Communism,Heritage and Tourism in East Asia

This study examines the linkages which connect Communism, heritage and tourism with reference to selected East Asian states which are governed by Communist regimes or have recent experience of Communist rule. Aspects of the heritage of Communism are seen to be of interest to tourists, but related visitor attractions also have a wider social and political significance and illustrate how tourism can be employed as a hegemonic tool and propaganda vehicle. Heritage, including that of Communism itself, thus serves as economic, social and political capital within a Communist context where the defining characteristics of government give rise to a distinctive relationship between political systems, heritage and tourism.     

East End immigrants and the battle for housing: a comparative study of political mobilisation in the Jewish and Bengali communities

Twice in the recent history of the East End of London, the fight for decent housing has become part of a bigger political battle. These two very different struggles are representative of two important periods in radical politics – the class politics, tempered by Popular Frontism, that operated in the 1930s, and the new social movement politics of the seventies. In the rent strikes of the 1930s the ultimate goal was Communism. Although the local Party was disproportionately Jewish, Communist theory required an outward looking orientation that embraced the whole of the working class. In the squatting movement of the 1970s political organisers attempted to steer the Bengalis onto the path of black radicalism, championing separate organisation and turning the community inwards. An examination of the implementation and consequences of these different movements can help us to understand the possibilities and problems for the transformation of grass-roots activism into a broader political force, and the processes of political mobilisation of ethnic minority groups.     

Albania's Road from Communism: Political and Social Change, 1990–1993

Until the late 1980s, Albania was one of the least known countries in the world and virtually inaccessible to foreigners. Most studies on Eastern Europe lacked reliable and complete information about Albania; it was usually either mentioned as the smallest and the least developed country of Europe or totally ignored. For their part, Albanian scholars have made little contribution, if any, to analysing their society under Hoxha's Communist regime. As with all totalitarian systems, Albania's Communism was immune to criticism for almost forty-five years, and information on domestic issues was tightly controlled. This article aims to throw some light on and to systematically analyse Albania's road from Communism. The country's inherited social, political, cultural, and economic conditions have made Albania's move from Communism the most difficult and convulsive of all the East European countries. They are also likely to put considerable obstacles in the path of establishing a true democracy, making Albania's post-Communist transition highly uncertain.     

Murphy's Moral Economy of Labor

Abstract

Throughout its history, the institution of the Catholic Church has been at odds with the social and political changes of modernity. However, many scholars claim that after Vatican II, the Church began to accept modernity's political regnancy, and subsequently embraced doctrines such as separation of Church and State and religious freedom. In fact, some scholars go so far as to claim that in recent decades, the Catholic Church has led political crusades that resulted in the political, economic, and social liberation of many, such as its spearhead movement against Communist countries and the liberation theology movements in Latin America. The purpose of this article is not only to examine such claims but to look more closely at the political implications of the thought of Pope Benedict XVI. I propose that Benedict XVI does not simply embrace modernity, but he challenges it from within and presents political society with an alternative foundation for political liberalism. To this effect, I examine the main tenets of his social thought, including his political anthropology and concept of personhood, his idea of secularity, and his understanding of the role of political institutions. I assess whether his ideas can be universally accepted by liberal, secular societies or whether the character of these ideas will appeal only to those who embrace Christianity.     

论民主党派在中国政治现代化进程中的历史作用

现代化是人类社会发展的历史必然,政治现代化则是整个现代化运动的重要方面。在改革开放以来中国政治现代化的进程中,共产党时政治现代化建设的领导是由中国政治发展的历史和现实所决定的。我国实行中国共产党领导的多党合作和政治协商制度,这一制度下的民主党派作为参政党,在中国政治现代化进程中发挥着独特而重要的作用。     

The Dark Sides of Social Policy: From Neoliberalism to Resurgent Right-wing Populism

This Forum Debate explores the confluence of neoliberal, populist, conservative and reactionary influences on contemporary ideologies and practices of social policy, with a focus on the poorer peripheries of global capitalism. Several fundamental tensions are highlighted, which are largely overlooked by the social policy and development literatures. First, many recent social policy innovations have been discredited by their association with neoliberalism. The rising political Right has been much more successful than the Left at exploiting this discontent, despite simultaneously deepening many aspects of neoliberalism once in power. At the same time, right-wing movements have proactively used social policy as a political tool to fashion the social order along lines deemed amenable for their interests and ideologies, expressed along nationalist, racialized, ethnicized, nativist, religious, patriarchal or other lines, and to innovate practices of segregation, exclusion and subordination. While these synergies of neoliberal and right-wing populism are observed globally, they need to be carefully and differentially interpreted from the perspective of late industrializing (or late welfare state) peripheral countries. Nonetheless, common themes occurring across both centres and peripheries, as identified by the invited contributions to this Debate section, include exclusionary identity politics, hierarchical and subordinating inclusions, and patriarchal familialism. In this context, segregationism is an ominous possibility of post-neoliberal social policy.     

Enemy of the people: Simmel,Ibsen, and the Civic legacy of Nietzschean sociology

The fall of Communism continued an ongoing weakening of Marxist ideology, which had been hegemonic among the European Left since the Great War. While the decline of Marxist thought can be justly seen negatively as the historical correlative of globalization, this decline has also produced cultural space for a re-evaluation of non-Marxist critiques of capitalist civilization. One example of a powerful non-Marxist critique of capitalist civilization is Georg Simmel's sociology of money culture. Before turning to Simmel's radical critique, this essay explains how Simmel came to be viewed as a conservative. Simmel's presumed conservatism is challenged via a re-examination of the civic implications of his Nietzschean sociology. A central question is whether Simmel's ethical individualism is conservative. This question is finally answered through an analysis of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. The choice of Ibsen is not random, for it amplifies the close ethical and historical affinity of Naturalist drama and Simmel's philosophy.     

Child forced labour: an analysis of ego documents throughout time

This article centralises a unique collection of ego documents created under Communism in which Polish former child forced labourers articulate their war experiences. A comparative analysis of them with recent testimonies reveals that these ego documents offer a more nuanced depiction of Germans and display richer information on the specific working conditions and daily routine for children than the contemporary ones. A comparative reading of the archival testimonies with their published equivalents shows how the streamlining of a publicly acceptable version of the past under Communism went both ways, that is, at times foregrounding the propaganda content of autobiographical wordings, but also at other moments downplaying this element. The collection increases our understanding of child forced labour experiences during the Second World War, specifically the ways in which children perceived that experience, and offers insights into the negotiated appropriation of Communist ideology at the individual level.     

Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander’s 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers’ relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers’ personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.     

Panchayati Raj in West Bengal: Popular Participation for the People or the Party?

Since 1978 the Left Front government in West Bengal, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — CPI(M) — has pursued a strategy of decentralized planning through locally elected panchayats (councils) in the countryside. The stated ideological commitment of the CP1(M) is to support and eventually empower the poor and oppressed and this has resulted in Panchayati Raj assuming the status of not just a state sponsored decentralization strategy, but the institutional forum for the mobilization of the poor and the expansion of the party's base. However the CPI(M)'s strategy is to some extent ambiguous in that it combines a need to maintain an electoral status as a party leading a state government within the Indian Union and a political status as a party promoting the conditions for, and the transition to, a people's democracy and thereby socialism.     

Modernity and its Discontents: On the Durability of Nationalism in the Arab Middle East

Abstract. Because many area experts studying the Arab Middle East commonly credit assumptions about nationalism that have, for the most part, been abandoned by their colleagues working in other parts of the globe, they assert that nationalist sentiment in the region has declined, either as a result of a series of political shocks or as the result of competition from other ideologies (such as Islamism). However, popular forms of nationalism not only have strong roots in the region, they have been continually reinforced over time. As a result, the current popular support for Islamism cannot be taken as a sign that nationalist sentiments are on the decline, particularly in light of the fact that Islamic movements share with nationalism a number of significant attributes.     

Labour internationalism and the public sector: The case of the Public Services International

This paper sets out the need to conceptualise labour internationalism in the public sector, given its distinct political character and orientation. Our analysis adds to a literature on labour internationalism that hitherto has mainly depicted strategies of unions in private sector industries. To better understand the reasons for upscaling trade union efforts in a sector where the main employer remains the institutional apparatus of the nation-state, we have interviewed office bearers in the most important global union federation organising across different public services – Public Services International (PSI) – asking them to explain their political and strategic considerations. We find that the distinct role of the nation state as an employer, the public character of work and specific relations between public sector workers and the users of services, are all determinants in shaping labour transnationalism in the public sector. This in turn leads to a greater emphasis on alliances with social movements and oppositional campaigns, representing a radical global political unionism. Neoliberal austerity and privatisation measures have reinforced the importance of such political relationships and power, but also challenged their organisational foundations. However, alliance-building is not PSI's sole strategy. We find that office bearers at the transnational level combines three strategic rationales through orientations that we have labelled the political-institutional, the movement-popular and the industrial-corporate. We also suggest that employing these sensitising concepts can bolster the scholarly treatment of understanding labour internationalism and its strategy repertoires more generally.     

The evolution of the Chinese Communist Party's policy on the bourgeoisie (1949–1952)

From its very beginning, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a shifting policy towards the bourgeoisie. Until the early 1940s, it maintained a relatively stable policy which successfully isolated the monied classes in China and helped it overthrow the rule of the KMT. But with the establishment of the new regime, the CCP Central Committee came under conflicting pressures: on the one hand it continued its former policy out of political expediency; on the other hand, based on traditional socialist political theory and Soviet experience, it kept a close watch on the bourgeoisie and even proposed targeting them as the chief enemy of next revolution. After the establishment of the PRC, as a result of the failing economy and the new government's lack of economic support and political experience, the CCP firmed up its policies on the bourgeoisie. However, with the bourgeoisie and capitalism still prominent elements in Chinese society, the communists became uncertain about which direction to take. As the CCP Central Committee had anticipated, officials of both the party and the government often gave way to corruption after taking over major cities. The Central Committee regarded this particular combination of money and power as a “violent attack” against the new communist regime by the bourgeoisie as a whole. In order to tighten its grip on national power, the Central Committee launched two anti‐corruption movements known as the Three‐Antis and the Five‐Antis. These movements were in fact aimed at the bourgeoisie as a whole, and succeeded in destroying the basis for capitalist business in the New China. Encouraged by this outcome, the CCP launched a policy of socialist transformation aimed at depriving Chinese capitalists of their means of production. Thus the CCP gradually and inevitably moved away from its original policy of cooperation with the national bourgeoisie.     

Hopes,dreams and anxieties: India's one-child families

While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle class, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004–2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child. We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition.     

Discerning the New Africa

In his introduction and overview to this issue of International Affairs, Christopher Clapham takes a broad look at Africa's post-colonial past and the often impracticable inheritance bequeathed to it by the colonial powers. With reference to the articles in these pages, he assesses the decline in African statehood and the problems associated with projects of external governance. However, in looking to an uncertain future, he finds emerging from within Africa itself reforming leadership and new movements, which are proving hopeful in the search for political reform.     

‘History Has Begun a New Chapter’: US Political-Opinion Journals and the Outbreak of the Korean War

In the pages of the United States’ leading political-opinion journals, different ideological camps had very different answers to the issues raised by the outbreak of war in Korea in the summer of 1950. Left liberals placed a great deal of blame for the outbreak of war on South Korean President Syngman Rhee, while conservatives and hawkish liberals used the occasion to lambast President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson. Hawkish liberals welcomed the possibility of a global showdown with Communism, while conservatives disapproved of US intervention in Korea for reasons both political and constitutional. In sum, the debate that dominated the pages of US opinion journals in the first weeks and months of the Korean War was both heated and robust, and exposes the ideological fault lines of the early cold war. To wit, hawkish liberals held positions that anticipated the birth of neoconservatism some two decades later. And conservative voices utilised their newfound platforms in The Freeman and The American Mercury to attack the Truman administration on a whole host of foreign-policy issues, revealing in greater detail than has previously been shown the role that international affairs played in the birth of the New American Right.     

Men in upheaval: integrating Hong Kong politics and critical studies of men and masculinities

Abstract

In this short review, we explain the need for a multidimensional analytical framework for exploring how the construction of men and masculinities has shaped Hong Kong’s social and political development, and how politics both enable and constrain men in their lived experiences and practices in various life spheres at the city’s current political juncture. We observe that the majority of the extant research on men and masculinities in Hong Kong is depoliticized, whereas studies on current Hong Kong politics are largely gender-blind. However, the ever-tightening grip of the Chinese Communist Party and the instances of political resistance in response, namely, the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and Fishball Revolution of 2016, suggest that the influence of the wider political situation has penetrated every dimension of life, which has considerable implications for masculine identities and practices. Rather than continuing to conduct the depoliticized masculinity studies and genderless political studies we have seen to date, it is time for a thorough investigation of the dynamic intersection of men’s practices and the political context of Hong Kong.     

The Politics of Communist Biography: Alfred Kantorowicz and the Spanish Civil War

After the German communist author Alfred Kantorowicz's breakwith Communism in 1957, he was lionized by his supporters asan icon of humanism and antifascism, and vilified by his formerallies as a turncoat and traitor. In his autobiographical writings,Kantorowicz portrayed himself as a victim of Stalinism, whohad always been opposed to the authoritarian and repressiveaspects of Communism. Again and again he returned to his timein the International Brigades as a way of illustrating bothhis commitment to antifascism and the betrayal of grassrootsCommunism by the party leadership. But contemporary recordsreveal a more ambiguous picture: not only was Kantorowicz along-time functionary, he was also more involved in the repressiveaspects of Communism than he later cared to admit. This articleargues that, like many ex-Communist biographies of the ColdWar, Kantorowicz's memoirs are shot through with retrospectiveself-justification. Given his post-1957 loathing for Communism,he needed to explain why he had joined the party in the firstplace, and then remained an active member for twenty-five years.By organizing his life around the dichotomies of footsoldiersand functionaries, antifascism and Stalinism, and censorshipand truth, Kantorowicz was able to avoid discussing his ownculpability as a Communist functionary.