Western Socialist Research Articles

Plato in East Asia?

Shadi Bartsch in her recent publication Plato goes to China (2023) has argued that Plato and the Greek classics have had an out-sized impact on Chinese politics and intelligentsia. This article, while sympathetic to her approach, argues that there is little evidence that Plato and the Greek Classics have exerted any direct influence on Chinese politics. Rather it argues that what influence Plato has had on China is actually indirect via a pre-war national socialist Japanese filter. In pre-World War II Japan Plato was fetishized as the ancient source of western socialist and communist thinking. Radical extremists such as Kita Ikki and Kanokogi Kazunobu created a new ideology that mingled aspects of Platonism with socialism and Japanese nationalism. They hoped thereby to create a modern-day Platonic utopia for the East Asian races (and for the Japanese in particular). This article examines how this modern-day “version” of Platonism with “Asian” characteristics impacted on pre-war Japan and modern East Asia as a whole.

Chinese Cultural Tradition and Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is an ideal, not a reality. It's a decentralized theory, not a systematic theory. It has many different names. From the ancient to the modern times, it has been increasingly perfect and close to realization. It has been partially fulfilled in the world. Confucius once advocated "great harmony with the world". Sun Yat-sen carried forward the concept of "the world for the common good"，and he absorbed the "universal ideas" of Western socialists. The idea of "world government" was formed in recent times. It was the ideal of our sages to organize a "union of sovereign states" to jointly maintain peace and eliminate war. This article is just to sort out the idea of the unity of the world, without any practical suggestions. This is a theoretical idea, not a practical one. Chinese scholars in modern times studied western ideas and then used them to examine Chinese classics to find new ideas. By combing through old papers, they gained a lot and were able to enlighten the people. We should have a grand vision, facing the world more advanced thinkers broad spirit.

A European road to socialism? The P.C.I., the E.E.C. and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War

ABSTRACT After years of struggling both on domestic and international scenario, during the late 1980s the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) promoted an ambitious European agenda, aiming at ‘overcoming’ the bloc policy and recomposing European unity, following Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘Common European Home’ project. Thus, the P.C.I. intensified its diplomatic efforts towards both the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) and Central and Eastern Europe (C.E.E.) countries, proposing itself as a link between the Western Socialists and the most change-oriented Communist parties towards a renewed and unified ‘European Left’. During the 18th Party Congress, held in March 1989, the P.C.I. launched the ‘European Road to Socialism’, supporting European integration as the only possible way to maintain the social achievements of the workers’ movement. The sudden transition of Central and Eastern Europe countries towards a Western-style market economy stopped this project, accelerating the P.C.I.’s own transition towards post-Communism.

‘No automation must be achieved without improving living standards’. The British Labour Party, the Italian Socialist Party and the German Social Democratic Party during the postwar technological revolution

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the connection between Western socialist parties and technological development during the 1950s. The cases of the British Labour Party (LP), the German Social Democracy (SPD), and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) let us to examine socialist perspectives in managing technological progress and in conceiving programmes and purposes on scientific research. This choice allows to understand two different aspects: on the one hand, the new pragmatism of socialist and social democratic parties, which was a typical trait of Postwar's socialist revisionism; on the other hand, the predominance assumed by domestic affairs in socialists’ vision, instead international topics. A very specific choice concerns the article's main focus. A large historiographical dispute has started to trace about Postwar Social Democracy's revisionism. Given such historiographical debate, this article firstly explores the behaviour and politics of the LP, the SPD, and the PSI about the the so-called modernization, a process which concerned the entire Postwar Europe. It also discusses programmes or ideas circulations about the 1950s ‘technological revolution’ and the agendas settled by socialist and social democratic parties to govern such global phenomena.

Milovan Đilas and the British Labour Party, 1950-1960

The article deals with Milovan Đilas’ political transformation presented through an analysis of his connections with the British Labourites, and with the reaction of the Labour Party to the Đilas Affair. After the dispute with the Cominform, Yugoslav leaders tried to initiate alternative international contacts through Western socialist and social democratic parties, considering the most suitable partner the British Labour Party. Official contacts with the latter were established in 1950, the key role in the dialogue with the British Labourites played by the head of the Commission for International Relations, Milovan Đilas. In the aftermath of the Đilas Affair, the once warm relations between the British Labourites and Yugoslav Communists grew rather cool, but the leadership of the Labour Party did not wish to compromise their relations with Yugoslavia, and therefore reacted to it with considerable wariness. Although Yugoslavia remained an authoritarian state under the leadership of the Communist Party, in the eyes of the West it continued to represent a significant factor in the destabilisation of the Eastern Bloc, and the friendly relationship between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav Communists were primarily based on foreign policy interests of the two parties. In the second half of the 1950s, the relationship between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav Communists rested, even more than before, on pragmatic geopolitical consideration and not on ideological affinity; the interest of the British Labourites in the Yugoslav self-management experiment decreased significantly, as did the Yugoslav interest in democratic socialism, the idea that Đilas was so passionate about.

GEORGE PADMORE AND THE SOVIET MODEL OF THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH

This article argues for an appreciation of the permeability of the Western socialist and black radical traditions and a recognition of their codevelopment. This relationship is illustrated through an analysis of George Padmore's intellectual history, particularly focusing on How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire (1946), in which Padmore applied Marxist ideas to his project of colonial liberation. The book functions as Padmore's manifesto for the transformation of the British Empire into a socialist federation following the model of the Soviet Union. Through comparisons with the manifestos of British socialist F. A. Ridley and American pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois, this article contextualizes this manifesto within a moment of postwar internationalist optimism. This approach also facilitates a discussion of the meaning of “pan-Africanism” to Padmore, concluding that pan-Africanism was, for him, a methodology through which colonial liberation, and eventually world socialism, could be achieved.

Kaddish for Che

Kaddish for Che

Eisler's Notes on Hollywood and the Film Music Project, 1935-42

In 1947, Hanns Eisler in collaboration with Theodor Adorno published a small but important book entitled Composing for the Films. The book represents a significant contribution to film studies, cultural criticism, and the discipline of twentieth-century musical practice. It also provides one of the few extended historical texts from the 1940s that deconstructs Hollywood musical practice while probing the wider theoretical implications of motion picture music. The gestation of Composing for the Films, however, remains controversial. (1) Although I shall treat this and the book's politically tangled publication history elsewhere, this article seeks to address one aspect of the book's intellectual foundation--that is, Eisler's theoretical and aesthetic notions about film music in relation to Hollywood's film industry. Eisler's direct exposure and reaction to Hollywood musical practices began in 1935 during his first trip to the United States, and continued in 1938 when he returned as an emigre and embarked on the Film Music Project (1940-42, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation). Since 1927, Eisler had been deeply interested in film music. As a committed Marxist, he saw film as a powerful political device to educate the proletariat and serve the revolutionary cause. In contrast to the modernist bourgeois ideals of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Eisler believed that music should be democratized and provide social meaning to a mass public. (2) Film music offered an outlet for the practical realization of these ideals, and Eisler quickly established himself as a critic and composer in the field from the earliest development of sound film onward, and brought a specialized knowledge and commitment to its practice. He involved himself intensively as a film composer, exploiting a wide range of musical approaches and applying many of the theoretical and aesthetic concepts that he, as a politically motivated musician, cultivated within an array of genres from documentary to commercial productions. Consequently, by the time he arrived in the United States in 1938, he was already considered a European expert and had accumulated a great deal of experience as a critic on the subject. "Hollywood Seen from the Left" In May 1935, Eisler was invited by the English parliamentarian Lord Marley to present a series of lectures in the United States in support of the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. (3) Organized in 1933 under the direction of Willi Munzenberg as a response to the burning of "objectionable" books in Germany and the suppression of intellectual activities by the Nazis, the Committee launched a propaganda campaign to appeal to a new constituency of socialist sympathizers worldwide. Munzenberg's control over this organization derived from his position as head of the Soviet Union's cultural propaganda apparatus abroad. His network of Communist Front organizations, including charities, publishing houses, newspapers, theaters, film studios, and cinema houses, attracted the participation of many illustrious intellectuals and artists like Eisler. For example, in 1934, Eisler and the playwright Bertolt Brecht published their Lieder, Gedichte, Chore with Editions du Carrefour, which had been a subsidiary of the Munzenberg Press since 1933. Eisler also wrote the score for Kuhle Wampe, a production of Munzenberg's Prometheus Films (McMeekin 2003:262-63; Betz 1982:121; Schoots 2000:79, 88). Munzenberg used popular media such as those described above to create bridges between the Soviet "proletarian" government and less doctrinaire Western socialists (McMeekin 2003:1). And by 1935, when the Soviet Union officially shifted its policy from a United to a more inclusive Popular Front agenda that would have wider appeal to socialist intellectuals and artists, anti-fascism became the common political concern, a shared rallying call. (4) Consequently, the activities of the World Committee and in particular Eisler's tour mustered international support for Communism by exposing the terrors of Fascism. …

Eisler's Notes on Hollywood and the Film Music Project, 1935-42

In 1947, Hanns Eisler in collaboration with Theodor Adorno published a small but important book entitled Composing for the Films. The book represents a significant contribution to film studies, cultural criticism, and the discipline of twentieth-century musical practice. It also provides one of the few extended historical texts from the 1940s that deconstructs musical practice while probing the wider theoretical implications of motion picture music. The gestation of Composing for the Films, however, remains controversial. (1) Although I shall treat this and the book's politically tangled publication history elsewhere, this article seeks to address one aspect of the book's intellectual foundation--that is, Eisler's theoretical and aesthetic notions about film music in relation to Hollywood's film industry. Eisler's direct exposure and reaction to musical practices began in 1935 during his first trip to the United States, and continued in 1938 when he returned as an emigre and embarked on the Film Music Project (1940-42, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation). Since 1927, Eisler had been deeply interested in film music. As a committed Marxist, he saw film as a powerful political device to educate the proletariat and serve the revolutionary cause. In contrast to the modernist bourgeois ideals of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Eisler believed that music should be democratized and provide social meaning to a mass public. (2) Film music offered an outlet for the practical realization of these ideals, and Eisler quickly established himself as a critic and composer in the field from the earliest development of sound film onward, and brought a specialized knowledge and commitment to its practice. He involved himself intensively as a film composer, exploiting a wide range of musical approaches and applying many of the theoretical and aesthetic concepts that he, as a politically motivated musician, cultivated within an array of genres from documentary to commercial productions. Consequently, by the time he arrived in the United States in 1938, he was already considered a European expert and had accumulated a great deal of experience as a critic on the subject. Hollywood Seen from the Left In May 1935, Eisler was invited by the English parliamentarian Lord Marley to present a series of lectures in the United States in support of the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. (3) Organized in 1933 under the direction of Willi Munzenberg as a response to the burning of objectionable books in Germany and the suppression of intellectual activities by the Nazis, the Committee launched a propaganda campaign to appeal to a new constituency of socialist sympathizers worldwide. Munzenberg's control over this organization derived from his position as head of the Soviet Union's cultural propaganda apparatus abroad. His network of Communist Front organizations, including charities, publishing houses, newspapers, theaters, film studios, and cinema houses, attracted the participation of many illustrious intellectuals and artists like Eisler. For example, in 1934, Eisler and the playwright Bertolt Brecht published their Lieder, Gedichte, Chore with Editions du Carrefour, which had been a subsidiary of the Munzenberg Press since 1933. Eisler also wrote the score for Kuhle Wampe, a production of Munzenberg's Prometheus Films (McMeekin 2003:262-63; Betz 1982:121; Schoots 2000:79, 88). Munzenberg used popular media such as those described above to create bridges between the Soviet proletarian government and less doctrinaire Western socialists (McMeekin 2003:1). And by 1935, when the Soviet Union officially shifted its policy from a United to a more inclusive Popular Front agenda that would have wider appeal to socialist intellectuals and artists, anti-fascism became the common political concern, a shared rallying call. (4) Consequently, the activities of the World Committee and in particular Eisler's tour mustered international support for Communism by exposing the terrors of Fascism. …

Postscript: History as anthropology

Postscript: History as anthropology

Diverging Paths to Modernity: Socialism as an Intellectual Movement in the Nineteenth Century. A Comparative Approach

The article examines the introduction of socialist theory as part of the political modernity of the nineteenth century in three Balkan countries: Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. It discusses first the dialectics between the introduction of an ideology and its context of adaptation. Then it proposes to view the transportation and adaptation of ideologies as a dynamic process involving multiple strategies. Further, the article situates socialism among other ideologies of mass representation in the nineteenth century, establishes the temporal sequence in which they were introduced in the Balkan space and assesses their relationship to the broader project of constructing modernity. The fact that socialism could assert itself as an ideological option in the predominantly agrarian Balkan societies of the nineteenth century may appear at first glance paradoxical. The article thus examines the significance of socialism against the background of underdevelopment, and underlines the influence of intellectllals as the principal disseminators of ideology. It highlights the catalytic influence of Russian socialism in the 1870s and 80s (predominandy populism and, to a lesser extent, Marxism) on the early Balkan socialist movement, an influence that did not limit itself to intellectual fertilization, but was also instructive for the model of intelligentsia that was concomitantly adopted. It maps out the geographic contours of early socialism, pointing to the significance of Russian influence for the east-central Balkans (Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania), and traces these early itineraries of influence and networks of transfer. It singles out the case of Greece, which due to predominantly Western socialist influence was left unrouched by Russian radical thought. It discusses further the passage from the populist to the Marxist paradigm and the growing influence, of Western Marxism, exploring the diverse ramifications that the interplay between Populism, Marxian socialism, and agrarianism were to follow in each of these countries, and concludes with an assessment regarding broader legacies of intellecrual transfer in the Balkans.

From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 by André s> Liebich (review)

REVIEWS 355 regionalautonomy. What is certainis thathe accepted and cooperatedloyally with Masaryk'spolicy of including German parties and ministersin the I926 to 1929 coalition government which he headed. In the last months of his life he died in December I933-he was deeply worriedabout the dangers to his countryfromthe Nazi riseto power and believed that the Czechoslovak politicalsystemshouldbe alteredin a democraticsenseto meet those dangers. This shows that he had a broader view of politics than mere fixing or deal making and while ProfessorMiller mentions these views he failsto give them properconsideration. That said, this is an excellent biography. The difficultiesof research have been overcome; it is well written,free ofjargon, and a pleasureto read. It also has the merit of placing Czechoslovak agrarian politics in a comparative frameworkso as to point out clearly the differenceswith similar Croatian, Bulgarianand Polishpartiesof the same period. Above all this book succeeds in giving a clear portrait, both personal and political, of this elusive, sympatheticand remarkablefigureof inter-warCzechoslovakia. London TREVOR VAUGHAN THOMAS Liebich, Andr&.FromtheOtherShore.RussianSocialDemocracy after192I. Harvard Historical Studies, 125. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, I~997 (hardcover) and I999 (paperback). xii + 476 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?31.95; $19.95. IN 1922, after their party had been declared illegal and their newspapers closed down, several hundred Mensheviks left Russia carrying Soviet passports and $13.oo bound for Berlin for what they thought would be temporary exile. Grouped around their journal, Sotsialisticheskiivestnik, and guided by the Foreign Delegation of the RSDRP, they led reasonably productive lives aided by their German socialist comrades for the next decade. The rise of Hitler changed this and in February 1933 sixty-seven menmbersof the emigre colony, the vast majority of them Jewish, moved to Paris on visas obtained through the intercession of L&on Blum. Seven years later, with the fall of France imminent, the westward migration of the ageing and diminishing Mlenshevik 'family' continued this time to New York where old ties with the Jewish labour movement led to a new and last home for the wandering band. One is struck, not only by the legality and propitious timing of these three moves, but also with Menshev ik resilience and optimism in the face of adverse conditions. Unlike many political refugees, they did not give in to despondency even wvhenthe dream of returning to their homeland faded. Wherever they lived, they sought to maintain contacts with Russia, to keep alive a belief in a non-dictatorial form of social democracy, and to interpret events in the Soviet Unioni for the edification first of western socialists and later of North American academnics. Even though they quarrelled incessantly about doctrinal matters, past history and future prospects, they always looked after one another financially and otherwise. Andre Liebich, a professor of international history and politics at the Institute of International Studies in Geneva, has provided in the book under 356 SEER, 79, 2, 200 I review the firstdetailed scholarly account of these peregrinations.He writes with grace and remarkabledetachment. He is also to be commended for the clarity and organization which he has been able to impose on his fractious, complex and often disorganized subject. What could have been a tedious compendium of the slowly evolving Menshevikworld-view has instead been presented as an engaging 'collective biography' of the 'Menshevik family' (p. io), most notably Fedor and Lidia Dan, Raphael Abramovitch, Boris Nicolaevsky,BorisSapir, Solomon Schwarzand David Dallin. In recognition of these qualities, FromtheOther Shore recently received the FrankelPrize in ContemporaryHistoryawardedby the Wiener Library. Liebich has mined virtually every major archive in western Europe and North America. Not surprisingly,much of his materialcomes from the taped interviews, mimeographed reports and memoirs compiled by the InterUniversity Project on the History of Menshevism at Columbia University. The Nicolaevsky,Volskyand SouvarineCollections at the Hoover Institution have also been consultedalong with the holdingsof the InternationalInstitute of Social History in Amsterdam. One unusual source is FBI and CIA reports on aged Mensheviksliving in New Yorkwhich the authorobtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These provide both a touch of humour and a clear indication that police reportsin generalmustbe treatedwith the utmost caution. One investigatorconcluded that J. Martow'was actuallyFedorDan and thatthelatterwas a 'SocialRevolutionary'.Dan mighthavebeen working...

How to Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito¯: Colonialism and National Culture in the Borderlands

One of the most crucial questions facing leftist activists and intellectuals today is the question of nationalism and its relation to liberation struggles. 1 A century ago, the period [End Page 102] of nation-state consolidation in Europe seemed to come to an end with the unification of Germany and Italy. European leftists of the era tended to address "the national question" primarily with regard to those European nations that were shut out or suppressed by nation-state formation. Debates about national culture resurfaced in a revolutionary context when independence movements swept Africa and Asia during and after World War II, and a substantial body of literature attempting to integrate anticolonial struggle, national liberation, and socialism arose from the capitalist "periphery." Much of this literature, and the wars for independence out of which it grew, adapted the language of nationalism to its own purposes. These movements gave new hope that national liberation struggles would prove compatible with greater human freedom and equality. Despite that hope, the destructive effects of nationalism are today visible everywhere: for example, the devastating wars in the Balkans, the repression of indigenous peoples by national bourgeoisie throughout the Americas, religious-national strife between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, the vertiginous intensification of national chauvinism in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia. Simultaneously, and in the context of feminist criticisms of nationalism [see, for example, Chatterjee, Nation; Lutz et al.; Mosse], attempts to unite the struggle to liberate "the nation" from colonial or neocolonial domination with progressive struggles against capitalist exploitation and against sexual- and gender-based domination continue [see, for example, Trask]. In Latin America, anticapitalist struggles lauded by Western socialists regularly take the form of national liberation struggles, such as the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [Zapatist National Liberation Army]) in Mexico and the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional [Sandinist National Liberation Front]) in Nicaragua. Additionally, lesbian and gay activists and theorists in the United States have frequently sought to appropriate nationalist rhetoric even as black and Chicano nationalist movements have been on the decline [see, for example, Berlant and Freeman; Moraga 145-74].

Socialism, Capitalism, and Modernity

Socialism, Capitalism, and Modernity G.M. Tamás (bio) Western socialists who do not wish to be seen as apologists for tyranny may dispute whether "actually existing socialism" was socialism at all. Yet the parallels between Western democratic and Eastern revolutionary-despotic socialism are numerous enough to allow us to assert that socialism is one of the main strategies of modernity, indeed, the only one which is (or was) global. It is the only variant of modernity that East and West have in common; otherwise, the twain shall never meet. The communist parties of Europe were born out of impotent rage against the First World War. Reformist trade unions and social democratic parties had failed to keep the international proletariat from killing one another in the service of their respective capitalist-imperialist masters. Class solidarity melted in the heat of nationalist frenzy. Marxist leaders of the social democratic center had no moral theory of war. Revolutionary antimilitarism ("defeatism") turned against social democracy in three important respects: 1) The incipient communist movement led by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg refused to regard social equality as the main goal of the workers' movement, maintaining instead that the suppression of alienation was the true essence of socialist politics. Thus did the Zimmerwald-Kienthal revolutionaries break with the [End Page 60] idea of "working within the system" to achieve social justice and a better way of life for proletarians. They envisioned an immediate end to wage slavery and the division of labor as part of the revolution that would end all revolutions. 2) Because the proletarians themselves and their political representatives had proven unreliable, the "revolutionary subject" would henceforth be not the "empirical" working class itself, but rather the agent of its ideal essence as a class, the disciplined and self-conscious vanguard Party. 3) The liberal democratic illusion shared by the treacherous trade union leaders would be dispensed with, and Marx's vague notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" revitalized. The messianic-revolutionary writers of the 1920s (Aleksandr Blok, Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Andrei Bely, and others) captured the prevailing sense of anticipation of the Last Battle that would overturn all previous orders and mark the rise of a new breed of healthy young barbarians to replace the corrupt old gentlemen who had sacrificed the flower of Europe's youth to the imperial system handed down by the Congress of Vienna. This sense that nothing was ever to be the same gripped figures as disparate as Spengler and Lenin, Mussolini and Béa Kun, Hitler and Trotsky. For their generation there was but one reality: war, a view most admirably described by Ernst Jiinger, especially in his great essay Der Arbeiter. The skull beneath the skin of politics was armed force commanded by blind will. War was hated, but somehow expressed the truth of things. The ennui and disillusionment of the sad uniformed assassin made him ridicule any concept of law, any hope of liberty, any attempt to distinguish between naked power and legitimate authority. The veterans who had seen the ideals of liberal individualism die on the battlefields had very simple ideas about a just society. Justice was personified by the brave lieutenant who shared his tinned meat, his flask of brandy, and his bottle of aspirin with his men, and was ready as well to share their death in a long and meaningless war of attrition. In their view, the civilian world that had sat back peacefully while they bled in the stinking trenches deserved only contempt. This idea was shared by such Westerners as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Barbusse, Hans Carossa, Erich Maria Remarque—and John Maynard Keynes. The Bolshevik generation did not consist of Bolsheviks alone. All its members shared a disgust for what they saw as the sham ideals of liberal humanism, altruistic patriotism, and the like. A new society would have to be forged by disenchanted veterans, united by a common sense of betrayal; filled with distrust for individuality, conventional politics, conventional morality, and la patrie; and overcome by loathing for bankers, dukes, politicians, generals, poets, philosophers, and columnists. Thus did radical defeatism help to shape Bolshevism, a hostile new sibling to social democracy...

Functional Rights: Private, Public and Collective Property

That public ownership is a viable means to achieve the economic goals of a society has long been an article of faith among western socialists and social democrats. Yet the continuing obsession of a resurgent right with 'privatization', along with the recent demise of Stalinist economic regimes in eastern Europe, has thrown the question of the efficacy of public ownership into high relief. The democratic Left, responding to these and other pressures, has begun to question, if not abandon, its confidence in public enterprise as a means to deal with problems of distribution, development and economic responsibility.

The Technological Mystique and Third World Options

Western socialists have been inspired during the past 30 years by the emergence of third world liberation movements which offered new possibilities beyond the stale European-originated reality of the "socialist bloc." At the same time scientific and technological evolution has continued with fanfare and at a rapid pace. Countries trying to exercise new ideological options for development were led to evaluate this science which emanated from the old oppressors yet seemed essential to progress.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The first campaigns for birth control clinics in British Columbia.

In 1936 Dorothea Palmer, one of the hired representatives of A.R. Kaufman’s Parents’ Information Bureau, was tried for distributing birth control information to the women of Eastview, Ontario. Because of the public attention drawn to the trial it has become a commonplace notion that Kaufman — a conservative businessman — was the first Canadian to propagate birth control ideas. In fact, a decade earlier in British Columbia the Canadian Birth Control League was founded. This paper seeks to explain why birth control should have been first defended in Canada by western socialists.

Recovering Politics for Socialism: Two Responses to the Language of Community

AbstractSocialism is often defined in terms of “community,” or, as Professor John Wilson once put it, as a “society of friends.” Thus defined, it is contrasted with the competitive relations of bourgeois society. But in some recent theory and practice, political competition is taken to be a defining feature of a legitimate socialist order. The persistence of political institutions is thus stressed, both by Western socialist theorists and by reformers in Eastern and Central Europe, and the orthodox view that “state” is to be superseded by “community” is sharply rejected. These two critiques differ, however, in one major respect: for Western socialists, the state is to be legitimated by the principles of socialist rationality, while for many reformers of Eastern and Central Europe it is to be legitimated by political life itself. From this second point of view, neither “friendship” nor “rationality” responds to the tensions which a socialist polity, no less than any other, will face: for both these concepts, to the extent that they are taken to set pre-established norms, constrict the “space for political action, ” and thus remove the necessary conditions for legitimacy.

Socialist Impressions of Revolutionary Russia, 1920

AbstractThe response to the Bolshevik Revolution in Western Europe ranged from uncritical adulation, where Russia was viewed as a "red paradise," to bitter hostility, where the new regime was believed to be headed by mindless and heartless fanatics who were propagating fraticide and terror. Such conflicting convictions were formed without very much reliable information about revolutionary Russia, expecially after Soviet Russia left the war and was blockaded by the Allies. Expectably, the opinions that existed corresponded to political persuasion rather than copious evidence. It was not until mid-1920, after the war had ended and the blockade lifted, that westerners were able to observe revolutionary Russia in a more thorough and leisured fashion. Moreover, the Bolshevik regime had by this time assumed a more discernible character; after almost three years of rule, the Bolsheviks could more plausibly be charged with some responsibility for conditions in Russia. Of particular interest are the observations and experiences of those revolutionary western socialists who traveled to Russia at this time, representing parties or other groups that hoped in some way to link their efforts up with those of the Bolsheviks; to become, in other words, part of the communist movement, though they were uncertain what this would mean, and their relations with the Bolsheviks were still ambiguous. These socialists are particularly interesting because they were not yet committed, disciplined communists nor were they committed anticommunists, though they later became one or the other. Thus their impressions were relatively unclouded by pre-judgement or parti pris. They desired not only to observe the conditions of Russia after three years of social revolution but to meet the new rulers of Russia and to determine the prerequisites or conditions for membership in the Communist International, or Comintern, as it came to be called, which the Bolsheviks despite their blockaded isolation had established in the spring of 1919. The impressions of these early visitors can be pieced together into a fairly complete and vivid account through a variety of sources, including memoirs, diaries, stenographic accounts of public and private meetings in Russia, socialist newspaper reportage, and polemical pamphlets. Although obviously many frustrating lacunae remain, these accounts often complement one another, especially by comparing accounts from one foreign delegation to another. In this article I will concentrate on the overall impressions of western socialists as they traveled through Russia and met leading Bolsheviks. In a companion article, I will investigate the many surprises and disillusionments of these early visitors as they attempted to negotiate entry into the new International.

Entering the Comintern: Negotiations Between the Bolsheviks and Western Socialists at the Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920

Entering the Comintern: Negotiations Between the Bolsheviks and Western Socialists at the Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920