scholarly journals ‘L’antisémitisme est l’auxiliaire obligatoire du fascisme’: Jewish Communists, Antifascism and Antisemitism in France, 1944-1960s

Fascism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 75-97
Author(s):  
Zoé Grumberg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
French Nation ◽  
French Communist Party

Abstract This article studies the discursive construction by Jewish communists of the struggle against antisemitism in France between 1944 and the 1960s. It shows that after the Holocaust, without denying the racial aspect of Nazi antisemitism, Jewish communists adopted the French Communist Party and the ussr’s antifascist analysis of antisemitism according to which antisemitism was the corollary of fascism, a strategy to divide people and the working class. However, after the War, Jewish communists’ fight against antisemitism was also shaped by their experiences as Jews during the Holocaust, by their commitment to defend Jewish interests and by their desire to be (re)integrated into the French nation. The author argues that through a specific Jewish and communist antifascist fight against antisemitism, Jewish communists managed to remain faithful to their multiples allegiances – to Jews, to the pcf, and to French universalism – and to reach multiples audiences that identified, at least temporarily, with antifascism.

Camarades! La naissance du parti communiste en France, Romain Ducoulombier, Paris: Perrin, 2010

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 178-188
Author(s):  
Ian Birchall
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Precise Meaning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
French Communist Party ◽  
Ideological Context

AbstractRomain Ducoulombier, author ofCamarades!, a study of the origins of the French Communist Party, belongs to a different ideological context to earlier authors on the subject, such as Kriegel, Wohl or Robrieux. But though Ducoulombier claims originality for his work, there is little genuinely new here. He fails to grasp the impact of the Russian Revolution on the French working class and has little understanding of the dynamics of the Communist International. He stresses the ‘asceticism’ and ‘messianism’ of the early Communist Party without giving a precise meaning to these terms. Worst of all, Ducoulombier concentrates on archival material while saying remarkably little about the French Communist Party’s actual activities, notably work in the trade unions, anti-militarism and anti-colonialism.

Social Democracy in France

1955 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-545
Author(s):  
Charles A. Micaud
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Simple Explanation ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Many ◽  
French Communist Party

Ten years after the Liberation, the French Communist Party remains the strongest party in France. It can muster a quarter of the nation's votes and claim more “militants” than all other French parties put together. A majority of industrial workers continue to vote for the “party of the working class” even if they are reluctant to strike on its behalf. This persistent strength is both disturbing and puzzling. It is obviously a major source of weakness not only for French democracy, but for the effectiveness of the Western coalition. There is no simple explanation of the continued hold of Communism, since it is both the cause and the consequence of the many-faceted crisis of French society.

scholarly journals Women in Uruguayan Communism: Contradictions and Ambiguities, 1920s–1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 643-672
Author(s):  
GERARDO LEIBNER
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Leadership Positions ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Success

AbstractThis article examines the dynamics of women's participation in the Communist Party of Uruguay (PCU) from the 1920s to the 1960s. Despite its commitment to women's emancipation and to equality between men and women, the PCU's attitudes towards gender equality were often contradictory and its messages were ambiguous. Though it promoted women's participation, the Party oscillated between seeking to overcome social prejudices, upholding principled and dogmatic positions, and accommodating the conservative habits prevalent among the working class. Women were encouraged to take part in activities but not to assume leadership positions. The 1960s, ironically a period characterised by openness and political success, was a decade of regression in gender equality that stood in contrast to the Uruguayan Communists' long trajectory concerning women's rights.

From Moscow to Vichy: Three Working-Class Militants and the French Communist Party, 1920–1940

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean McMeekin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
French Politics ◽  
Vichy Regime ◽  
French Communist Party

‘From Moscow to Vichy’ chronicles the political trajectory of Jules Teulade, Albert Vassart and Henri Barbé, three French labour militants of modest origins who were rapidly whisked into the top ranks of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the early 1920s, but later fell out of favour with Moscow just as the PCF entered its halycon years in the mid-to-late 1930s. Each of them, though for different reasons, turned against their former Russian patrons so violently that political participation in the ‘anti-Communist’ Vichy regime became thinkable. An examination of their unpublished memoirs – long ignored by Gaullist and communist historians, to whom the recollections of ex-Communist Vichy ‘collaborators’ gave little comfort – reveals both the powerful allure the Russian Revolution had for its earliest devotees, and the profound disillusionment that could result for working-class Communists who saw their faith in Moscow betrayed. In their stories, and those of others like them, we can discern something of the devastating fallout of Moscow's invasion of French politics between the two world wars.

Isabelle Garo and the Provincialism of French Marxism and Anti-Marxism

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 220-236
Author(s):  
Andrew Ryder
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Marxist Tradition ◽  
French Communist Party

Isabelle Garo’s study,Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx: La politique dans la philosophie, presents a historical approach to the French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s and its relationship to Marx and the Marxist tradition. In her view, these authors were captured by a largely mistaken understanding of the resources present in Marxist thought, and were overly affected by the prejudices instilled by the French Communist Party. Speaking from a perspective of practical commitment, she traces a path from early French Marxism to an anti-totalitarian consensus. Her study renders Louis Althusser’s innovations the most pivotal in introducing a whole series of themes, with ambivalent effects on theoretical production today. Most significantly, she discerns a replacement of politics and political economy by philosophy and epistemology. She attends first to the mobilisation of psychoanalysis against humanism, which gave way to a vehement critique of the normative aspects of psychoanalysis itself. Re-reading Foucault and Deleuze as post-Althusserians, Garo suggests that this led to a championing of Friedrich Nietzsche’s viewpoints against Marx. Garo’s study is immensely valuable in contextualising the apparent innovations of poststructuralist thought. However, we can discern greater relevance for the insights of these thinkers for contemporary Marxist thought than Garo concedes, and her attempt to read them as a complete deviation from Marxist principles ultimately fails to convince.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

Nation, Locality and Radical Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Political Left ◽  
National Model ◽  
Selection Of

Concentrating upon the years between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, which separated the first and second minority Labour governments, this chapter traces the rise of a modernised, national vision of Labour politics in Scotland. It considers first the reworking of understandings of sovereignty within the Labour movement, as the autonomy enjoyed by provincial trades councils was circumscribed, and notions of Labour as a confederation of working-class bodies, which could in places include the Communist Party, were replaced by a more hierarchical, national model. The electoral consequences of this shift are then considered, as greater central control was exercised over the selection of parliamentary candidates and the conduct of election campaigns. This chapter presents a study of the changing horizons of the political left in inter-war Scotland, analysing the declining importance of locality in the construction of radical political identities.

Remembering the Past/Anticipating the Future: A Professor From the White Working Class Talks With a Survivor of the Holocaust About Our Troubled World

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Ellis ◽  
Jerry Rawicki
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Collaborative Writing ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Shed Light

This article extends the research of Jerry Rawicki and Carolyn Ellis who have collaborated for more than eight years on memories and consequences of the Holocaust. Focusing on Jerry’s memories of his experience during the Holocaust, they present dialogues that took place during five recorded interviews and follow-up conversations that reflect on the similarity of Hitler’s seizing of power in the 1930s to the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. Noting how issues of class and race were taking an increasingly prominent role in their conversations and collaborative writing, they also begin to examine discontent in the rural, White working class and Carolyn’s socialization within that community. These dialogues and reflections seek to shed light on the current political climate in America as Carolyn and Jerry struggle to cope with their fears and envision a hopeful path forward for their country.

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