Revolutionary Agenda Research Articles

Going Underground: The Author’s Body and the Mining Workplace in the Writing about Miners in Modern China

Abstract This article highlights the author’s body and its physical experience in labor history, by a focus on their historical implication for the emergence of writings about miners in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century China. Miners and their workplace entered Chinese textual and pictorial representations at the turn of the twentieth century, as a result of the growing importance of the mining industry, the dissemination of new mining knowledge, and the formation of new social groups. Later in the 1920s, literary movements tied up with the revolutionary agenda under the influence of Marxism brought new conceptualizations of miners’ position in society and their relationship with intellectuals. When authors turned to write about miners in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they chose to legitimize their writing by descending into mine shafts to acquire the experience in the underground mining workplace and to incorporate the bodily experience into their writings. The mining lamp in texts and images from this period provides a prime example to illustrate how the author’s experience in the underground mine was embodied in the author’s and the miner’s corporeal visions and contributed a new way of seeing and representing miners. Drawing upon materials about miners of various genres, this article reveals the formulation of Chinese visual modernity within Chinese social interactions and brings the author’s body into labor history by calling attention to both its material presence in the workplace and its agentic power to inscribe workers.

Caravan Modernity: The Strategic Revitalisation of China’s Dynastic Transportation System during the Second Sino–Japanese War

ABSTRACT This article analyses how and why, during the War of Resistance (1937–1945), Nationalist China revitalised the dynastic system of transportation and communication (yiyun zhidu). Due to the blockade by the Japanese Imperial Army, it shows, everything essential to the war effort was in short supply. If essential items were available, the difficulties in securing transportation were overwhelming. This was exacerbated by the transfer of the capital to Chongqing. The relocation moved the Nationalists further away from China’s emerging modern transport infrastructure. This article examines the yiyun campaign by referring to primary sources and recent Chinese scholarship. The campaign entailed mobilising the population to partake in the transportation of goods using the age-old systems of caravans, boats, and human porters. The Nationalists, however, did not see this as resurrecting an old system. In line with their revolutionary agenda and modernising ethos they held that revitalisation would be informed by ‘scientific management’ (kexue guanli). The article illustrates the complexity of the campaign through the controversy surrounding the ‘management fee’ (guanlifei). As time progressed it became clear that recruiting people to participate in the yiyun campaign would be challenging.

The Impact of Iran's Nuclear Program on Iranian-American Relations (2010-2021)

Objectives: This paper explores the relationship between Iran and the U.S., focusing on Iran's nuclear program. It examines how successive U.S. administrations have addressed the issue and analyzes the responses of newly elected Presidents of the U.S. and Iran, as well as the Prime Minister of Israel, to the ongoing Iran Nuclear Deal negotiations using an analytical approach.
 Methods: The study employs an analytical methodology derived from the fields of political and social sciences, moving beyond traditional approaches in international relations.
 Results: The paper argues that Iran's development and acquisition of nuclear weapons, as a regional power, pose a direct threat to regional stability and may trigger a nuclear arms race. The interests of the U.S. and its allies in the region would also be endangered.
 Conclusions: The paper concludes that both Washington and Tehran should reach a mutually beneficial agreement to maintain regional power balance and prevent the potential for an arms race, especially with the seventh round of negotiations approaching. As Iran pursues destabilizing regional ambitions in the Middle East, posing a strategic threat to U.S. interests and allies, the U.S. should reassess its Middle East policy to ensure that Iran does not exploit sanctions relief and its remaining nuclear energy capacity to expand its revolutionary agenda throughout the region.

The intersections of comedy and politics in Zimbabwe: analysing Baba Tencen’s ‘Borderphobia’ and Prosper Ngomashi’s ‘Pastor and his wives’

This paper is a comparative explication of selected online Zimbabwean comedies as satire. It pursues the revolutionary character of the comedies against an increasingly limiting and impoverishing politico-economic environment. In our rendition, we depart from the general and simplistic thinking that comedy is solely for entertainment’s sake to view it as a puissant genre of art that is deployed not only to articulate big national issues but revolutionise consciousness given the danger of pacifying the people that goes along with oppression. The paper pursues the revolutionary agenda in the comedies as the comedians are inadvertently committed to the search for a breakthrough against a limiting and impoverishing politico-economic environment. Emerging out of this elucidation of comedies is that steeped in the comedies, is a sharp sense of resistance against oppression as well as an intense interest in liberating reflection and struggle. The centrepiece of the article is to comparatively engage Pepukai Zvemhari’s ‘Border phobia’ and Prosper Ngomashi’s ‘Pastor and his wives’ against the keen interest in lampooning those in charge of the affairs of the state for breeding trepidation and social phobia among the masses while on their part, life is decorated with profligacy and self-aggrandizement. The two comic skirts perfectly fall into the category of revolutionary art.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

The Small Spaces of Global Struggle

The Small Spaces of Global Struggle

Reform, revolution and reaction in the urban space of Madrid, de corte a checa (1938) by Agustín de Foxá

The first literary manifestations to emerge in the context of the Spanish Civil War endeavored to create a legitimizing discourse for each of two contending Spains, the National Spain and the Republican Spain, by means of poetic appropriation of urban spaces. Nevertheless, this was not a Spain divided only in two, between leftists and rightists or Socialists and Cedistas, but rather a territory comprised of many parallel wars sparked prior to 1936. According to historian Enrique Moradiellos, the nuclei of three disparate and opposing political agendas arose from the physical foundation of these two Spains, ‘the reformist-democratic, the reactionary-authoritarian and the revolutionary-collectivist [agendas] that responded to the same triad of models that emerged in Europe in the wake of the devastating impact of the Great War of 1914 and that competed to achieve political and institutional stabilization’ (2004: 125). This ‘reform, reaction and revolution’ triangle that acted as the protagonist of the Great War would also settle into the fratricidal spaces of Spain and its cultural products. In this context, my essay will analyse the mechanisms of appropriation of Madrid’s spaces employed by each of these three political agendas as they are presented in Madrid, de Corte a Checa (1938) by Agustín de Foxá. Following the map of the capital we will see how both, the agenda of a modern anti-traditional space driven by the Second Republic and the anti-bourgeois revolutionary agenda that stood for the destruction of the status quo and the implementation of a Communist Orthodox regime, present a threat to the conservative ideal that represented the monarcho-Catholic centralism of the third agenda. This threat is manifested in the dismantling of Madrid through the ‘de-Hispanicization’ (Foxá) of the mythical spaces of the sacred (churches and convents), historic (statues and palaces) and domestic (house interiors) cityscapes.

The Family Lottery

The Family Lottery Sophie Lewis (bio) Ever since the long 1960s, the vast majority of Western feminists and leftists have tried to walk back the demand to "abolish the family"—that is, to fully deprivatize care. We have hastened to reassure our distressed and outraged audiences that we aren't anti-family; in fact, we want more family, not less! Perhaps this capitulation, this rhetorical sleight of hand, is understandable. After all, distinguishing families from "the family" is an unfamiliar maneuver. Families may be where capitalism gets resuscitated each day for free, and where the vast majority of queerphobic and sexualized violence takes place, but they are also often the only bulwarks against racism and alienation many people have. To criticize the family in the contemporary political landscape is to be understood as nihilistically anti-relational at best and, at worst, racist—presumably because nonwhite groups are more dedicated to (or dependent upon) family than white. It's true that the regulatory fantasy of the nuclear family is upheld zealously, even religiously, as a cultural value by almost every existing ethnic group (certain Indigenous peoples are a notable exception to this). But that doesn't mean that the family isn't structurally implicated in ethnic and class hierarchies. Far from "just" harmful to women and children, the family as such, with its exclusions, extortions, and arbitrary rationings of care, is spiritually deleterious for all. But it has especially (and materially) lethal consequences for Black and brown, im/migrant, Indigenous, poor, and working-class queer, trans, feminized, sex-working, and gender nonconforming people—whose needs, desires, and modes of survival it pathologizes and devalues. The privatization of care into the family household, like the stateimposed norms of the couple-form and the biogenetic model for registering responsibility and rights over children, should be seen as a continuation of an older project of advancing whiteness and producing a well-ordered productive labor force. Understanding this might help us see through the false universalism of "family values," whereby America purports to stand for "keeping families together" (a flawed [End Page 61] principle in itself, especially for queer youth whose biological kin want to kill them) but then tortures and rips apart the nonwhite family at the border. Since at least the late 1970s, a rich tradition of radicalism in America has emanated from these marginalized spheres, including movements of lesbian welfare recipients and domestic workers in a struggle for families but also against and beyond the family. Many participants at the first National Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays in 1979, for example, boldly rejected the premise that children are the property of one or two or any number of parents, advancing instead the notion that everyone already has—yet at the same time needs and deserves—many mothers. One caucus announced, unforgettably, "All children of lesbians are ours." In practice, then, family abolition has been defined as the simultaneous preservation and destruction of the survival practices and domestic intimacies of the present. This dialectical method is well-expressed by feminist scholar Tiffany Lethabo King: "While I critique the family and am committed to addressing its limitations—even its elimination—I celebrate the creative ways that Black descendants of captive communities continue to reinvent and conceptualize relationships." On a different continent, 100 years ago, the Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai understood very well how unpalatable a revolutionary agenda of family abolition seemed to most workers, in a context where capitalism had already eroded the family significantly. In her treatise Communism and the Family, Kollontai compassionately acknowledges that it is existentially petrifying to imagine relinquishing the organized scarcity we have in favor of an abundance we have never known and have yet to organize. Nevertheless, abolition of the family was—"infamously," in Marx and Engels's phrase—a central part of the "proposal of the Communists." As early as 1808, the French feminist and utopianist Charles Fourier, whose writings Marx read closely, speculated that the solution to the horrors of the market lies partly in the replacement of the bourgeois family with a much larger open unit he called the "phalanstery." How would this large-scale commune structure function? The Brooklynbased parent, writer, and...

Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. By Rachel Hynson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 314 pp. $39.99

Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. By Rachel Hynson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 314 pp. $39.99

A Primer on the Digitisation of Administrative Tribunals

Tribunals are a major feature of the administrative justice landscape in the UK. Recently, the government proposed and began to implement a revolutionary digitisation agenda across the justice system. The digitisation of administrative tribunals is a key part of that agenda. The proposed changes promise a paradigm shift in the way that public law litigation is carried out and, more broadly, how fairness in the administrative state is policed. Not much is, however, known as to the detail of what is to come, with the current policy documents offering only a broad vision. At this point of ‘known unknowns’, this short and accessible primer seeks to set out a framework in which the emergence of digital tribunals can be understood and assessed. It outlines four important contexts: reforms to administrative justice and changes to tribunals; advances in e-government; developments in online dispute resolution; and the development of the Transforming Our Justice System proposals.

New Revolutionary Agenda: The Interwar Japanese Left on the "Chinese Revolution"

To achieve socialist revolutions in Asia, the Third Communist International (Comintern) recommended to Asian revolutionaries the strategy of a united front comprising the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie, which would prioritize the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. The early Japanese Communist Party (JCP) (1922–1926) resisted this recommendation, which lumped together colonized India and semi-colonized China with the only empire in Asia, Japan. The JCP insisted on the priority of the domestic national struggle, arguing that without toppling the imperial government at home by means of a socialist revolution, there could be no dismantling of Japanese imperialism and therefore no Chinese Revolution. After the outbreak of Japanese aggression in China in 1927 (the first Shantung intervention in May of that year) and the rise of popular nationalist support for the empire at home, members of the Japanese Left recognized that they had failed to properly engage with Japanese imperialism in Asia. Based on Comintern archives and the writings of leading Japanese Communists, this article argues that, as a strategy to rebrand and redeem itself in the new critical situation in Asia, the Japanese Left began to regard the Chinese Revolution as the only path to liberation, not only for Asia but for Japan as well.

Understating the Logic of Regime Survival? Conceptualizing State–Society Relations and Parliamentary Liberation in Post-2011 Jordan

Both reform and revolutionary movements in the Arab world have called on institutions of state to follow through on the cries for dignity, bread and social justice emanating from the street. These movements are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and may demonstrate overlapping commonalities of practice. Asef Bayat has designated this phenomenon an example of ‘refo-lution’, the amalgamation of a revolutionary agenda with a reform process. This paper will argue that 2011/2012 demonstrations in Jordan fall into this category, and that they elucidate that the relationship between the Hashemite monarchy and Jordanian society needs to be reframed for political stability. The theoretical frame of this article, grounded in the selectorate theory of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita in conjunction with insights from Nazih Ayubi, suggests that this stability requires a more defined separation of powers and functions of the monarchy and the parliament, making the latter an autonomous legislative body.

Religious Violence and Democracy in Niger

Deadly attacks on Christians and mounting resistance to secularism in Niger raise the question of whether the Muslim-majority country is turning away from democracy and toward a repressive form of Shari’a law. I argue that religious extremism in Niger has largely external roots and that domestic religious leaders are not pursuing a revolutionary agenda, even though they are increasingly involved in organizing social movements. The foreign nature of terrorist threats may even help preserve democracy by raising nationalist support for the state.

Upended Path: The Rise and Fall of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

This article examines the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the 2011 uprising. It analyzes the Brotherhood's behavior and strategy since taking power in June 2012, exploring the underlying factors leading to their downfall in 2013. The article argues that the short-lived Islamist government's fall can be ascribed to three key factors: its lack of a revolutionary agenda, the Brotherhood's organizational stagnation and inertia, and its leaders' incompetence and inexperience in governance.1The abrupt rise and fall of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to power took many observers, commentators, and policy-makers by surprise. After only one year at the reins of government, the Muslim Brotherhood's path was upended and its future has become uncertain. While the Brotherhood leadership and sympathizers blame the old regime forces (i.e., the deep state) for their failure, the Brotherhood's own blunders and miscalculations cannot be disregarded. Their impetuous rush to power, the stagnant and rigid decision making-process within the movement, and the incompetent and weak leadership of President Mohamed Morsi all contributed to their fall. After the ouster of Husni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, the Brotherhood emerged as one of the key political forces in Egypt. Its Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) won the first parliamentary elections after the January uprising and party chairman Dr. Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first free and democratically elected president. However, after only one year in office, Morsi proved unable to run the country effectively or to achieve the objectives of the January uprising, leading the military to take control in a coup on July 3, 2013, following an eruption of mass protests against Morsi on June 30.This article begins by tracing the debate over how to explain Islamists' behavior and strategy. It critically discusses the key theoretical trends dominating the terrain of Islamism over the past three decades. The second section probes the Brotherhood's role before and after the January uprising. It examines the ability of the Brotherhood to survive and endure under the Mubarak regime and how it became Egypt's key player in the post-Mubarak era. The third section focuses on the Brotherhood's downfall and explores the key factors behind it, particularly those related to the group's internal dynamics. The final section discusses the current crisis facing the organization and how it has thus far dealt with the post-coup regime, which has designated it as a terrorist group.DEBATING ISLAMISMOver the past few decades, Islamism has been a subject of inquiry and debate within academic as well as policy-making circles. Despite a plethora of literature on Islamist movements, capturing the essence of Islamism as a sociopolitical phenomenon is still an enigma. Scholars are not only puzzled by the changing faces of Islamism but also by the lack of methodological and theoretical tools that could help analyze and explain Islamists' discourse, behavior, and strategy.1 Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, two influential bodies of scholarship have dominated the study of Islamism. The first is the essentialist or culturalist approach, which treats Islamism as a rigid and immutable phenomenon. The advocates of this approach tend to view Islamism as nothing but a reactionary response to the crisis of modernity that has challenged Muslim societies since the early 20th century. This trend falls short in explicating the complexity and multifaceted character of Islamism, and tends to consider it within a reductionist, ahistorical, and culturist view of Islamic societies.2 Moreover, to prove their views, essentialists tend to conflate Islamism with Islam as a whole, focusing particularly on more conservative and violent forces that follow a rigid and regressive version of the religion. For these scholars, Islam is not a faith but rather an anachronistic ideology that does not cope with modern ideas. …

Extremism in revolutionary movements

A revolutionary entrepreneur strategically chooses the revolutionary agenda to maximize the likelihood of revolution. Citizens have different preferences and can contribute varying degrees of support. We show: (1) Extremists exert a disproportionate influence over the revolutionary agenda; (2) Depending on the structure of repression, more severe repression can moderate or radicalize the revolutionary agenda. Specifically, increases in the “minimum punishment” (marginal cost of revolutionary effort at its minimum) radicalize the revolutionary agenda. This presents the elite with a tradeoff between extreme but unlikely revolutions and moderate but likely ones. (3) Competition between revolutionary entrepreneurs can radicalize the revolutionary agenda.

Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Age: A Review of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green's Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Age: A Review of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green's <i>Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture</i>

A liberationist constitution? Maidan's revolutionary agenda and challenges for constitutional reform in Ukraine

The new wave of the ‘Euro Revolution’ in Ukraine has revealed yet another glaring gap in the country's social and political order: a constitutional one. The violation of Ukrainian citizens’ basic constitutional rights and freedoms, against the backdrop of excessively wide and frequently abused presidential powers, called for the emergence of a constitutional agenda for the revolutionary movement. The re-transition to the parliamentary-presidential form of government, accomplished in mid-February 2014, represents only the first stage of the constitutional agenda set by ‘Maidan’. Further changes to the form of government are forthcoming, which will very likely see Ukraine become a parliamentary republic. The constitutional process has been suspended, however, due to various constraining factors, both internal (the upcoming presidential elections) and external (Russia's aggression in Crimea). Given the inherent demand for a continued constitutional transition to a parliamentary republic, the process is likely to be accomplished by the end of 2014.

Silent Voices: Mothers who Kill their Children and the Women's Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan

In the early 1970s Japan witnessed the emergence of a new women's liberation movement that put forward an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese post-war society. Known as ūman ribu (woman lib) or simply ribu (lib), this movement appeared at a historical time when the numerical increase in cases of mothers who killed their own children prompted the news media to describe maternal filicide as a dramatic social phenomenon. This article explores ribu's engagement with the increased public visibility of mothers who kill. It contends that the solidarity and support the movement demonstrated for these criminalised mothers radically challenged idealised notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother—child bond, and deeply questioned the post-war nuclear family as the cornerstone of society. The article investigates the revolutionary potential of ribu's preoccupation with murderous mothers by framing it in the context of the movement's call for consciousness transformation and for the pursuance of a more genuine relationality, and it gestures towards an understanding of what might be at stake in reading maternal filicide through the interpretative grid of a revolutionary agenda.

A new land: Deleuze and Guattari and planning

This article argues that planning would benefit from greater engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It pays particular attention to their normative political vision, which is a revolutionary agenda that aims at a condition of radical freedom for humans beyond the state and capitalism. The planning literature has only just begun to examine Deleuze and Guattari's work, and so far it has avoided discussion of their normative political vision. I argue that when we confront this vision head-on, it opens up productive existential and normative questions about what planning is and if it should exist at all.

Listen to Your Body: Ugly Feelings and the Post-Political Japanese American Subject of Susan Choi's American Woman

About halfway through Susan Choi's novel American Woman (2003), the Japanese American protagonist, Jenny Shimada, undergoes a somewhat puzzling physiological experience that can be described as one...