Chapter Four Political Leadership and Working-Class Agency in the Russian Revolution: Reply to William G. Rosenberg and S.A. Smith

2012 ◽  
pp. 166-180
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Russian Revolution

Rejection of Radical Nationalism in Wartime Yugoslavia: The Case of Tuzla (1990–1995)

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-69
Author(s):  
Goran Filic
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Municipal Elections ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
The City ◽  
Radical Nationalism

The article identifies causal mechanisms that help explain why the city of Tuzla managed to reject and avoid inter-ethnic conflict and radical nationalism during the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Despite the overwhelming odds of being surrounded by vicious ethnic fighting and relentless nationalist attacks, the city of Tuzla protected and sustained peace in its borders. This research provides some explanations as to why Tuzla managed to survive radical nationalism and fragmentation during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The article concludes that Tuzla's success was path dependent and its ability to reject violent nationalism revolved around Tuzla's identity of traditionally working class, anti-nationalist, anti-fascist forces around which Tuzla's citizens rallied. This helped elect the only non-ethnic political leadership in the country during the first multiparty municipal elections, and also actively protected citizens’ democratic choice against nationalist attempts to foster ethnic mobilisation and ethnic violence.

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.

Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923

Signs ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Evans Clements
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Peasant Women

The Sorrow of a City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice J. Hobson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
National Convention

Chapter Three focuses on the tumultuous episode where Atlanta’s most vulnerable citizens, primarily poor black children, were being hunted and murdered. To clarify this, chapter three explores the experience of the victims’ families through oral interviews, the FBI papers, and archival research to show how the popular political sentiment of Atlanta’s black working classes and poor towards Atlanta’s black City Hall was one of distrust that thwarts the black Mecca image. Crucial to understanding the Atlanta Child Murders again notes that the prism of race was not the only lens to better understanding this convoluted community, but that class stratification within black Atlanta(s) are lucid. The Atlanta Child Murders provide a unique counter-narrative on class to Atlanta’s black Mecca status, as victims who were poor black youth were labeled and dismissed as “hustlers and runaways” in effect suggesting that they deserved what happened to them. Chapter three accounts for the experiences of the Committee to Stop Children’s Murder (STOP Committee) and the Techwood Bat Patrol, organizations formed by some of Atlanta’s black working class and poor as they deemed it necessary to organize against the murderers because to them, Jackson was too busy bolstering the black Mecca image while sacrificing Atlanta’s poor to play politics. This chapter grapples with the idea that at this time, Atlanta’s black political leadership was already working with Atlanta’s white business elite to host the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the 1996 Olympic Games. As a result, it was widely believed by a large segment of the public that Atlanta’s black City Administration downplayed the murders to show that social and economic progress had been made in the South and thus promoting a “city too busy to hate.” Just as important, many in black Atlanta felt that Williams was not the killer and that another killer remained on the loose.

Jewish Workers Meet the Russian Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
Faith Hillis
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Russian Politics

This chapter treats Europe’s Russian colonies as a crucial locus of Jewish emancipation. It explores how professional revolutionaries—both Jews and non-Jews—made contact with Yiddish-speaking Jewish workers abroad, integrating the latter into the radical networks centered in the colonies. In the process, many Jewish proletarians became radicalized and more engaged in Russian politics than ever before. The exchanges between Russified intellectuals and working-class Jews in emigration created a new style of revolutionary politics from the bottom up that was sensitive to the special experiences and needs of Jewish workers yet sought to marshal these particularities for the cause of universal emancipation. The chapter closes with an exploration of how émigré networks transported the new political styles developed abroad back to Russia and examines the role that exile politics played in the creation of the Bund, an event usually understood as purely domestic in origin.

World War I and its Aftermath

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Kirk
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Labor Party ◽  
The Face

The final chapter considers the ways in which Mann’s and Ross’s commitments to labour-movement unity and wider working-class solidarity fared in the face of the highly divisive issues of war, militarism, imperialism, peace, patriotism, loyalism, internationalism, conscription, revolution and counter-revolution surrounding the period of World War One and its aftermath. It shows that while Mann and Ross continued to preach peace, opposition to the ‘imperialist’ war and conscription, Ross was far more active and outspoken in his anti-war activities than Mann and as a consequence suffered imprisonment and declining health. The pacifism of Ross, indeed, is to be contrasted with Mann’s commitment to taking the war to a successful conclusion against ‘Prussianism’. In 1917 both Mann and Ross welcomed the ‘emancipatory’ Russian Revolution and staunchly opposed the politics of counter-revolution and ‘loyalism’. Yet while Mann embraced communism, Ross found a home in the radicalised Australian Labor Party and rejected the Bolshevik model for democratic Australia. The case of Mann and Ross casts important new light upon the general issues of labour’s and workers’ attitudes to war and peace, revolution and reaction, patriotism and loyalism and communism and social democracy.

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.

How Not To Write About Lenin

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
John Molyneux
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
National Scale ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Near Misses ◽  
Hungarian Revolution ◽  
Capitalist State ◽  
Time Discount

AbstractEighty one years on, the Russian Revolution remains an event of unique significance for socialists, Marxists and historical materialists. It is the only occasion to date of which it can plausibly be claimed that the working class itself overthrew the capitalist state, established its own power and maintained it on a national scale for a significant period of time. Discount the Russian Revolution and we are left only with heroic but local and short-lived attempts and near-misses such as the Paris Commune, the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, the Munich Soviet and Barcelona 1936, or the long list of seizures of power, usually by armed forces of one sort or another, in the name of the working class or Marxism (Eastern Europe 1945–47, China 1949, Cuba 1959, etc.).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document