scholarly journals Polar Opposites? NGOs, Left Parties and the Fight for Social Change in Nepal

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 629-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feyzi Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
International Community ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Parliamentary System ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
Poor Peasant

In the early 1990s, when NGOs were rising to prominence as an ostensible force for social change in Nepal, the Maoists were also beginning to organise, and denounced NGOs as agents of imperialism. The Maoists came to prominence by fighting a People’s War launched in 1996, with the intention of improving life for the poor peasant and working-class majority. But after a decade-long struggle, the Maoists became incorporated into the parliamentary system. While Nepal’s first democratic revolution in 1990 met formal, popular political demands, which were consolidated in a subsequent revolution in 2006 overthrowing the monarchy and bringing the People’s War to an end, there was little socio-economic progress for the vast majority. The argument advanced in this article is that this lack of progress relied on the interplay of two phenomena: an anti-Maoist alliance consisting of the international community, the domestic ruling elite and NGOs, and a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the Maoists’ political theory.

Labour, Society and the Drink Question in Britain, 1918–1939

1987 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen G. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Working People ◽  
Progressive Reforms

The historiography of leisure has made considerable advances since the pioneering years of the early 1970s. Research into Victorian leisure has shown that some of the ruling elite attempted to fashion the life-style of working people in order to create a disciplined and reliable labour force which suited the needs of a maturing industrial and urban society, although it must be added that sections of the British public remained immune to attempts at moral reform and improvement. Professional labour leaders were also eager to control and regulate the amusements of the poor. According to trade union bosses like John Doherty, only a sober, industrious and thrifty working class could hope to achieve progressive reforms and some form of political and economic emancipation: workers who were intemperate would apparently stifle the opportunities and aspirations of the emerging Labour movement. Nowhere is this more true than in the Labour leadership's perception of and policy towards working-class drinking.

Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 129-171
Author(s):  
John Marot
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
Permanent Revolution

Lars Lih has contributed to our knowledge of Russian Social Democracy lately. However, serious methodological flaws bedevil this advance in knowledge. Lih’s overall approach displays a very static understanding of political ideas in relation to political movements. In the first section, ‘Lenin, the St Petersburg Bolshevik Leadership, and the 1905 Soviet’, I challenge Lih’s position that Lenin never changed his mind about bringing socialist consciousness into the working class ‘from without’. In the second section, ‘Lenin, “Old Bolshevism” and Permanent Revolution: The Soviets in 1917’, I challenge Lih’s revisionist view that Old Bolshevism’s pre-1917 goal of ‘democratic revolution to the end’ drove Lenin’s partisans to make a working-class, socialist revolution in 1917. On this singular account, Lenin’s April Theses, which called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the transfer of all power to the soviets, was merely a further expression of Old Bolshevik politics, not a break with it, as has almost universally been held.

The Paradox of Poverty: Socio-Economic Aspects of Population Growth.— By T. Scarlett Epstein and Darrell Jackson. The Macmillan of India Limited Delhi, 1975. pp.127.

1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-382
Author(s):  
M. Javed Akbar Zaki
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Rural India ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Fertility Decision ◽  
The Social

To many social theoreticians, the population explosion, particularly in the developing nations presents a crippling threat to their developmental pro¬cesses. Their argument's validity rests mainly on the assumption that expected economic progress is swallowed up by unbalanced rise of numbers in the population. The book being reviewed deals mainly with this subject matter and is divided into two parts, each containing three articles contributed by various researchers. Part one, 'The Social context of Fertility Decision' is focused on analyzing the role of factors affecting fertility at the micro-level decision making process. The first article 'Fertility decision in rural India' by Vinod Jainath, examines the applicability to rural India of various models of the process of fertility decision making and finds most of these wanting with respect to the Indian social situation. While analyzing the fertility patterns of Rural India, he points out the positive need for larger families among the poor small farmers mainly due to labour supply considerations. The author argues that unemployment and under¬employment actually motivate the poor to have more children as it better ensures their economic security in their old age. As the chances of gaining employ¬ment for their offspring diminish, they are induced to increase the total number of children in order that atleast one will be able to support them. Thus a vicious circle of poverty arises in large families because of each of the parents wanting to increase their children's chances of employment by ultimately reducing the overall employment opportunities even further and exacerbating their poverty.

Abdullah Quilliam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Legal Advisor ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

Mary Barton

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Community

‘It's the masters as has wrought this woe; it's the masters as should pay for it.’ Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

Richard Whately and political economy in school books, 1833-80

1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Goldstrom
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Richard Whately ◽  
School Books

Throughout the nineteenth century, books, pamphlets and periodicals offered widely-ranging advice to the working class. One theme, appearing about 1820, was political economy: ‘Next to religion’, a royal commission reported, ‘the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes’. And Richard Whately, former Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, now archbishop of Dublin, urged similarly the need to teach political economy to the poor : ‘The lower orders’, he said, ‘would not … be, as now, liable to the misleading of every designing demagogue … If they were well grounded in the outlines of the science, it would go further towards rendering them provident, than any other scheme that could be devised.’

scholarly journals Making Rebels: The New Zealand Socialist Party, 1901-1913

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Dunick
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Political Factor ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
National Organisation

<p>The New Zealand Socialist Party (NZSP) was the first radical socialist party in this country. The decade in which it existed was a time of rapid social change. The NZSP began in 1901 as a reaction against the Liberal Party which dominated New Zealand politics at the time. In its first five years the party had two main branches in Wellington and Christchurch, but it grew rapidly after 1907 with the expansion of industrial unionism. The NZSP was overshadowed by the Federation of Labour and never developed a coherent national organisation. As the working class began to organise nationally to challenge the Massey Government, the NZSP failed to adapt to the new political situation and dissolved in 1913.  The party began as a group of marginal outsiders, but as society changed and class became an important political factor, the NZSP played an important role in spreading new ideas and educating a generation of socialists. When the NZSP ended in 1913 the ideas it had promoted were widely accepted among New Zealand’s organised working class.</p>

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