Political Revolution Research Articles

The disappointment of Rosa Luxemburg: Rethinking revolutionary commitment in the face of failure

Despite the recent revival of revolutionary commitment in response to left melancholia, I suggest that the contemporary academic left has not adequately addressed the difficulty of responding to failure as an inevitable aspect of revolutionary politics. The dominant tendency has been to try to offset the risk of failure by managing revolutionary action in line with a pre-given model of revolutionary change – only to limit the range of possibilities for revolutionary engagement. To address this problem, I draw on Rosa Luxemburg, a foremost revolutionary thinker, whose experiences of disappointment led her to rethink the notion of revolutionary commitment as a practice of learning from failure. This rethinking of commitment suggests a different way of engaging with failure – one that expands our imagination of political possibilities beyond the confines of the dominant contemporary responses to left melancholia and enriches their visions of revolutionary change.

Psychedelic Marxism: The Ecstatic States of the Body in the White Panther Party around 1970

In the late 1960s, new styles of revolutionary politics of ecstasy emerged in the United States. They combined countercultural politics of transforming the subject via the experience of ecstatic states of the body with radical approaches to a fundamental reconfiguration of the societal order. A vital force in shaping such new styles of radical politics was the White Panther Party – an organization that was not only an influential actor in the countercultural and radical landscapes in the United States but also impacted European countercultures. The article examines how White Panthers merged politics of ecstasy with eclectically adapted bits and pieces of various communist ideas and ideologies and, thus, shaped a new style of radical politics that we might name psychedelic Marxism. Furthermore, it traces the changes in how the White Panther Party and its predecessors, the Detroit Artists Workshop and Trans-Love Energies, set states of ecstasy and societal change in relation to each other. Shedding light on White Panthers’ politics of ecstasy allows us to learn more about the ongoing reshaping of countercultural and radical politics during the late 1960s, but also about trajectories of communist ideas and ideologies that have not found much scholarly attention yet.

Thoughts and Design of Ideological and Political Construction Based on the ADDIE Model

Abstract This paper studies the coupling of the five links of ADDIE and the five essential elements of the ideological and political classroom teaching model. Secondly, based on the ADDIE model, the curriculum system of “analysis - design - development - implementation - evaluation” of ideological and political courses is established. It is found that the five modules of ADDIE are closely related to the five core elements. Each link of ideological and political revolution is divided into several specific sub-units. Analyzing the ADDIE model of “ideological and political” curriculum reform can effectively mobilize students’ enthusiasm. This paper has specific reference value to the teaching practice of ideological and political courses in colleges and universities. The conclusion of this paper has a particular reference value for preparing and exploring curriculum thinking in universities.

Evolution and Political Revolution in Blackwood's Periodical Poetry

Abstract: In May 1861, the middlebrow British monthly Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published a comic poem titled "The Origin of Species." While foregrounding Charles Darwin, the poem portrays evolution as teleological, progressive, and driven by the agency and desires of individual organisms—a misrepresentation of Darwin's theory. I argue that the poem undertakes this misrepresentation deliberately: the version of evolution it attributes to Darwin was associated with radical politics and threats to the social order. The Blackwood's poems call up these political associations to reduce the novelty of Darwin's theory and to hint at its dangerous social tendencies.

The VUCA-nature of modern protest communication

This study introduces several political revolutions from the past and the present for a deeper understanding of the nature of protest communication. Previously, the protests’ success was ensured by the use of printing, telegraph and media innovations, which allowed the protest organizers to evade government control. Today, such technologies provide information and allow participants to communicate proactively in social networks, self-organizing into structures that strengthen and spread protest communication. Social networks enable the realization of the communication potential of each participant based on the organizational model of mass collaboration. This model is not characterized by a system-structural organization, which confounds predictions of the processes of social interaction. Each subsequent event depends on the previous one, complicating the establishment of a trend. This organizational model creates difficulties for the authorities in controlling protests, as it is prone to the stochastic formation of centres of activity, which can be explained from the perspective of field theory, provided in this study. Therefore, from the point of view of the authorities, the situation with the development of the protest acquires the characteristics of VUCA, moving beyond possible control.

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

"The Andropov problem": to a sociological characterisation of the Soviet society

The topic of the article is the problem of “understanding” the Soviet society, interpreted, however, not in line with the so-called “understanding sociology”, but from the point of view of a “portrait” approach to describing particular societies, that allows to identify their characterological features and specifics. On the basis of the complementarity principle formulated by N. Bohr, methodological issues of implementing such an approach are considered, mainly in terms of integrating discourses and languages for describing social reality. As a starting point of the characterological model of a particular society, the article proposes to take its dominant motivations and the sociocultural environment that supports them. For this purpose the concept of a motivating environment of society is introduced. The social nature of the Soviet society is being characterised on the basis of a comparison of sociological research materials, statistical data, assessments of prominent Soviet figures and judgments of "ordinary Soviet people", as well as the author´s own observations. Based on the analysis of these materials, the author proves that the system-forming motivations of the Soviet everyday life are in fact bourgeois in nature. At the same time, against the general background of bourgeois modernity, the Soviet society stood out for its special characterological features, successively associated with the sociocultural trends of the last decades of the existence of the Russian Empire and the peculiarities of the Russian model of educational modernisation. First of all, it is the attitude to education and erudition, that we perceived not as instrumental, but as terminal values. Tracing the dynamics of the intellectual and spiritual needs of the Russian society over long historical intervals, the author considers the formation of such an attitude towards education as a cultural revolution. At the same time, the article substantiates a fundamentally new interpretation of the cultural revolution, that supports the idea that the beginning of the cultural revolution preceded the political revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The attitude to education as a terminal value largely determined the logic of the internal evolution of the Soviet society, during which specific forms of sociality developed in the USSR, that authors propose to define as the society of education.

The Blue Beret

The Blue Beret

Revolts in Mexican California: Between Resistance to the State and Integration of Federal Republicanism (1821–1832)

Like Europe, the Americas experienced a period of state and nation building during the nineteenth century. South of the United States, which declared its independence in 1776, a dozen new political entities appeared on the map from the former American kingdoms of the Spanish monarchy (and Portuguese, in the case of Brazil) after a long and complex process, largely due to the Napoleonic Wars in Spain. Among them, Mexico gained independence in September 1821. It was formed from what was the viceroyalty of New Spain, meaning all of Spanish North America (see figure 1). This relatively late independence (the first American independences from Iberia took place in the 1810s) meant that most of Mexico was affected first by a political revolution: the adoption of a liberal constitution in 1812 on the scale of the entire Spanish monarchy, known as Constitution of Cádiz. Initially an empire, Mexico adopted a federal republican system in the 1823–1824 period, like many of its American neighbors, whether they came from Spanish or English Empires. Historians have underlined the paradox represented by the adoption of a liberal, individualist, and egalitarian political systems by these new countries, with wide access to voting, in organic societies, arranged in collectives in which unanimity was privileged. This situation led to overlaps and hybridizations around key political notions of popular sovereignty and freedom.1

The Genteel Realist James as a Pessimistic Naturalist in The Princess Casamassima

This paper highlights James as a naturalistic pessimist in his late fiction and, more specifically, in his late novel The Princess Casamassima (1986). Although James was identified as a pioneer genteel idealistic realist in his early fiction, his mode of writing shifted in his late fiction to cope with the new environmental settings in Europe and post-civil war American conditions. This dynamic change in his writing modes renders James as an experimental writer responsive to the drastic social, economic and intellectual changes in the late nineteenth century. To fictionalize the historical changes that occurred in Europe, James inscribes in The Princess Casamassima the harsh reality of life as it is, without idealization and aestheticization. He fictionalizes Hyacinth as drawn into the secret world of revolutionary politics and projects him as helpless and determined by biological, social, political and environmental forces which he can neither understand nor control. In dealing with themes of the lower order of society, violence, suicide, revolutionary politics, as well as social contrasts and environmental determinism not attempted at all in his early fiction, we witness in The Princess Casamassima a new naturalistic pessimist James. Delineating Hyacinth as strikingly determined, immersed in grim settings, together with being victimized by fate, the paper concludes, renders James a typical naturalist.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology of Revolution

Abstract Is there a political theology of revolution in Carl Schmitt or is his political theology only and exclusively autocratic? Schmitt sees the key to revolutionary politics in the construction of the idea of the people as a constituent power. This idea, and the first event it produced, namely, the French Revolution, not only establishes a concrete state of exception but also makes exceptionality both at the same time a constituent and a de-constituent element of the political order of the Modern State. The exception goes from coming from “outside” the political order to being integrated into it as an element of stasis, that is to say, of destabilization. Hence, all modern politics, under the mask of legality, become permanently revolutionary. This article analyses the juridical genealogy and the theological–political transfers involved in the construction of the modern revolutionary political era that follows from Schmitt’s insights.

BİR ORTA ÇAĞ KAYNAĞI OLARAK NOVGOROD KRONİĞİ: TARİHSEL DEĞERİ VE MUHTEVİYATI

Rus kronikleri ya da Rus yıllıkları Rusların Hıristiyanlığa geçişlerini müteakiben Bizans’ın yıllık yazma geleneğinden etkilenmeleri neticesinde ortaya çıkmıştır. XII. yüzyılda başlayan bu gelenek özellikle XIV. yüzyılda tüm Rusya’ya yayılmıştır. Rus yıllıkları, Türk-Slav/Rus münasebetleri konusunda bugün sahip olduğumuz bilgilerin ana kaynağıdır. Novgorod’da yazılan yıllık nüshaları Rus yıllıklarının en eski ve önemlilerindendir. Kilise ve manastırlarda yazılmış olsa da bu yıllıkların en eski nüshaları ne yazık ki zamanla kaybolmuş ve günümüze kadar ulaşamamıştır. XIV. yüzyılda Rus ülkesinin çeşitli yerlerindeki büyük manastırlarda çok sayıda yıllık yazılmış ve zamanla içinde Novgorod'da yazılan nüshaların da yer aldığı “yerli” yıllık geleneği oluşmuştur. 
 Novgorod Kroniği erken dönem Rusya tarihinin temel yazılı kaynaklarının en önemlisi ve en iyi bilinenidir. Novgorod'da kronik yazımı çok erken başladı, zira Novgorod Kroniği ilk Rus yıllığı olarak kabul edilen Povest Vremennıh Let (Geçmiş Yılların Hikayesi)’in Nestor Nüshasından (Nestor Kroniği) bir dizi öge içermektedir. Kroniği yazan ve koruyanların din adamları olması, bazı yazıcıların kendilerini salt rahip olarak adlandırmasının ötesinde eserin genelinde yoğun bir dini eğilim bulunmaktadır. Bu durumun doğal sonucu olarak Novgorod Kroniği kilise meselelerine bolca değinmektedir. Bu dini notlar dönemin politik konularına ve sosyal koşullarına ışık tutmaktadır. Kroniğin mevcut en eski kopyası, XIII. yüzyılın ikinci yarısına tarihlenen Synodal Nüshası (Sinod Parşömeni) olarak adlandırılır. İlk basımı 1841'de yapılmış olup, halen Devlet Tarih Müzesi'nde korunmaktadır.
 Orta Çağ tarihinin ana kaynaklarından biri olan Novgorod Yıllığı farklı kişilerin kaleminden çıkmış ve günümüze kadar ulaşmıştır. Novgorod Yıllığı, 1016-1471 yılları arasındaki hadiseleri konu almaktadır. Novgorod Kroniği, Nestor Kroniği’nin bıraktığı yerden Rus tarihini devam ettiren birkaç yerel kronikten biridir. Genel olarak tipik Rus yıllığı olmakla birlikte, tek düze bir siyasi devrimler kataloğu olma özelliği de taşımaktadır. Novgorod Kroniği, Rurikidler hanedanının knyazları (prensleri), şehrin valileri ve başpiskoposları hakkında bilgi vermektedir. Bu alan ve belirli konular için malzeme değeri yüksek olan yıllık, Kumanlar, Almanlar, Moğollar, Litvanyalılar ve Hanse Birliği ile ilgili detaylı bilgiler vermektedir. Söz konusu milletlerin Novgorod ve çevresine yapmış oldukları saldırılar, savaşlar yıllıkta bazen detaylı bazen ise önemsiz bir hadiseymiş gibi anlatılmaktadır. Kalka Savaşı, Tannenberg Savaşı, Kulikova Savaşı, Neva Muharebesi, Novgorod Yıllığı’nda anlatılan önemli savaşlardır. Novgorod Kroniği, on üçüncü yüzyılın başlarında, Konstantinopolis'in Latin haçlılara düşüşü hakkında ayrıntılı bilgi verirken, ülkeye çok daha yakın olan gelişme olarak bir diğer Latin Haçlıları Almanların gelip doğu Baltık'ta koloniler inşa etmesine daha az dikkat kesilmektedir. Yıllık eksik ve kronolojik olarak hatalı bilgiler vermekle beraber, Slav coğrafyası ve bu halklarla iletişim kuran milletlerin tarihlerinin ele alınması açısından doyurucu bilgiler içermektedir.

The Collapse of the USSR in the Context of the Theory of Institutional Violence

The collapse of the USSR is explained from the point of view of a new approach – the theory of institutional violence by D. North, B. Weingast and D. Wallis. The application of this theory shows that by the 1980s the USSR had reached the stage of a mature “natural state”. The basis of the Soviet system consisted of long-term political and economic organizations run by the elite that ensured a high level of security and stability of official position due to effective control over the apparatus of state violence (KGB, the militia, the army). Thus, objective prerequisites for the transition to a new social order of “open access” based on economic and political competition developed in the Soviet Union. The leadership of the USSR, represented by M. S. Gorbachev and his supporters in the party, was confident that the introduction of openness and democracy would benefit the Soviet state. M. S. Gorbachev’s loss of control over the special services and the army in the summer of 1991 had a fatal significance for the fate of the USSR. Organized by the chairman of the KGB V. A. Kryuchkov, the putsch of the GKChP catastrophically discredited the union government. The leaders of the Soviet republics were convinced of the need for its complete elimination and achieved this in a short time. Thus, the perestroika and the collapse of the USSR can be considered as the beginning of the movement of the Soviet society toward the “open access order”. The initial conditions of this transition can be considered relatively successful. Despite a series of armed clashes in different regions of the USSR, the collapse of a huge militarized power occurred without much bloodshed and carnage between representatives of the political elite. The events of August 1991, thus, led to a political revolution, which marked the beginning of new sovereign states with a form of government close to the republican one.

Политический феномен революции

The article analyzes the political phenomenon of revolutions. The article explores the phenomenon of political revolutions, providing an overview and analysis of the key aspects, causes, and consequences of this phenomenon in world politics. Revolutions, as political events, have a long history and have a significant impact on modern society. The article examines the reasons that may push people to rebel against the existing political system. The author emphasizes that dissatisfaction with corruption, authoritarian regimes, economic instability and social inequalities often serves as a catalyst for mass protests. Effective use of mass communication tools such as the Internet and social media also plays an important role in mobilizing the masses. Additionally, the article analyzes the impact of political revolutions on the countries and regions where they occurred. This may include changes in political structure, the establishment of new governments, and even global implications for international relations. In addition, the article raises the issue of the role of the international community and external actors in political revolutions, including support for the opposition and influence on the development of events.

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs, and: Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812–1912 ed. by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, and: Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs, and: Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812–1912 ed. by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, and: Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FUNCTIONS OF CHINESE RURAL SCHOOLS IN THE NEW ERA

Chinese society is rural; rural education is an important part of China. The development of rural schools is not only a problem of China's basic education political revolution but also a problem directly related to the sustainable development of Chinese society. This paper is a literature review of rural schools' social and cultural functions from the Chinese documentary and literature. Multiple definitions of the term rural are provided. The findings are represented via different overarching themes. The findings reveal that rural schools can perform social and cultural functions if they are developed as an important component of rural construction in the new era, enhancing the cultivation and inheritance of rural culture, extensively carrying out vocational education to serve the rural revitalization strategy directly, and vigorously cultivating all-subject teachers with a local flavor.

Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword

Reviewed by: Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword Maria O'Malley (bio) Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions kirsten sword University of Chicago Press, 2021 408 pp. Kirsten Sword's Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions offers an incisive and compelling argument about how the rise of print, in particular public notices in newspapers, mediated spousal separation and to a certain extent shaped legal discourses surrounding the dissolution of marriage. The book provides ample context for the cases it highlights by tracing the halting and roundabout ways the jurisdictional debate about divorce unfolded in England and in the colonies. Sword finds that "the dramatic growth of the press gave ordinary people power to draw on a transatlantic repertoire of debates about household order, and to make legal and moral arguments independent of the claims of local legal authorities" (12). She notices how advertisements in newspapers were used as an alternative to the law to exempt a spouse from the financial obligations of marriage. Rather than taking a spouse to court for a legal divorce, which would involve a lengthy process and an uncertain verdict, a husband would place an advertisement in a local paper explaining to merchants that he was not responsible for her expenses. Sword includes, as a frontispiece, one such ad placed by John Davis in the New-Hampshire Gazette in 1762 asking for his wife's return as well as distancing himself from any of her finances: "This is therefore to forbid any Person entertaining or harboring her on my Account, or giving her Credit for Money or any Thing whatsoever" (qtd. in Sword 1). Her argument is built on extensive archival evidence that she culls from divorce cases, legal commentaries, ecclesiastical pronouncements, political treatises, novels, letters, personal journals, and newspapers. The study, ultimately, demonstrates how "newspaper [End Page 254] reporting of these phenomena, as well as of parliamentary petitions for full divorce, helped escalate demand for legal and quasi-legal remedies to marital conflict on both sides of the Atlantic" (111). Sword spotlights how these demands shored up or challenged the hegemony of patriarchal systems. The book starts with great promise by explaining in the introduction how racialized figurations shaped the public relations campaigns spouses launched and how, in some ways, the practice of race-based slavery raised new questions about eighteenth-century marriage and divorce. Her study analyzes the phrasing, paradigms, and epistemes that set the terms for marriage law against the background of political revolutions stretching from the Interregnum to the American Revolution. She finds that at times the practice of slavery informed marriage law: "European colonial powers revived [arguments about household patriarchy] to support new forms of government and new forms of slavery between the sixteenth and seventh centuries" (4–5). As evidence, she identifies substantial similarities between newspapers advertisements seeking the return of enslaved people and wives who had absconded. The great strength of the book lies in its close attention to language to broaden the study's scope from divorce to conceptions of slavery and the ties it finds between divorce and the expansion of a credit-based marketplace. The first parts of the book focus on single divorce cases from the sixteenth century: one in the colonies (Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson) and one in England (Manby v. Scott). These cases demonstrate how patriarchy undergirded legal decisions even as those decisions demarcated some limits to males' authority over their households. Sword cites new primary source material to give a more balanced account of these cases. Not until the second half of the book does a reader get an extended treatment of the tropes relying on enslavement for understanding marriage law. The promises of the introduction bear fruit starting in chapter 5 and ripen especially in chapter 8 when the book's argument sharpens and clarifies. Many scholars will find her discussion of aggregated archival work of newspapers notices useful. Much of Sword's archival work involved digging up public notices submitted to local papers by husbands publicizing the behavior of their errant wives to distance themselves from any financial obligations and then the...

The life of Dr. Hu Shih as a scientist, diplomat, revolutionary and politician

Dr. Hu Shih is a Chinese scientist, especially a philosopher in education, diplomat and leading advocate of political liberalism. But he is also a very important Elite in the history of Chinese and Taiwanese culture, with wide interests. It has contributed greatly to the adoption of the spoken language as an official writing language. As an influential supporter of American pragmatism, he advocated the creation of a new society through mass education rather than a political revolution. Dr. Hu Shih was born in Shanghai on December 17, 1891 and died in Taiwan on February 24, 1962. This study is conducted to reveal the biography of Dr. Hu Shih, a distinguished Chinese scientist, along with his intellectual, literary and political personality. Our goal while making this study is not only to tell his life story, but also to establish a relationship between his ideas and actions, and especially to reveal his contributions to the intellectual and cultural life of China and the world. The important thing is that no matter how much he tries to stay away from politics, his contributions to the cultural and political development of China and then Taiwan with his duties and liberal ideas will be demonstrated.

Rediscovering Revolutionary Socialism in America:


 
 
 This article examines the pre-World War I editorials of America’s first Socialist con- gressman, Victor Berger, in order to recover the lost history of early twentieth-century American socialism from the obscuring lenses of Progressivism, Populism, anarchism, scientism, Soviet Communism, and American Exceptionalism. As I argue, talk of a Second Gilded Age today overlooks the vastly different roles “socialism” has played in the respective discourses. Rather than fighting for a stronger national welfare state, even the most conservative Socialists like Wisconsin Representative Victor Berger campaigned for the abolition of wage labour and the overthrow of global capitalism. Recognizing Populism’s failure to preserve its political independence as a working-class movement, Berger, like Debs, proposed that the working class should organize itself under the banner of a socialist party to take state power. In order to link the forma- tion of mass parties like the Socialist Party of America to a totalizing philosophy of history and international political revolution, Berger drew from Second-International Marxist dialogue in which it was enmeshed, not indigenous American traditions. The prolific editorial career of Victor Berger, head of the largest English-language socialist daily in the country, demonstrates how pre-war American Socialists did not merely “translate” Second-International Marxism but rather made up a constitutive part of its transatlantic development.
 
 

Collective Bargaining Retrenchment in Union Country: The Politics of 2011 Wisconsin's “Budget Repair” Bill

AbstractIn 2011, the passage of Governor Scott Walker's “Budget Repair” policy retrenched collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin, a state that was the earliest adopter of these rights and locally celebrated as “union country.” In this article, I use critical juncture analysis to examine this significant case of institutional change. I argue that newly elected GOP politicians initially saw opportunity in a new legislative majority—emerging from the popularity of the Tea Party during the 2010 midterm elections—and attempted strategic policy crafting to mobilize support for this anti-union bill. However, these efforts eventually devolved into a reactive struggle for power with entrenched Democratic legislators and previous policy beneficiaries. Incorporating work on organizational deviance, I show how politicians in both parties sought to control the policymaking process with improvised oppositional tactics that undermined governing norms, ultimately resulting in the bill's passage. This study, thus, expands on theories of institutional change, illuminating the subversive politics of many contemporary movements and political parties.