Revolutionary Vision Research Articles

The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future by James Naylor

Reviewed by: The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future by James Naylor John Manley James Naylor, The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2016) The "received" version of the history of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf), James Naylor argues, presents a misleading account of the origins of the party, the character of its early socialism, and the efforts of its members to meet the challenges of Depression, war, and fascism. Based on a "simple binary of reform and revolution" (169) – and too often written by non-historians lacking "critical distance" (7) from their sources – its "progressivist narrative" (9) is rooted in Cold War preoccupations and essentially offers teleological justification for the party of social democratic reform the ccf became after 1945. Thus, it presents a "benign" (71) picture of those ccf pioneers who can be credibly cast as "prescient advocates" (7) of the liberal welfare state. It canonizes the saintly James Shaver Woodsworth and the pragmatic proto-social democrats of the League for Social Reconstruction (lsr) as the ccf's "brain trust." And it presents a harshly skewed picture of those who refused to surrender their revolutionary vision of a Canada transformed by socialism. Rather, the received history of the ccf dismisses this latter group of socialist stalwarts ("labour socialists," as Naylor calls them) as "quixotically marginal and historically doomed." (141) In re-telling the story of (certain aspects of) the ccf in the 1930s and early 1940s, Naylor's passionately combative The Fate of Labour Socialism does not deny that by 1945 labour socialists were barely hanging on to their "dream of a working-class future," but it shows them – and their "current of Labour Socialism" – more respect and restores their agency. Labour socialists, Naylor insists, not only formed the ccf's "activist core," (8) but were influential – even at times, hegemonic – organic intellectuals (in a fairly typical intervention, he admonishes one political scientist for suggesting that the lsr gave the Manitoba ccf "intellectual content and leadership," a notion, he points out, that would have "appalled" (95) the working-class autodidacts of the Winnipeg Independent Labour Party). Though the bulk of his coverage focuses, understandably, on the provinces where labour socialists were most numerous and carried most weight (Ontario, BC, and Manitoba), he attempts throughout to present a geographically comprehensive portrait. The only region to suffer notable and possibly avoidable neglect is the Maritimes. The book is organized chronologically (by and large). Chapter 1, "The Legacy of Labour Socialism," runs from [End Page 264] the mid-1920s until the ccf's formation in 1932. It shows how "a current of self-identified working-class socialists who had determined to build specifically socialist organizations, independent of the organized trade unions and the Communists" (63) emerged and developed, and spurred on by the social problems and political possibilities thrown up by the Great Depression, began to seek national expression. Most were members of local or provincial Independent Labour Parties (ilp) or, in Alberta, sections of the Canadian Labour Party (clp); some were "Marxists of the Third Way" (as described by Peter Campbell) or moving in that direction by turning their ilps, in Ontario and BC, into explicitly socialist parties; a few, Trotskyist and Lovestoneite exiles from the Communist Party of Canada (cpc), still had a foot in Leninism. They were united less by doctrine than by an intense class identity, sometimes reinforced by Marx and Engels' conception of the proletariat as a "universal" class with the unique power to create a classless society and sometimes simply by fear and loathing of the middle class; by ethnic identity (almost all were British or of British descent and highly attuned to British Labour politics, though inspired more by the British ilp than the "irredeemably reformist" (301) Labour Party); and by deep commitments to working-class political independence and to "making socialists" through independent working-class education. Naylor emphasizes that in their hands this important practice, inherited from pre-1914 socialism, went "far beyond the rote study of texts from a narrowly Marxist tradition." (40...

〈人形〉のレジスタンス:――花田清輝の〈鉱物中心主義〉的モティーフと〈革命〉のヴィジョン――

〈人形〉のレジスタンス:――花田清輝の〈鉱物中心主義〉的モティーフと〈革命〉のヴィジョン――

The Man, the Corpse, and the Icon in Motorcycle Diaries Utopia, Pleasure, and a New Revolutionary Imagination

Bringing together filmic, theoretical, popular and historical sources, the essay addresses the figure of Che Guevara as icon, myth and commercial object, as well as the significance of its representation in contemporary cinema.

Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS)

As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence---if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. To address these challenges, DARPA has announced a new four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years. The Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS, program seeks to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon and environments in which they operate. [1] MIT Lincoln Laboratory will provide the test framework and evaluation of proposed software tools in support of this revolutionary vision

The President Ho Chi Minh’s testament – important guidelines for Vietnamese Communist Party in its construction and development

President Ho Chi Minh, the founder, follower and practitioner of the Vietnamese Communist Party during His life and work as a national revolutionary leader, always advocated to and insisted on the vision to incorporate the formulation of Vietnam’s revolutionary vision, strategies and tactics into his effort to build up the Vietnamese Communist Party to become the only Party ruling and leading the national revolution. Prior to coming to the eternity, President Ho Chi Minh left us an important Testament which has truly become a visionary and directional document with profound instructions, a motto and a vital guideline to the Vietnamese Communist Party’s construction and development. His first words of the will are devoted to talking about the Party. President Ho Chi Minh clearly specifies that to build up the Party, a strong and transparent one must be closely connected with both the development and rectification of the Party. Party rectification is indispensable to the foundation and development of the Party, making it so transparent, healthy and strong that the Party can always maintain its revolutionary leadership, not bureaucratic, not deteriorated and not-far-away from the people, and that the Party can reinforce and gain people's confidence in the Party.

The Excavatory Intervention: Archaeology and the Chronopoliticsof Roman Antiquity in Fascist Italy

The Excavatory Intervention: Archaeology and the Chronopolitics of Roman Antiquity in Fascist Italy Romanità – the invocation of the «eternal Roman spirit» – has long been recognised as a core component of Italian Fascist ideology and political culture. However, the «cult of Rome» is typically seen as an expression of the regime's theatricality, its retrograde tendencies and its hostility to modernity. This contribution argues that, on the contrary, romanità was part of Fascism's revolutionary vision of modernity. In particular, the article highlights the regime's use of archaeological excavation, both in Rome and in North Africa, as an instrument of spatial and temporal rupture, used to forge an unmediated relationship between Roman antiquity and Mussolini's New Italy.

The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France

What does history look like? How was the temporality of the French Revolution envisaged? And in what ways was the French Revolution reproducible? These are some of the provocative questions explored by Richard Taws’ masterful new book. Hailed by Lynn Hunt as one of the most original and sophisticated additions to the field in recent years, in many ways Taws’ takes up Hunt’s own preoccupations with revolutionary time and revolutionary vision. Through a dramatic enlargement of the sources under discussion—scrutinising banknotes and passports as well as almanacs and caricatures—Taws is able to identify recurrent and pervasive anxieties about the precariousness of the Revolution. Long overlooked by conventional art histories, the printed ephemera of the 1790s—a genre of cultural production which was ‘always already about time’—proves in Taws’ account the ideal lens for examining how the revolutionaries grappled with their own exceptional present and unstable efforts to fix themselves in history.

Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794

Mary Ashburn Miller, <i>A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794</i>

Bolsheviks, Revolution and Physical Culture

This article assesses the impact of the October Revolution of 1917 and the role of its leading revolutionaries on physical culture and sport. Foremost among these was Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin, and his contribution to the shaping of sport in the Soviet Union receives particular attention. Key to fully understanding Lenin's role in the development of physical culture and sport is the Lenin ‘myth’ and its interpretation in later Soviet sports discourse. The combination of the Lenin myth and Marxist–Leninist ideology was part of an ongoing Soviet effort to shape the ideal socialist citizen. The Bolshevik project was concerned with forging a new self and physical culture was an important part of this process. Thus, this article highlights intersections between the physical and emotional self, arguing that physical culture and sport were instrumental in contributing to revolutionary vision.

Enter the Alter-Left

Enter the Alter-Left

The society of equals: Restoring democratic equality in relations

Leading political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon outlines a reformation of the idea of equality that takes its inspiration from the revolutionary visions of France and the United States while embracing what is good about our modern individualism and diversity.

Sexual Freedom and the Promise of Revolution: Emma Goldman's Passion

This article explores the contributions to a history of sexuality, capitalism and revolution made when we consider the work of anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). I suggest that Goldman's centring of sexual freedom at the heart of revolutionary vision and practice is part of a long tradition of sexual politics, one which struggles to make sense of how productive and reproductive labour come together, and to identify the difference between sexual freedom and capitalist opportunity. Goldman's concern with the significance of kinship in holding together capitalism, militarism and religion, as well as sexual feeling's capacity to disrupt those relationships, echoes across more than a century to resonate with Marxist, feminist and queer scholars’ engagements with similar issues. But where contemporary scholars often tend to retain the opposition between culture and society, representation and the real, making it difficult to produce a materialist analysis of sexuality as transformative rather than always already overdetermined, Goldman's energetic insistence on sexual connectivity as freeing provides an important vantage point. Not only does Goldman consistently situate sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and the church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour, she frames sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women, and as a model for a new political future.

A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794. By Mary Ashburn Miller.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi+231. $45.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsA Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794. By Mary Ashburn Miller.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi+231. $45.00.Johnson Kent WrightJohnson Kent WrightArizona State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 85, Number 4December 2013New Directions in Legal and Constitutional History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/672552 Views: 43Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Myth as a Stronghold of Biographism. A Study of Józef Łobodowski

The article discusses literary the works of Józef Łobodowski from a mythographic perspective. Three themes are crucial in his poetic writing: his presumed origin from Kozak Łoboda, his experience and vision of revolution, and his love for Zuzanna Ginczanka. Łobodowski combines a faithful representation of biography with a mythical narrative. As a result, each mythographic textual solution acquires a particular functional dimension.

“Like a pillar of fire above the Alps”: William Blake and the Prospect of Revolution

The Alps are not part of a sublime prospect in William Blake's poetry simply because they provoke Burkean terror or occasion a Kantian sensation of the unrepresentable. Rather, in both The Song of Los (1795) and Jerusalem (1804–c. 1820), the Alps are sublime in so far as they present the prospect of revolution. The earlier poem flirts simultaneously with a vision of revolution as eschatological finality and as the political realization of the ideas of “Rousseau and Voltaire.” By contrast, Jerusalem conveys revolution as an experience that potentiates the emergence of a radical ontological condition that frees the subject from both political and religious subjectivation. This paper traces the ways Jerusalem harnesses the Kantian sublime to Deleuzian concepts of difference and repetition. Jerusalem embraces the contra-finality of the sublime that Kant disparages and exploits the aesthetic as a Deleuzian site for the emergence of ontological difference. When Los sings his “watch song,” “the Alps and the Appenines / Listen.” This becoming-human of geography that Los's lyric occasions also gives “Time & Revolution to the Space of Six Thousand Years.” Rather than figuring revolution as an eschatological finality, Jerusalem's revolution involves a radical reconception of the body and the geo-political situation that frame its subjectivation.

MARY ASHBURN MILLER. A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794.

MARY ASHBURN MILLER. A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794.

A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794

A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794

From the Critique of Power to the Poetics of Justice

From the Critique of Power to the Poetics of Justice Caleb Smith (bio) What would it feel like not to be dominated? Some version of this question is posed in each of the critical projects named in my title. The first, the critique of power, often identifies domination with enchantment. As Michel Foucault observed in “What Is Critique?,” the critical attitude emerges, in its modern form, when reason attempts to disentangle itself from the rationalizations that justify and legitimate the exercise of authority. It asks, “For what excesses of power, for what governmentalization, all the more impossible to evade because [End Page 160] it is reasonably justified, is reason not itself historically responsible?”1 To pursue critique is to follow a line of inquiry that leads away from ideological mystification, toward a way of knowing whose allure is the consolatory promise of noncomplicity in a corrupt order. The second kind of critical project I wish to introduce, the poetics of justice, sets aside the overburdened distinction between the rational and the irrational. It presumes that people might be enchanted not only into submission but also into other postures—into protest, for example, or into dissent. The poetics of justice attends, accordingly, to the fantasies of persuasion and belonging that attend every invocation of justice, whether the speaker is a judge cloaked in authority or a self-styled martyr faithful to a higher law. I may as well admit from the beginning that any schematic opposition between critique and poetics oversimplifies things. It probably obscures as much as it reveals. In the end, though, my aim is not to argue for poetics, against critique. I’ll suggest, instead, that some reflection on the poetics of justice in nineteenth-century America might move us toward a fuller, more open reckoning with what critique has meant all along, both as an institutionalized academic practice and as a fantasy of collaborative world-making in its own right. For a few years now, some of us who spend our working lives with the artifacts of nineteenth-century culture have been growing restless with the demystifying work of critique—“disenchanted with disenchantment,” as Nancy Bentley says.2 Perhaps the most influential document of this restlessness in the field so far, Cindy Weinstein’s and Christopher Looby’s American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, signals a turn away from the styles of skeptical reading sometimes known as “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” toward a renewed engagement with the varieties of sensuous experience and imaginative play that literature makes possible. Presenting their volume as a friendly rejoinder to a previous generation’s demystifying projects, the editors argue that attentiveness to aesthetics does not blind us to history. In fact, much of the interest of the aesthetic, for the contributors, is in its distinctive ways of negotiating with historical conditions, including its ways of projecting alternatives to those conditions. “And so it comes about that aesthetic questions return to the critical conversation, perhaps in fruitful conjunction with the political questions that have earned their central position in our inquiries.”3 My own recent work on the poetics of justice—that is, the varieties of nonrational persuasion that popular legal literature was imagined to [End Page 161] exercise on its first publics—has been undertaken in the same spirit. Still, I wonder: how different is this spirit, really, from the one that animated critique? After all, the politicized historicism that prevailed in American literary and cultural studies from the 1980s until very recently was not concerned only to expose the ruses of power. Critique also set out to discover versions of itself in the nineteenth century. This was one crucial aspect of the canon wars. Works written by marginalized and disenfranchised subjects were said to subvert hegemonic ideologies, and their authors were reclaimed as the intellectual ancestors of a politicized critical practice. The authority of critique, in other words, was not simply claimed by scholars in the present; it was attributed to authors and texts from the past. Indeed, setting out to recover works of the subversive imagination, critique endowed texts with quasi-magical powers of revelation and conversion. These powers were not usually called “aesthetic,” but the event of disenchantment tended...

Designing Women: Feminist Methodologies in American Fashion

Designing Women:Feminist Methodologies in American Fashion Annemarie Strassel (bio) In 1940, Elizabeth Hawes, a leading voice in American fashion and owner of one of the most exclusive couture businesses in New York, abandoned her career in fashion to take on the "war against fascism." After working for several months as a critic for the leftist tabloid PM, she took a job as a machine operator at Wright Aeronautical, a New Jersey wartime plant, and published a memoir about her experiences entitled Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches (1943). At the heart of the book is a quest to explain "why women cry," a problem she attributes to the crisis in domestic labor created by women's entrance into wage work. She writes, "The world has been told, to the vomiting point, that a revolution is now in progress. Men: this revolution is likely to be brewing right in your own kitchen. For we . . . have all been notified that the day of the Common Man is coming up. Don't think the Common Woman is just sitting around preparing to spend the whole of that day in the kitchen" (xi). If the war had created certain economic opportunities for women, it had also sharpened gender inequities, Hawes argued, as the dual responsibilities of productive labor and social reproduction fell onto women's laps amid the wartime crisis. She writes, "I am terrified we may not start soon enough to avert the Hitlerian routine of Children-Kitchen-Church for the new generation of the Common American Woman and do away with economic slavery to their husbands"(xi-xii). In response, Hawes proposes a revolutionary vision for the feminist reorganization of society, envisioning a world with employer-provided child care, self-cleaning homes, affordable public housing and health care, community restaurants, programs to promote women's reproductive health, nondiscrimination in the workplace, [End Page 35] dress reform, socialized beauty parlors and exercise facilities (so that everyone might have access to the "body beautiful"), and initiatives to encourage women to vote (Hawes 1943). Hawes imagined the achievement of this radical utopia through a cross-class alliance of "professionals in health and education and religious and welfare and housing; of Club-women and les Riches-Bitches and She-Wolves and thousands and thousands of just plain mothers, Womenworkers and Forgotten Females; we [would] all go ahead together to see that no child lacked what he needed" (xii). Just how did Elizabeth Hawes, a household name in American fashion, go from couturier to trade unionist and radical feminist in a few short years? Some crucial answers lie in the social consciousness and feminist methodologies shared by a new generation of American designers like Hawes, who emerged in the turbulent political and economic climate of the Great Depression. Hawes was among a growing movement of women in fashion—designers, retail executives, fashion critics, and industry personalities—who collectively defined new approaches to fashion, rooted in women's physicality and the promise of mass production. Under the framework of "Americanizing fashion," these women challenged traditional business models in fashion and the mystique of Parisian haute couture. More than a patriotic appeal, the idea of American style provided an intellectual framework for women to engage critically with the fashion industry and the construction of femininity through mass culture. This essay reconstructs the political underpinnings of American fashion, pointing to 1) a new emphasis on sculptural design methodologies; 2) Hawes's landmark critique, Fashion Is Spinach (1938), which attacked both French exclusivity and the empty rhetoric of material democracy by the American apparel industry; and 3) the conceptual ties between interwar American fashions and a longer tradition of "material feminism," specifically dress reform (Hayden 1982). The generation of women leading the American design movement emerged at the very moment that historians identify as the nadir of women's political militancy between the two "waves" of twentieth-century American feminism: suffrage and women's liberation (Scharf 1980; Ware 1981; Rupp 1987; Cott 1987; Freedman 1987; Evans 1997). An analysis of the goals, methods, and aesthetics of this generation of women in American fashion suggests alternative spaces for rethinking the possibilities of feminist expression in the decades following woman suffrage...

I Remember Richard: A Review of Samurai Among Panthers and More

“Richard Aoki's biography stands out for a number of reasons other than the fact that I was a good friend of his and am a colleague of Diane Fujino. It presents a revolutionary's vision of his life and activities, and reflects even the lilt of his speech and his colloquialisms. I doubt if he would have had it any other way, and Fujino was wise to recognize this from the beginning.”