Suchergebnisse

To understand the way in which Otherness is discursively constituted via conscious or unconscious self-interrogation, a reading is given of Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women (Barrows, Anita [Tr], London: Marion Boyars, 1977) -- a book inspired by the Chinese cultural revolution & Western feminism. Kristeva's text is read as an imaginative construction, located in time & space within a political economy of relations of race, class, & gender, & produced in accord with conventional rules of meaningful articulation. Kristeva's book is purposively self-reflexive, & at once a travelogue, ethnography, intellectual biography, & social scientific description. Her account of Chinese women expressly affirms the positive gains of the Chinese revolution, particularly of its social policies. It is concluded that Kristeva's text is problematic to the extent that the observer is both a women & a Western observer, which forces the uneasy conjunction of Orientalist & feminist frames within her text, & makes the construction of Chinese women as Others inevitable. W. Howard

In Chinese Communist literature, men and women are primarily seen in their likeness as workers rather than in their sexual and emotional unlikeness as human beings. Women, as much as men, are praised for their socialist zeal and heroic capacity for work and condemned for being socialist sluggards indifferent to production. But despite its repudiation of "human interest" as a symptom of capitalist or revisionist decadence, even this supremely practical literature cannot begin to exist without some superficial attention to personal problems, and these problems, inevitably, attest to the persistence of biological instincts and immemorial habits of human civilisation. Until the techniques, Communist or otherwise, for dehumanisation are perfected, men and women will remain subject to irrational passions, and if circumstances permit, they will fall in love, get married, bring up children, and in other devious ways contrive for pleasure and happiness. In tracing the lot of Chinese women under Communism, I will therefore take for granted that the primary purpose of their earthly existence is to contribute to and assist in production and examine rather their residual personal problems in the context of the overriding importance of socialist construction. The results of niy investigation, if my women characters, drawn invariably from short stories, are at all typical, will show, not surprisingly, the pathetic adjustment of their feminine instincts and interests to the jealous demands of Party and state. The exceptions that I will take notice of—sympathetic victims and challengers of the impersonal Communist bureaucracy—are all heroines of revisionist fiction that has been subject to vehement attack by the press.

In the past few years in China, as in some other socialist countries, the issue of legalizing private property has been put on the agenda. State property has traditionally attracted special attention of Chinese economists. The author takes a look at the theoretical studies and discussions on state, private and other types of property by Chinese economists. (DÜI-Sen)

Welsh devolution has not been adequately theorised. Following the narrow vote for Welsh devolution in 1997, many academics in Wales adopted a nakedly 'celebratory', uncritical view of devolution as a radical change to the British state, taking at face value the claim that it was designed to rejuvenate Welsh democracy. The power relations inherent to the transformation of the British state are rarely discussed in Wales. As a consequence, the developments which have occurred in Wales since devolution – political disengagement, the rise of the far right, the vote for Brexit – seem hard to grasp: it is simply presumed that something has 'gone wrong' with the application of devolution. This dominant way of thinking assumes that devolution was designed to 'work'. Using Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, this article argues that devolution to Wales (and Scotland) was a central plank of New Labour's transformation of both the Labour Party and the British state. Building on a reading of the post-war British state as a historic bloc, I draw attention to the power relations inherent in Welsh devolution and the 'top down' nature of the process, which was led by the Labour party in order to preserve its hegemony in Wales and the United Kingdom as a whole. After outlining the political struggles and strategies of transformismo which occurred within the process of passive revolution, where hegemony is temporarily 'thinned', I contend that contemporary Wales represents a period of interregnum, where the old world (the traditional centralised British state) has died, but a new Welsh state cannot be born. As Gramsci predicted, this has led to the emergence of a host of 'morbid symptoms' in Wales. I conclude by reflecting on the nature of the interregnum and whether 'restoration' or 'revolution' is likely to triumph in Wales.

Intro -- Introduction -- What Is Socialism? -- The Beginnings of Socialist Thought -- The Rise of the Industrial Working Class -- The Growth of Factory Towns -- Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Utopian Socialism -- Marx and Scientific Socialism -- Dialectical Materialism -- The Revolutions of 1848 -- Revolution in the German States -- Marx and Engels Write a Manifesto -- Capital -- Civil War in France -- Anarchism versus Marxism -- The Rise of Social Democracy -- Bernstein and Marxist Revisionism -- Syndicalism and Trade Unions -- Socialists in World War I -- The Beginning of the Russian Revolution -- Lenin and the Russian Revolution -- Socialism in Power -- The Third International -- Stalin versus Trotsky -- The Soviet Union Under Stalin -- Chinese Communism -- Mao and the Chinese Revolution -- The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution -- World War II -- The Cold War -- Alternatives to Stalinism -- The Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci -- Utopian Socialist Movements in Britain -- The British Labour Party -- Creation of the Welfare State -- The Scandinavian Model -- Thatcher and Privatization in the UK -- Socialism in the Developing World -- The Collapse of the Soviet Union -- Socialist Movements in the US -- From the IWW to the Palmer Raids -- From Depression to New Deal -- Senator Joseph McCarthy -- The Cuban Revolution -- Vietnam -- Socialism and the "New Left" -- Reaction -- Socialists and the Green Movement -- Socialism and the Future -- Photographs -- About the Author -- Index -- Copyright.

THIS ESSAY EXAMINES PARALLELS THAT HAVE MARKED THE COURSE OF ECONOMIC REFORM IN CHINA AND THE USSR. IT ARGUES THAT SOVIET REFORMERS HAVE INCREASINGLY COME TO ADMIRE AND EMULATE THE CHINESE MODEL. NOTED IS A STRIKING TREND TOWARD SYSTEMIC CONVERGENCE ALONG SEVERAL DEMENTIONS OF REFORM. IT ARGUES THAT NEITHER COUNTRY WILL BE SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY AT ANY TIME IN THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE.

How it differs from "capitalist" and "statist" medicine.

Based on recent ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this essay examines the revolutionary aesthetics of political meetings in a sociopolitical environment marked by the collapse of a national socialist ideology. Local political meetings in Mozambique articulate a paradoxical tension between sacrifice and revolution. While socialist rule disintegrated in the mid‐1980s, most local political meetings allow for the actualization of the revolutionary socialism which the governing Frelimo party was forced to sacrifice in order to remain in power. In the essay, it is thus examined how the enactment of a revolutionary aesthetics successfully exposes what Frelimo was incapable of realizing and thus momentarily captures the party's ideological legitimacy. Taking my inspiration from Roy Wagner's recent work on holography and invention, I explore the relationship between sacrifice and revolution as an articulation of a symmetrical 'twinning' of seemingly contrastive political principles that are held together by a singular political aesthetics that is actualized only at political meetings.