Socialist Networks Research Articles

A Hub of Anti-Colonialism: Prague's International Organizations in the Transnational Socialist Network and Global Cold War

During the Cold War, Prague was home to several international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) uniting member organizations of different fields (students, journalists, trade unions, communist parties, churches and others). This article aims at a reinterpretation of their history through the lens of decolonization, presenting the NGOs not only as soldiers in the Cold War but also as ‘hubs of anti-colonialism’. It shows the role of the ‘Third World’ delegates in the NGOs and their positioning toward Czechoslovak state socialism. It explores the mechanisms of knowledge production and transfers through media and training programmes.

Common mycorrhizal network: the predominant socialist and capitalist responses of possible plant-plant and plant-microbe interactions for sustainable agriculture.

Plants engage in a variety of interactions, including sharing nutrients through common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs), which are facilitated by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). These networks can promote the establishment, growth, and distribution of limited nutrients that are important for plant growth, which in turn benefits the entire network of plants. Interactions between plants and microbes in the rhizosphere are complex and can either be socialist or capitalist in nature, and the knowledge of these interactions is equally important for the progress of sustainable agricultural practice. In the socialist network, resources are distributed more evenly, providing benefits for all connected plants, such as symbiosis. For example, direct or indirect transfer of nutrients to plants, direct stimulation of growth through phytohormones, antagonism toward pathogenic microorganisms, and mitigation of stresses. For the capitalist network, AMF would be privately controlled for the profit of certain groups of plants, hence increasing competition between connected plants. Such plant interactions invading by microbes act as saprophytic and cause necrotrophy in the colonizing plants. In the first case, an excess of the nutritional resources may be donated to the receiver plants by direct transfer. In the second case, an unequal distribution of resources occurs, which certainly favor individual groups and increases competition between interactions. This largely depends on which of these responses is predominant ("socialist" or "capitalist") at the moment plants are connected. Therefore, some plant species might benefit from CMNs more than others, depending on the fungal species and plant species involved in the association. Nevertheless, benefits and disadvantages from the interactions between the connected plants are hard to distinguish in nature once most of the plants are colonized simultaneously by multiple fungal species, each with its own cost-benefits. Classifying plant-microbe interactions based on their habitat specificity, such as their presence on leaf surfaces (phyllospheric), within plant tissues (endophytic), on root surfaces (rhizospheric), or as surface-dwelling organisms (epiphytic), helps to highlight the dense and intricate connections between plants and microbes that occur both above and below ground. In these complex relationships, microbes often engage in mutualistic interactions where both parties derive mutual benefits, exemplifying the socialistic or capitalistic nature of these interactions. This review discusses the ubiquity, functioning, and management interventions of different types of plant-plant and plant-microbe interactions in CMNs, and how they promote plant growth and address environmental challenges for sustainable agriculture.

Women, Hospitality and The Intimate Politics of International Socialism, 1955–1965

Abstract In the 1950s, a commitment to democratic socialism connected networks of intellectuals, activists and political operators in both Europe and Asia. Many of these were women, who built informal and intimate networks of solidarity that underpinned the movement. The rich set of correspondence between European and Asian socialist women speaks to their role as connectors of global and local civil society within international socialist circuits. It also indicates the importance of friendship, mobility and hospitality as a crucial factor in sustaining such networks, as well as building the trust that facilitated the exchange of subversive information. While Asia was seen as the great hope of international socialism in the 1950s, by the middle of the 1960s, many of its socialist parties had imploded, pointing to the limits of international socialism for Asian women amidst global anti-communism and the rise of authoritarian states. Transnational socialist networks nonetheless helped further both European and Asian women’s campaigns for gender equality, development and democratic socialism in decolonizing Asia, adding vital new dimensions to the history of internationalism.

Bridging geographical research and political action: the Trentino Italian region in the scientific and socialist writings of Cesare Battisti, 1895–1914

Scholars in the history of geography have paid close attention to the way geographical research has contributed to the development of scientific and political concepts such as ‘region’ and ‘nation’. This paper focuses on the life and writings of Cesare Battisti (1875–1916), a native of the city of Trento who became renowned in Italy and Austria-Hungary as a socialist and a geographer at the beginning of the twentieth century. To understand his thought, this paper collects and examines Battisti’s scientific outputs and published political papers, along with previously unstudied private writings from his archive (1895-1914). The result is a portrait of Battisti as someone who was outside of national geographical traditions; an entangled intellectual who used different geographical, political, and philosophic tools and methods to legitimate his political claims. In particular, the paper suggests that the idea of Trentino as a region was construed through an anticolonial discourse aimed at supporting the region’s claim for autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian empire. This study of Battisti, therefore, offers valuable insights into the emergence of left-wing nationalist and regional discourses, which arose from Italian and Central European socialist networks before the First World War.

Paying for Principles: Women and the Politics of Translation Work, 1880–1900

ABSTRACT This article explores the dual role of translation work as remunerative and political labour for economically self-reliant women involved in activism in the late nineteenth century. Home-based freelance translation was a convenient profession for educated women, but the work was often underpaid, precarious, and demanding. As this article will show, translation work could also be explicitly politicized. Growing socialist networks developed an international press that allowed paid work to be combined with the dissemination of political ideas and texts across borders. Three case studies, of Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, and Regina Zadek Bernstein, give an insight into translators’ relationships with their work and the place they gave themselves in the texts they produced. The article considers the importance of these women’s socio-political beliefs, their international activist networks, and their professional and intellectual independence in their attempts to unite the remunerative and activist aspects of their work.

“We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

The fascist who would be king: Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk

ABSTRACTMacklin and Fowlie explore the political life of Count Potocki de Montalk, a poet, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne. Count Potocki is perhaps most famous as a minor cause célèbre among London’s literary intelligentsia after his imprisonment for obscene libel in 1932. Historians, when they consider him at all, often discount him, viewing him as little more than a colourful eccentric, a view reinforced by Stephanie de Montalk’s fascinating biography of the man, which appeared in 2001. Eccentric he most certainly was. However, as this article demonstrates, Potocki also played a key role as an enabler of fascist and extreme right-wing activism through the services he provided myriad groups as a printer of their literature, a career that spanned the interwar and post-war periods. The article examines how his preposterous pursuit of the Polish Crown, coupled with the innate elitism this engendered, led him to reject egalitarianism and democracy and embrace fascism. While the Spanish Civil War saw an outpouring of literature from his literary contemporaries in support of the Spanish Republic, Potocki responded by establishing The Right Review as a mouthpiece for his own personal mélange of monarchism and fascism. Utilizing newly released security service files combined with archival research in the newly deposited Searchlight archive at Northampton University, this article pays closer attention to the political side of Potocki’s activities than has hitherto been the case, particularly his wartime publishing activities. This includes his anti-Soviet pamphlet on the Katyn massacre, which caused great vexation in government circles for fear of the harm Potocki’s (correct) accusations might do to relations with Britain’s crucial wartime ally. The authors conclude with a detailed examination of the role Potocki played in post-war National Socialist networks, for both personal and political ends, not least of which was his continued efforts to further his claim to the Polish throne, which he never ceased to believe was his by divine right.

Christian Salm, Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s: European Community Development Aid and Southern Enlargement

Christian Salm, <i>Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s: European Community Development Aid and Southern Enlargement</i>

Ignacy Daszyński. Ein Sozialist, polnischer Patriot und transnationaler Akteur vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg

The Polish-Galician Socialist Ignacy Daszynski was without doubt one of the most significant Social-Democratic politicians of Cisleithania, and later of the Polish Republic. From 1897 he was a Deputy in the Cisleithania’s Reichsrat, where he would become a most active and eloquent Parliamentarian. Through his close relationships and even friendships, with the most recognized exponents of the Second International, figures like Karl Kautsky or Viktor Adler, he played a role too in the international socialist movement and secured therein support for his national political agenda: He understood himself to be first of all a Pole, followed immediately by his identity as a Social Democrat, and he joined social and nationalist aspirations tightly. The reestablishment of a Polish state occupied for him the highest priority. Before the First World War, Daszynski succeeded in gaining the support of his international comrades for the Polish national project. Furthermore, he skillfully managed to initiate strategic friendships with significant European socialists. In this way, he was recognized and accepted quite early in socialist circles outside of the Habsburg monarchy. He broke through, as did many of his contemporaries, linguistic and other barriers and was a part of networks that spanned national borders. In the process, his foreign language abilities helped him as much as his close personal contacts. In the present article, Daszynski is viewed as one of the most linguistic ethnic, and national boundary transcending Social-Democratic actors from the time before the re-founding of the Polish state. He is appraised from perspective of contemporary transnationally influenced historiographical research. His activities within Social Democratic political forums are similarly considered for its transnational meaning. An essential impulse for this research was given by the Marcel van der Linden connected publication, Transnational Labour History, which examines the labor movement in the context of interwoven, connected processes between states and organizations, and at the same time, stresses the formation of complex socialist networks, and the processes of exchange of people and ideas.

Socialist Networks and the Internationalization of Building Culture after 1945

In 1968 the Parisian journal Opus International published on its cover an image of two mirrored supermen, differing only by the acronyms on their chest: that of the United States and that of the Soviet Union (fig. 1). Designed by the Polish artist Roman Cieślewicz, this poster, it has been noted, made the two powers appear as twins, accused them of exercising a destructive influence on the rest of the world, and suggested the impossibility, or futility, of choosing between them. Figure 1: Sup...

The socialist network

We develop and test machine learning-based tools for the classification of personal relationships in biographical texts, and the induction of social networks from these classifications. A case study is presented based on several hundreds of biographies of notable persons in the Dutch social movement. Our classifiers mark relations between two persons (one being the topic of a biography, the other being mentioned in this biography) as positive, neutral, or unknown, and do so at an above-baseline level. A training set centering on a historically important person is contrasted against a multi-person training set; the latter is found to produce the most robust generalization performance. Frequency-ranked predictions of positive and negative relationships predicted by the best-performing classifier, presented in the form of person-centered social networks, are scored by a domain expert; the mean average precision results indicate that our system is better in classifying and ranking positive relations (around 70% MAP) than negative relations (around 40% MAP).

Eastern Europe Abroad: Exploring Actor-Networks in Transnational Movements and Migration History, The Case of the Bund

SummaryThe “transnational turn” is one of the most discussed topics in historiography, yet it has inspired more theoretical tension than empirically saturated studies. This article combines both aspects by examining the transnational network formation of one of the most important social movements in late imperial Russia, the Jewish Labour Bund. It furthermore introduces into historiography one of the most fruitful theories in recent social sciences, “actor-network theory”. This opens the view on the steady recreation of a social movement and reveals how closely the history of the Bund in eastern Europe was interwoven with large socialist organizations in the New World. Based on a large number of sources, this contribution to migration and movement history captures the creation and the limits of global socialist networks. As a result, it shows that globalization did not only create economic or political networks but that it impacted the everyday lives of authors and journalists as well as those of tailors and shoemakers.

The Blacklist: personal stories of victimisation, hardship and determination

The Blacklist: personal stories of victimisation, hardship and determination

Socialist cosmopolitanism meets global Pentecostalism: charismatic Christianity among Vietnamese migrants after the fall of the Berlin Wall

By focusing on Pentecostal charismatic Christianity, this article explores the encounter of Vietnamese boat people in former West Germany with their political counterparts, Vietnamese contract workers in former East Germany and those from ex-COMECON countries, who became asylum seekers in reunified Germany. It argues that Vietnamese migrants, formerly divided by different political attitudes and experiences, create social relations by joining global Pentecostal networks. However, this new unity cannot be understood as a new form of diasporic ethno-nationalism, despite the fact that many believers live primarily within Vietnamese networks, some of which extend transnationally to Vietnam. Once former contract workers from Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and other East European countries become mobile believers, most of their proselytizing activities are based on global Christian sociality. Reconstructing their previous global socialist networks, new believers are spreading the Gospel in ex-COMECON countries and in late socialist Vietnam.

Birth Control and Socialism: The Frustration of Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue's Mission

AbstractThis article explores the ties between the early birth control movements in the United States and Japan, both of which emerged from a transnational socialist network after the Russian Revolution of 1917. By closely examining the activism of two symbolic figures in the movements, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001), their roles abroad, and the public responses in both nations, the article studies the possibilities and limits of the transnational birth control movement in the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that, while the socialist network helped expand their original goal of relieving working women across the world from the dual burden of reproductive and wage labor, the moment they crossed national borders, they simultaneously became bound by nationalist frameworks and gender biases. Their liberal and reformist, rather than revolutionary, approaches to birth control based on the Western model of progress and the eugenic concept of racial survival ultimately blunted the dream of universal sisterhood and female liberation.

European Municipalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: the Socialist Network

This article analyses the contribution of European socialism to the building of a variegated network of reformers in municipal politics from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Unsuccessful as a network inside the Second International, a broader international federation of cities, the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA), was proposed in 1913. Belgian, French, Dutch and English socialist leaders remained strongly influential in this federation between the two world wars, working in connection with co-operative movements and the International Labour Office based in Geneva. The fifty years of debates and projects animated by the international journal Les Annales de la Régie Directe founded by the French socialist Edgard Milhaud allows us to follow the development of a generation of local reformers from the beginnings of municipalist thought and praxis up to the idea of building a decentralised European Community of cities and regional authorities.