Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905-1910

Slavic Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Williams

This pamphlet ivas written iviih an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, particularly economic, analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in allegorical language—in that accursed Aesopian language— to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up their pens to write a "legal" work.V. I. LeninCollectivism was a Utopian dream that flourished in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and later became part of Soviet ideology. Eisenstein's early films, conductorless orchestras, and mass workers' choruses all aimed at inculcating the view that a collective—be it the party, the proletariat, or the masses—was to replace the individual as the determinant of social and political values. The popular "proletarian culture" movement that flourished during the civil war (1918-21) was one form of collectivism, but there were many others. Yet, as a body of ideas, collectivism in Russia preceded the 1917 Revolution by a decade or more and made a crucial contribution to bolshevism. Indeed, in the years after 1905, collectivism had as much a claim to bolshevism as did the party-centered authoritarianism of Lenin.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 424
Author(s):  
Luis Gargallo Vaamonde

During the Restoration and the Second Republic, up until the outbreak of the Civil War, the prison system that was developed in Spain had a markedly liberal character. This system had begun to acquire robustness and institutional credibility from the first dec- ade of the 20th Century onwards, reaching a peak in the early years of the government of the Second Republic. This process resulted in the establishment of a penitentiary sys- tem based on the widespread and predominant values of liberalism. That liberal belief system espoused the defence of social harmony, property and the individual, and penal practices were constructed on the basis of those principles. Subsequently, the Civil War and the accompanying militarist culture altered the prison system, transforming it into an instrument at the service of the conflict, thereby wiping out the liberal agenda that had been nurtured since the mid-19th Century.


Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.


Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser

Analysing the development of the concept of non-state parties to an armed conflict from the writings of philosophers in the eighteenth century through international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty law to contemporary practice, three threads can be identified. First, as pointed out by Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago, one basic principle underlying the laws of war is that war is not a relation between men but between entities. Accordingly, the lawful objective of parties cannot be to harm opponents as individuals but only to overcome the entity for which the individual fights. This necessitates that any party to an armed conflict is a collective, organized entity and not a loosely connected group of individuals. Second, de Vattel already stressed that civil war is fought between two parties who ‘acknowledge no common judge’ and have no ‘common superior’ on earth....


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Art Carden ◽  
Gregory W. Caskey ◽  
Zachary B. Kessler

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business.


Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Evans Clements

Much attention has been given lately to the utopianism that flourished in Soviet Russia during the civil war and NEP. Scholars have noted that the idea of women's emancipation figured as an important element in this utopianism, affecting diverse aspects of it—fictional portrayals of the communist society of the future, urban architectural plans, the character of public pageants, even clothing design. The names of the women who participated with men in creating these Utopian projects have been recorded. As yet, however, scholars have not asked whether the female Utopians of NEP shared the utopianism of their male comrades or whether women entertained a vision of their own, distinguishable from men's. If there are discernable differences, how do they compare to those which scholars have found between male and female Utopians elsewhere in Europe and in North America? Why did such diversity arise? What were its consequences?


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (108) ◽  
pp. 188-217
Author(s):  
Ulrik Schmidt

Keaton and the Masses:This article explores conflicts between individual and mass and the process of massification (i.e. the becoming and unfolding of masses) as comic potential in Buster Keaton’s physical comedies. This comic potential is basically characterized by a formalized and aestheticized reduction of human individuality when confronted with objective, non-human matter. De-individualization plays an important role in modern comedy in general. With his intense focus on massification, though, Keaton is not only one of the first, but also one of the most dedicated investigators of comic de-individualization by purely physical means.The first part of the article considers the complex relations in Keaton between gag and narrative with specific regard to the conflict between the individual and the masses. Furthermore, the basic compositional elements in Keaton’s cinematographic staging of individual-mass conflicts are explored, including deactivation and isolation of the individual in relation to his immediate surroundings.Subsequently, the different forms of massification in Keaton are examined more closely with reference to variation in their comic potential. Here, Keaton’s masses are grouped into three basic forms: In the solid mass—typically materialized in heavy objects and hard surfaces—the comic potential is due to its ability to violently tumble or jam the pacified individual into de-subjectified body mass. In the fluid mass, the comic potential is basically found in the unmanageable character of the soft, formless and constantly transforming phenomenon. In pure accumulation, Keaton focuses on the comic potential of the very formation of masses as a process of accumulation (i.e., the repetitive addition of discrete, more or less identical elements). Here, Keaton’s interest lies above all in the formation of human masses (crowds).The last section considers Keaton’s cinematographic distribution of individual gags on the global scale of the entire film. Here, it is analyzed how Keaton incessantly glues the individual gags together into one large and seamlessly continuous gag. It is thus concluded that not only is each individual gag characterized by massification, but the way the different gags are interrelated throughout Keaton’s films also has a profound mass character.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 91-97
Author(s):  
Yury V. Lebedev ◽  

The article reveals the deep connections of the “people’s thought” and Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in “War and Peace” with the theological and literary-critical works of A.S. Khomyakova. The author of the work analyzes the dispute between Tolstoy and the cult of an outstanding personality, with the Hegelian understanding of his role in the historical process. Tolstoy is alien to the Hegelian rise of “great personalities” over the masses, the Hegelian liberation of the “genius” from moral control and evaluation. Tolstoy believes that it is not an exceptional personality, but the life of the people that turns out to be the most sensitive organism, catching the will of Providence, intuitively sensing the hidden meaning of the historical movement. Anticipating Tolstoy, Khomyakov sharply criticizes the cult of personality in the church hierarchy, the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, of the unconditional authority of an individual in matters of conscience and faith. Khomyakov reveals deep religious roots that feed the centuries-old Western enmity towards Russia. The article proves that Tolstoy is close to Khomyakov’s idea that Divine Providence overshadows with its grace only the believing people, united into a single organism by Christian love, that the epic basis of “War and Peace” is anticipated in Khomyakov’s literary-critical works “Glinka’s Opera ‘Life for Tsar’”, “On the Possibility of the Russian Art School”, “Ivanov’s Painting. Letter to the editor of ‘Russian Beseda’”. The article proves that “War and Peace” overcomes the conflict between the individual and society, the hero and the people, and reveals the epic horizons lost in the Western European novel.


2021 ◽  
pp. 186-202
Author(s):  
Clarissa W. Confer

American Indians residing in Indian Territory fought for both the Union and the Confederacy in the American Civil War. When war came to the region in 1861, the Five Nations—Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole—made choices derived from their cultural, political, and economic interests as sovereign nations. Military action ebbed and flowed through Indian Territory over four years, which displaced significant portions of the population at different times. At war’s end the Natives found themselves on opposing sides, both between and within the individual nations. The external as well as internal civil war deepened tribal divisions and caused substantial physical destruction and considerable human suffering.


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