Political Revolution Research Articles

Revolution as a Cultural Institute

The author of this article analyzes the concept of “revolution” and “revolutionism” in the contemporary culture. He defines the latter as one of the most important cultural institutions of modernity and regards it as a continuous and constitutive process in the New Age society, though acting most of the time in a latent form. Although the boundaries of the concept of revolution are extremely broad today, any study inevitably raises the question of the typology of revolutionary processes, to which the orthodox thought could provide an independent answer. Revolutions can be divided into two types. The first type is political revolutions, a change of political regimes. The second includes systemic revolutions, which lead to a change in the global cultural model. The revolution as a historical phenomenon, along with the subject of colonization, emerges from the Enlightenment and Reformation discourses, which replaced the Christian idea of the catechization of peoples. This led to the revolution becoming a reference point for a society that gravitated toward a radical reconstruction of institutions and identities and which was willing to pay a high moral price for it. Attention is paid to the quasi-religious foundations of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action. The results show that a modern society is a society with horizontal dynamics of development, and its social upheavals, often taking a radical revolutionary format, can only use Christian symbolism to disguise non-Christian content. The Soviet culture reproduced elements of religious practice because the new government clearly wanted to create its own rituals, as the deep religiousness of the people called for it. The main objective of this article is to structure and briefly describe the semantics of revolutionism, in which the eschatological, mystery and psychological aspects are highlighted, and the revolutionary ritual of sacrifice is examined. The author concludes that the authentic and truly spiritual alternative to the revolutionary constructivism of modern society includes the religious transformation of a man, as well as theosis and cosmotheosis, which can also change the existing social model.

Cannibalizing the Black Atlantic in F. T. Marinetti’s Interwar Writing

Abstract In this article, I address Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s writing that borrows from the cultural discourses of the Atlantic African diaspora of the interwar years. I analyze two texts, the play The Drum of Fire and the short story “The Black Man,” both written in 1922; these are traversed by contemporary anticolonial discourses in Africa and the Black American rhetoric of emancipation, which Marinetti appropriates as prime examples of modernity and revolutionary politics. Far from expressing anticolonial and emancipatory sentiments for people of African descent, I argue that Marinetti coopts these discourses to project Italy at the center of the Atlantic world, as the locale of technological and cultural novelty. Between primitivist stereotypes and celebrations of cultural hybridity, these texts reflect Marinetti’s attention for Black cultures of the Twenties, beyond the well-known “jazz craze.” Steeped in current historical events, including Italian migration to the United States, the texts analyzed here demonstrate the contribution of African diasporic cultural discourses to a pivotal phase of Italy’s own nation building, when the country is striving to establish itself as a modern, politically relevant nation on the international stage.

Protest without End

In the aftermath of crushed political revolution, forms of protest become curiously circular and conflicted. Drawing on literary and visual representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, this essay analyzes new circuits of demands that break with the project of successful revolutionary ends and demonstrate an investment in the satisfying interminability of protest that cannot be suppressed or punished. It brings into view a range of protesting figures engaged in an ongoing alteration of the colonial relation to argue that the eccentric gaps between process and purpose are useful for thinking through the satisfactions of anticolonialism.

Revolution

Revolution

The aesthetics of political resistance: On silent politics

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts.

“An unlawful and contemptible adventure”: the Ducoudray-Holstein expedition and US foreign policy in the early 1820s Caribbean

ABSTRACT This article explores how the involvement of US citizens in projects of political revolution across the Caribbean threatened the geostrategic and economic interests of the United States in the region. In 1822, a revolutionary expedition led by a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, Henri Louis Villaume de Ducoudray-Holstein, departed from the Atlantic seaboard to overthrow Spanish rule in Puerto Rico and to establish the so-called Republic of Boricua. The republican utopia nonetheless collapsed after Curaçao’s Dutch authorities arrested the expedition’s leaders. This article assesses the expedition’s geopolitical ramifications, highlighting how it exacerbated tensions between the US and the Spanish Empire. It also underscores the predicament of US officials, both in Washington and across the Caribbean, who sought to defend US geostrategic goals and the Union’s maritime trade, even while policing US participation to illicit activities in the Revolutionary Caribbean.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Pioneers of Clerical Fascism? Mythical Language of Revolutionary Political Catholicism in Slovakia and Visions of a “New Nation”

Konštantínove listy/Constantine’s Letters is an international scientific journal which has been published in Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra since 2008. The main goal of the journal is to present problems and themes intertwined with the cultural and political history of Great Moravia during the 9th century as well as continuity of Cyrillo-Methodian tradition in later times. Next, there is also space for other adjacent topics connected with Slavonic and Byzantine history, philology, philosophy, literature, cultural relations as well as medieval and early modern age ecclesiastical history and iconography.

The Electronic Press Dealt with The Issue of Poverty in Sudan

The increase in poverty rates from ancient times to the present day is considered one of the most complex, measured and read issues. Poverty directly affects the individual and society in all economic, psychological, educational, health, cultural and political aspects as well, and it is one of the main reasons for the eruption of major political revolutions in Sudan and other regions. All this made the Sudanese electronic press deal with the issue of poverty extensively, as it is an extremely complex social phenomenon that exhausts nations and peoples.
 This study dealt with how the Sudanese electronic press deals with the issue of poverty and its contributions to address this phenomenon that affects all aspects of human life, through two main chapters: Chapter One: Electronic Journalism and the Issue of Poverty and Social Change. This chapter discusses writing and editing poverty issues in electronic journalism. As well as the electronic press explanations of the causes of poverty in Sudan.
 The second chapter deals with fieldwork, methodological aspects and content analysis. Where an applied study was presented on the Sudanese newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm website, then the conclusion comes with the results and recommendations that concluded on the importance of making media and technical efforts in the Sudanese electronic press, and working on highlighting the press material that deals with poverty issues, in addition to the need to adopt programs that help in addressing these issues.

Your (Internet) Connection Is Unstable

Your (Internet) Connection Is Unstable

Formy współdziałania Służby Bezpieczeństwa Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej i Komitetu Bezpieczeństwa Państwowego Związku Radzieckiego „na odcinku” ukraińskim w latach 1956–1989

Due to its international aspect, the Ukrainian issue became the subject of cooperation between the Security Service (SB) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW) of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) and the State Security Committee (KGB) of the Soviet Union. Cooperation involved counterintelligence services, departments to destroy the political opposition and the so-called ideological and political subversion, and departments controlling religious life. In the first half of the 1970s, the Management of Special Departments of the KGB at the Northern Group of Soviet Forces (in Poland) also took part in special operations against Ukrainians. The design of joint operational activities as well as the exchange of views and information was facilitated by working meetings organized in capital cities and at border crossings. One of the first documented meetings on the Ukrainian question after the period of the political “thaw” was held in May 1958, and the last, most likely at the turn of 1988 and 1989, in Minsk, Belarus. The basic areas of cooperation include: surveillance and disintegration of Ukrainian emigration (mainly rival factions of the nationalist movement), prosecuting Ukrainian war criminals and collaborators who avoided responsibility, surveillance of Ukrainian citizens of the Polish People’s Republic suspected of carrying out “nationalist activities”, signaling threats to the security of the state generated by Ukrainian population as well as standard completion and verification of archival materials concerning the controlled persons. The operational activities of the secret services of Poland and the Soviet Union required the involvement of so-called personal information sources, i.e. secret collaborators. They were Polish and Soviet citizens of Ukrainian nationality, with numerous relatives and friends in Poland, the Soviet Union and Western countries. This allowed them to cross state borders, despite restrictive passport regulations. The Security Service recruited them to cooperate by threatening with imprisonment, embarrassment, and dismissal from work or studies. Support was also offered in finding a job or a flat, and it was also possible to renew contacts with relatives abroad. These were effective tools for manipulating agents.

On the Utopian Possibility in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: A Lacanian Reading

Written in 1974, the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed revolves around the central character Shevek’s self-appointed mission to improve the relationship between two planets, Anarres and Urras, by breaking down the walls that are separating these ideological enemies. The novel, in that sense, can be read as one man’s search for an ideal state, rather than a description of a utopian/anti-utopian state. Literary scholars generally focus on various aspects of The Dispossessed in terms of its anarchist politics, ecological politics, and revolutionary politics. This article; however, aims to approach the novel from a Lacanian perspective by addressing the protagonist’s psyche and his relation to the socio-symbolic orders in the novel. By focusing on the characterization of the relations between the subject and the other in an anarchist (as well as a capitalist culture) in The Dispossessed, this article aims to analyze how the novel provides a path towards an ideal state.

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean

The Art of Revolutionary Praxis

Merleau-Ponty, in Humanism and Terror (1947), addresses the spectrum of problems related to revolutionary action. His essay, Eye and Mind (1960), is best known as a contribution to aesthetics. A common structure exists in these apparently disparate works. We must reject the illusion of subjective clairvoyance as a standard of revolutionary praxis; but also we must reject any idealised light of reason that illuminates all—that promises a history without shadows. The revolutionary nature of an act must be established as such through praxis. The creative praxes of the political revolutionary or the revolutionary artist are recognised ex post facto; yet each involves the creation of its own new aesthetic wherein the value of that praxis is to be understood spontaneously and all at once.

Imagining the Urban Poland: Revolution and Reconceptualization of Urban Society in the Kingdom of Poland, 1905‒1914

The aim of this article is to analyze how the concept of mieszczaństwo was redefined in Polish political discourse between 1905 and 1914 in conjunction with concepts of intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. My hypothesis is that before the Great War, in a time of powerful social and political revolutions that took place on the streets of Warsaw, Łódź and other cities, new ways of conceptualizing the urban society emerged. I shall discuss the circumstances that led to the forming of the concept of the Polish mieszczaństwo during the debate about the urban self-government in the Kingdom of Poland after the 1905 Revolution. As the city itself became the subject of political competition, and the right to govern the city became a demand of the Polish public opinion. For National Democratic Party it was an excellent occasion to expand anti-Semitic rhetoric and promote the idea of the Polonization of cities as a long-term goal. However, I argue that this rhetoric would not find public response if the intelligentsia itself would not redefined its attitude to other groups of urban dwellers. The mieszczaństwo, which had no political meaning previously, became the main factor of the imagined modernization of Poland. Despite the price of the ethnic conflict it became obvious that Poland had to be urbanized to be modernized.

Латиноамериканська тематика на сторінках «Новой и новейшей истории» (1985−1991 рр.)

The issues of the articles published on the pages of the scientific-historical periodical "New and Contemporary History" (1985−1991, so-called Perestroika epoch) has been analysed. The complex of publications devoted to various problems of the Latin America modernity and contemporary history is identified. The author offers his classification of the identified publications by genre. It is found out that the articles and monograph reviews were the most popular genres. It was found that the overwhelming majority of the authors belonged to Moscow group, while there is absence of works prepared by the scientists who came from other Soviet republics (at least in the field of Latin America research). The conclusion about the dominance of Moscow scholarly centres in the Latin America`s history studying is made. It is shown that a tangible ideology and propaganda component in the research problems and the plots were important during Perestroika period and this approach was mostly kept until the end of the Soviet Union existence. The problems studied by the authors were as follows: national liberation struggle of the local population against Spanish colonial rule; the trade union movement and opposition to American imperialism development; historical personalities who represented the national liberation movements; political and social revolutions. An analysis of publications on the Latin America history shows that the Soviet historians did not have clear preferences regarding definite countries of the continent under study. All the Latin America countries were paid the focus of attention by the Soviet researchers. The state of Latin American studies on the pages of "New and Contemporary History" shows unsatisfactory level of this research field elaboration that is especially obvious in comparison with European and American studies.The forming of the Soviet historiography heritage in Latin American studies is of great importance for further perspectives of the Ukrainian Latin American studies development. It makes sense to assert that a careful consideration of the Soviet historiography heritage on the subject is important for the contemporary Ukrainian historiography.

The natural domination of capitalism: Darwinist organicism and the perverse postcolonial fantasy in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri's status as a prominent author of ‘post colonial literature’ necessitates a probing of her fiction's ‘macro-politics’, a rigorous demystification of her ideological and political sympathies and antipathies. Situating Lahiri's post colonialism must clarify her stance on geo-political and economic developments of the last seventy years. It must inevitably engage with the debates on issues such as neo-liberalism, imperialism and neo-conservative military interventionism, so far not adequately addressed by the critical literature. In the following essay, we propose that a ‘macro-political’ reading of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland could furnish us with the answers that are crucial to the field of postcolonial studies and its self-criticism. A close reading of the narrative, as a politically biased historiography, reveals a deployment of social Darwinist (evolutionary) doctrine coupled with a rather crude dismissal of leftist opposition amounting to an apologetics for neo-liberal capitalism and its aggressively interventionist ‘foreign policy’. This regime has proved increasingly incapable of self-justification, indicated by the current rise of populism and the ‘environmentalist’ movement on a global scale. Furthermore, we will try to draw parallels between this crisis and twentieth-century fascism. Max Horkheimer's analysis will shed light on the novel's ideological content and that, for all its overt unflagging apologetics, it brings to the surface the acute systemic contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism. Today's crisis ties the viability of the future of organised human life to a revolutionary systemic upheaval, and Lahiri's consigning of precisely such revolutionary politics to juvenile utopianism becomes a peculiarly untenable act of denial and projection.

Kets, G. and J. Muldoon, eds. The German Political Revolution and Political Theory

Kets, G. and J. Muldoon, eds. The German Political Revolution and Political Theory

Marx and Critical Constitutional Theory

This chapter argues that Marx proffers important resources to develop a critical constitutional theory that questions the fetishism and mystifications of modern constitutionalism and whose goal is to deepen democracy. In particular, it argues that Marx’s critical theory of constitutional law is political, social, socialist, and anti-systemic. The chapter is organised as follows. The first section highlights Marx’s attention to the antinomy of constitutionalism in his engagement with Hegel’s theory of the state. In the course of this engagement, Marx contrasts the political constitution (both monarchical and republican) with ‘democracy’ in order to foreground the constitution’s limitations and point the way toward the resolution of the paradox by centering the people’s constituent power and subjecting the constitution to popular will at all times. The second section examines alienation and the abstraction of popular sovereignty under a political constitution that emanates from the separation of state and ‘civil society’. The third section argues that the limitations and mystifications of ‘the paradox of constitutionalism’ are rooted in the political (or partial) revolution that generates the constitution. Instead of a class-neutral constituent power leading a political revolution, Marx envisions a social revolution in which the proletariat is the constituent power. In order to illustrate the false promises of political revolutions, the fourth and fifth sections focus on the failings of constituent assemblies. These constitution-making assemblies do not live up to the ideal of constituent power, either because their politics is non-revolutionary or because the pre-revolutionary constitutional order imposes constraints on their work to prevent revolutionary rupture. The sixth section highlights Marx’s analysis of the incoherence and contradictions of the political revolution’s constitution. The fact that the constitution is ultimately based on modus vivendi because it accommodates competing interest and embodies a class compromise generates this incoherence. The seventh section returns to the paradox of constitutionalism in order to highlight Marx’s conclusion, following his analysis of bourgeois revolutionary constitutions, that the fundamental contradiction consists in the blockage of social emancipation, and that the constitutional incoherence and instability are better understood as emanating from the unresolved paradox of constitutionalism. The eighth (and penultimate) section explores elements of an alternative radical constitutionalism that Marx identifies in the experience of the Paris Commune in order to chart a path beyond the alternatives of despotism and class rule.

Frantz Fanon and revolutionary group praxis

Frantz Fanon was a political revolutionary, and he remains a key intellectual figure in decolonization debates and postcolonial studies. He was also a psychiatrist, continuing to practice, teach and explore new forms of community mental health and groupwork even in exile. In this talk, I explore convergences between Fanon’s institutional psychotherapy and group analysis, alongside his other commitments, to indicate how Fanon’s geopolitically-situated psychosocial analyses linking individual and social change can inform more politically engaged group analytic practice. More specifically, Fanon’s observations on language and power highlight how histories and legacies of colonialism infuse everyday interaction, structuring both relationships and bodily experiences. I argue that his insistence on the need to engage with power and privilege, and the ethical-political responsibilities of the therapeutic practitioner in mobilizing their own practice to acknowledge and challenge these, remain acutely relevant to current group analytic practice in these times of intensified suffering, distress and social inequalities.