Politics for the Polyps

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Harris
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Marine Invertebrates ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Colonial Organisms

Daniel Harris, “Politics for the Polyps: The Compound Organism as a ‘Peculiar Form of Communism’ in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke and The Water-Babies” (pp. 64–88) Charles Kingsley’s novels and political writings are saturated with references to physiological processes in marine invertebrates. In particular, the forms of his novels take their inspiration from functional arrangements in colonial organisms such as corals, in which “individual” polyps are physiologically linked to their neighbors. Alton Locke (1851) and The Water-Babies (1863) attempt to explain the benefits of cooperative economic practices (e.g., the associative workshop) and the dangers of cooperative political practices (e.g., the Chartist mass meeting) by jettisoning British Enlightenment assumptions about personal identity. Instead, Kingsley’s novels use discontinuous and communal physiological processes in invertebrates, such as corals and jellyfish, as frameworks for representing psychological and political development. Ultimately, Kingsley seeks to intervene in mid-century debates about how to individuate members of the working class by suggesting that reformist measures must be grounded in a physiological understanding of individuation that contravenes psychological definitions of individuality.

A Legal Ethnography

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Dayan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
The South ◽  
Legal Fiction ◽  
Personal Rights ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The Law

This chapter examines how judges determined the character of slaves. In the South, the adaptation of Lockean notions of personal identity to slaves was inextricably bound up with the understanding of person as a forensic term and the kind of legal incapacity and nonrecognition that signaled negative personhood. Thomas Morris in Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619–1860 argues that the most crucial legal fiction was that “the slave was an object of property rights, he or she was a ‘thing’.” However, what most occupied the thoughts of lawyers and judges in cases about personal rights in the courts of Virginia on the eve of the civil war was not to affirm the slave as property, but to articulate the personhood of slaves in such a way that it was disfigured, not erased. Slave law depended on this juridical diminution. The peculiar form impairment took and the transformations that ensued gave new meaning to degradation.

Childhood

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-75
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Home Life ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter argues that it is impossible to understand the Kenneys’ politics without understanding their home life. It suggests that we need to see the Kenneys as a product of two related cultures: the tradition of autodidactism and the ‘religion of socialism’. Reading, Christianity, and socialism underpinned these cultures and help explain the sisters’ political trajectory. Though many women were drawn to feminist activism from particular strands of the labour movement, particularly the Independent Labour Party and the trade unions, these were not the only currents of thought which influenced women’s politics. The Kenneys’ childhoods not only give us access to working-class women’s political development outside the workplace but also begin to connect feminist militancy with a different political tradition.

scholarly journals Conspecific chemical cues drive density-dependent metabolic suppression independently of resource intake

2020 ◽  
Vol 223 (17) ◽  
pp. jeb224824
Author(s):  
Melanie K. Lovass ◽  
Dustin J. Marshall ◽  
Giulia Ghedini
Keyword(s):  
Metabolic Rate ◽  
Chemical Cues ◽  
Marine Invertebrates ◽  
Feeding Activity ◽  
Food Competition ◽  
Conspecific Density ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Metabolic Suppression ◽  
Metabolic Variation ◽  
Metabolic Reduction

ABSTRACTWithin species, individuals of the same size can vary substantially in their metabolic rate. One source of variation in metabolism is conspecific density – individuals in denser populations may have lower metabolism than those in sparser populations. However, the mechanisms through which conspecifics drive metabolic suppression remain unclear. Although food competition is a potential driver, other density-mediated factors could act independently or in combination to drive metabolic suppression, but these drivers have rarely been investigated. We used sessile marine invertebrates to test how food availability interacts with oxygen availability, water flow and chemical cues to affect metabolism. We show that conspecific chemical cues induce metabolic suppression independently of food and this metabolic reduction is associated with the downregulation of physiological processes rather than feeding activity. Conspecific cues should be considered when predicting metabolic variation and competitive outcomes as they are an important, but underexplored, source of variation in metabolic traits.

Franz Mehring and the Problems of Liberal Social Reform, in Bismarckian Germany 1884–90: The Origins of Radical Marxism

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-255
Author(s):  
Glen R. McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery R. Webber
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Political Development ◽  
The People ◽  
Analytical Imprecision ◽  
Urban Guerrillas ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Dual Power

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.

Miners and National Politics in Peru, 1900–1974

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Laite
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Processes

For much of the twentieth century the Peruvian working-class has been limited in size and divided between different groups with divergent political objectives. Successive Peruvian governments have been able to capitalize on these features in their attempts to control the working-class, directly regulating workers' organizations or playing off one group against another. Yet, despite these limits and divisions, workers have on several occasions staged general strikes and pressured governments into taking account of their demands. Consequently, the political development of sectors of the working-class at the local level has been closely affected by political processes at the national level.

Working-Class Interests and the Politics of Social Democratic Reform in Britain, 1900–1940

1991 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Cronin ◽  
Peter Weiler
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Property A ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

When nineteenth-century liberals searched for reasons not to enfranchise the lower orders, they most often hit upon the argument that, once given the vote, workers would use it to elect governments pledged to redistribution and welfare at the expense of property. A cursory look at the political history of the twentieth century suggests they were not entirely deluded. Indeed, the most salient facts about political development since 1900 surely are related: The democratization of the political system allowed for the emergence of the working class as a distinct claimant to political power, and its presence within the polity somehow or another stimulated the enormous extension of the social and economic role of the state.

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