant forces of the commu­ nity the only meaning offree speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.”2 Black reiterated this in his dissent in the 1961 case, Communist Party U.S.A. v. The SubversiveActivities ControlBoard. What this means is that it is worse to suppress the advo­ cacy of Stalinism than to be ruled by a domes­ tic Stalin. First Amendment scholars, particularly those under the aegis of the ACLU, speak of autonomous individuals as having antecedent rights against the state, including the right to say what they please irrespective of its effect on the state. As they would have it, the right protected by the First Amendment is a natural right. Now, it is true that this nation was founded by autonomous individuals, individu­ als living in the state ofnature, who could say whatever they wanted to say, irrespective of its effect on a state because there was no state in the state of nature. But it is also true, as “Publius” (John Jay, in this case) said in Fed­ eralist Paper No. 2, “Nothing is more certain thanthe indispensable necessity ofgovernment; and it is equally undeniable that whenever and however [government] is instituted, the people must cede...

The affinities of Lenin and Gramsci: implications for radical adult education theory and practice

The Russian communists are a first-class ruling elite. As all those who have dealt with him have attested, Lenin has revealed himself as the greatest statesman of contemporary Europe. He is a man who radiates prestige, a man who can enflame and discipline whole populaces; a man whose vast brain can dominate all those social energies, throughout the world, which can be turned to the benefit of the revolution; a man who can check and even checkmate, the most wily and refined statesman of the bourgeois political routine. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1919]: 92) One of the most striking characteristics of Leninism is its formidable coherence and consistency. Leninism is a unified system of thought and practical action, in which everything hangs together and everything confirms everything else, from the general conception of the world right down to the most minute problems of organization. The fundamental nucleus of Leninism, where practical action is concerned, is the dictatorship of the proletariat and all the tactical and organizational problems of Leninism are linked to the question of how best to prepare and organize for the proletarian dictatorship. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1925]: 281-282) And let no-one say that the Leninist criteria for Party organization are peculiar to the Russian situation and that it is a purely mechanical approach to try to apply them to Western Europe. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1925]: 285)

Proletarian Internationalism, "Soviet Patriotism" and the Rise of Russocentric Etatism During the Stalinist 1930s

The most characteristic aspect of the newly-forming ideology . . . is the downgrading of eIements within it. This doesn't mean that phraseology has disappeared or is disappearing. Not at all. The majority of all slogans still contain this element, but it no longer carries its previous ideological weight, the element having ceased to play a dynamic role in the new slogans. It is most possible to see these subtle moves in minor but representative examples. At first, one was to speak of the USSR as the of the proletarian dictatorship, and then the of and the of toilers of the whole world. During the socialism in one country construction period, the USSR was referred to officially as the socialist fatherland. Toward the end of the First Five-Year Plan, the more intimate [term] socialist motherland, or soviet motherland appeared, while today [the USSR] is referred to over and over again as simply motherland. According to our contemporaries' perceptions, motherland sounds warmer, more joyful and less official and bureaucratic than socialist motherland.

French Revolutionary Studies in Today’s China

In March 1989, at the Shanghai International Colloquium commemorating the bicentenary of the French Professor Zhang Zhilian gave a brief and brilliant talk about the history of the Chinese historiography of the French Revolution. He said that it had three characteristics: late appearance (almost a century after the event took place), take-overism (borrowing a lot from the revolutionary historiography of other countries), and (always trying to serve the current politics). After describing some improvements made during the decade following Mao's death and the fall of the Gang of Four, Zhang stressed that it would be wrong to overestimate these achievements, the three characteristics of our historiography of the French which have made it more or less vulnerable, are still active.(1) Zhang Zhilian told a true story. The Chinese historiography of the French Revolution is by no means an exciting one. Much younger than that of many other countries -- especially the western ones, it has little originality, and -- what seems much worse -- even lacks academic independence, always working as a maidservant for politics, and very often for bad This situation has changed somewhat since Deng Xiaoping started the Reform and opened up the country to the outside world, thus separating the historiography of the French Revolution in a certain way from so-called politics. Since then Chinese students of the having been kept away from the western world for some thirty years and from the whole outside world for about fifteen years, have finally begun to be able to get in touch with current trends in the historiography of England, France, the United States, and other countries, to become aware of what had been going on there during this closed-door period, to research into first-hand historical resources, and to think over the important characters and events as well as the historical meaning of the Revolution in ways different from those they were used to. Napoleon, for example, who had been praised as a hero of fighting back the feudalistic and a foreign legalist (yang fajia), was thus criticized as someone who did much to help the restoration of the old monarchy. Danton, who had been regarded as a renegade of the or enemy of the in his later activities -- exactly as he was condemned by Robespierre and St. Just -- was now rehabilitated as one of the wisest leaders of the as one who knew better than anyone else when the Revolution should be radical and when it should be moderate. The coup of 9 Thermidor, which had been attacked as anti-revolutionary, an idea borrowed from the former Soviet Union, was re-evaluated as something like a part of the Revolution itself, because, its basic and the most important fruits by erasing its excessively radical measures. What I have mentioned above are some discussions rather popular in Chinese universities and history journals at the end of 1970s and the beginning of 1980s. They are among the first fruits brought about by the thinking emancipation movement following the fall of the Gang of Four. Quite ironically, as a criticism of the histoire a cle during the Cultural Revolution, those history studies can themselves also be criticized as histoires a cle, because they look very like using the history of the French Revolution to justify Deng's reformation policies, just as was alleged to have been done to justify Mao's theory of the continuing revolution under the proletarian dictatorship. Although there is an important difference between the two histoires a cle -- that is, the first one had been dictated by the government, while the second, as far as I know, was not -- the similarity can hardly be denied: people were simply attacking one kind of political utilitarianism with another. This reminds me curiously of what happened during the Thermidorian Reaction. …