Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979-90

Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979-90 PDF Author: H.F. Pimlott
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004503439
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Wars of Position analyses the UK left’s most public periodical under Thatcherism: Marxism Today. It connects the periodical’s political-ideological and cultural transformation via its relationship with the Communist Party, production, distribution, publicity, media relations, cultural coverage, design, and writing style.

Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979-90

Wars of Position? Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979-90 PDF Author: H.F. Pimlott
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004503439
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Wars of Position analyses the UK left’s most public periodical under Thatcherism: Marxism Today. It connects the periodical’s political-ideological and cultural transformation via its relationship with the Communist Party, production, distribution, publicity, media relations, cultural coverage, design, and writing style.

‘Preparing for Power’

‘Preparing for Power’ PDF Author: Jack Hepworth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135024239X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book employs a history of ideas approach to trace the complex journey of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and its afterlives. Although the RCP existed for barely two decades, it left a curiously lasting impact on British politics, and its legacies have provoked bewilderment, suspicion, and animosity. Formed as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1978, the RCP represented a distinct and often controversial offshoot of the Trotskyist left. Campaigning principally around 'unconditional support for Irish freedom' and anti-racism, RCP cadres expounded an independent revolutionary politics to supersede capitalism. In the 1990s, however, the RCP leadership ruefully declared that the working class had suffered an historic defeat, and the party dissolved in 1996. Combining wide-ranging archival research and twenty-four life-history interviews with former activists, Preparing for Power examines ideological continuity and change among the ex-RCP milieu. Explaining the party's key ideas, their evolution, and their retrospective contestation, Jack Hepworth analyses the RCP's trajectory in a broader political context. In doing so, Hepworth illuminates a network which has been the subject of considerable media sensation and polemical attention.

The Cultural Production of Social Movements

The Cultural Production of Social Movements PDF Author: Robert F. Carley
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031333136
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a theory of cultural practices, protest tactics, strategic planning and deliberation, and movement organizational structures: “ideological contention.” It is a theory of ideology “from below.” The Cultural Production of Social Movements shows how conflicts—both with external political forces and disagreements, dissensus, and the decision-making process internal to social movements—produce knowledge and meanings that, in turn, impact upon and change the practices that contribute to how social movements are structured and organized. The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the relationship between consciously held superordinate ideas, the changing composition of progressive and oppositional social struggles, and the social worlds they hope to inhabit. Analyzing the Black Panther Party, specifically Kathleen Cleaver’s break with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and her contributions to the Party, Operaismo (or Workerism) in Italy and the relationship between shifting organizational strategies, inventive tactics, and novel and expansive ways to theorize class struggles, and the communal composition of “Worker-Recovered Enterprise Movements” in contemporary Argentina, this book shows how movement ideologies change and how meanings structure organizations, mobilizations, and futures. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements ideology is neither a static set of principles, nor is an unconscious orientation towards power and governance. Rather, it is the contentious, democratizing, and deliberative processes—which become realized as tactics in protests, struggles, defeats, and victories—that makes the relationship between movements, and what they “mean” conscious to its participants.

Fight back

Fight back PDF Author: Subcultures Network
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847799604
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Fight back examines the different ways punk – as a youth/subculture – may provide space for political expression and action. Bringing together scholars from a range of academic disciplines (history, sociology, cultural studies, politics, English, music), it showcases innovative research into the diverse ways in which punk may be used and interpreted. The essays are concerned with three main themes: identity, locality and communication. These, in turn, cover subjects relating to questions of class, age and gender; the relationship between punk, locality and socio-political context; and the ways in which punk’s meaning has been expressed from within the subculture and reflected by the media. Jon Savage, the foremost commentator and curator of punk’s cultural legacy, provides an afterword on punk’s impact and dissemination from the 1970s to the present day.

The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media

The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media PDF Author: Chris Atton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317509404
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media provides an authoritative and comprehensive examination of the diverse forms, practices and philosophies of alternative and community media across the world. The volume offers a multiplicity of perspectives to examine the reasons why alternative and community media arise, how they develop in particular ways and in particular places, and how they can enrich our understanding of the broader media landscape and its place in society. The 50 chapters present a range of theoretical and methodological positions, and arguments to demonstrate the dynamic, challenging and innovative thinking around the subject; locating media theory and practice within the broader concerns of democracy, citizenship, social exclusion, race, class and gender. In addition to research from the UK, the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, the Companion also includes studies from Colombia, Haiti, India, South Korea and Zimbabwe, enabling international comparisons to be made and also allowing for the problematisation of traditional - often Western - approaches to media studies. By considering media practices across a range of cultures and communities, this collection is an ideal companion to the key issues and debates within alternative and community media.

Writing from the Left

Writing from the Left PDF Author: Alan M. Wald
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859849064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Discussion of fiction, poetry and cultural history is given central place in Wald's analysis. From this perspective he argues that the contemporary concerns of race, gender and culture have created a powerful new leftist critique. The book argues that that the left can draw strength by reconceptualizing its cultural legacy as a rich, diverse stream of political and cultural experiences flowing over six decades. It draws deeply on this tradition, highlighting its contemporary relevance. Alan Wald is the author of "James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years", "The Revolutionary Imagination", "The New York Intellectuals" and "The Responsibility of Intellectuals".

Left in the Past

Left in the Past PDF Author: Alastair Bonnett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0826430074
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
"Alastair Bonnett persuades us that the left can come to terms with nostalgia, because nostalgia---if the left did but realize it---is both a fact and an underutilized quality of leftist thought, and to prove it, Left in the Past conspires an unexpected rendezvous between early socialism, post-colonialism, and situationism. The book's novel readings of renowned cultural theories on the one hand, and exposes of arcane psycogeography on the other, will intrigue scholars, activists and students alike in virtually any area of politics, the arts, the humanities and social sciences." Simon Sadler, Professor of Architectural and Urban History, University of California, Davis In Left in the Past, Alastair Bonnett re-assesses the place of nostalgia within radical politics and, in doing so, provides a new introduction to the history and politics of the left. Left in the Past argues that nostalgia has been an important, but repressed, aspect of the socialist imagination. The book begins by showing the centrality and repression of nostalgia in both 19th-century radicalism and anti-colonial radicalism. This is followed by an examination of the consequences of this inheritance amongst revolutionary intellectuals in the twentieth century. Bonnett shows that, today, in our "post-socialist era", the relationship between radicalism and a sense of loss, and the ambivalent position of socialism in and against modernity, can and must be re-examined. Bonnett's unique approach to the left makes Left in the Past a provocative but necessary resource for anyone interested in the history and politics of the left and radicalism.

The Left at War

The Left at War PDF Author: Michael Bérubé
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081479985X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Bush’s belligerent response fractured the American left—partly by putting pressure on little-noticed fissures that had appeared a decade earlier. In a masterful survey of the post-9/11 landscape, renowned scholar Michael Bérubé revisits and reinterprets the major intellectual debates and key players of the last two decades, covering the terrain of left debates in the United States over foreign policy from the Balkans to 9/11 to Iraq, and over domestic policy from the culture wars of the 1990s to the question of what (if anything) is the matter with Kansas. The Left at War brings the history of cultural studies to bear on the present crisis—a history now trivialized to the point at which few left intellectuals have any sense that merely "cultural" studies could have something substantial to offer to the world of international relations, debates over sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, matters of war and peace. The surprising results of Bérubé’s arguments reveal an American left that is overly fond of a form of "countercultural" politics in which popular success is understood as a sign of political failure and political marginality is understood as a sign of moral virtue. The Left at War insists that, in contrast to American countercultural traditions, the geopolitical history of cultural studies has much to teach us about internationalism—for "in order to think globally, we need to think culturally, and in order to understand cultural conflict, we need to think globally." At a time when America finds itself at a critical crossroads, The Left at War is an indispensable guide to the divisions that have created a left at war with itself.

The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel

The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel PDF Author: Danielle Marx-Scouras
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description


The Conformist Rebellion

The Conformist Rebellion PDF Author: Elena Louisa Lange
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538160161
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
With the rise of myriad forms of identity politics which corresponds to a new “Trinity Formula” of leftist analysis of capitalism (class, race, and gender), major currents in the contemporary radical left in the past decades have shifted their aim. This book addresses the ideological, theoretical, and practical dilemmas of the contemporary academic and activist left from a Marxist standpoint. Covering contemporary developments in Left thought and ideology and putting them into social and historical context, the chapters provide a theoretical confrontation with the myriad ways it has tended to accommodate itself to neoliberal ideology, rather than fundamentally opposing it. The contrast between the Marxian emancipatory project and what the progressive left has made of it has never been more glaring than now, a time in which capital no longer seems to confront a political barrier. It is this predicament that The Conformist Rebellion evaluates, for a renewed approach to emancipation from capital.