At the moment of the founding of the Second Republic in April 1931, the labour movement in Spain was dominated by two organizations, namely the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). The Second Republic marked the first period in which the two organizations had concurrently operated openly since the Primo de Rivera dictatorship had made the CNT illegal at the same time as the UGT had agreed to cooperate with the General’s corporatist project. With the founding of the Republic, a long-standing organizational and ideological hostility between the two organizations was exacerbated by the fact of the UGT actively participating in the reform project of the Republican-socialist government and the CNT increasingly opposing that project. However, the Republic progressively became polarized between left and right; as fascist regimes came to the fore across Europe, increasingly large sectors of the Spanish left called for a unity of their forces to prevent a similar occurrence in Spain. The outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936 made this unity even more imperative. This thesis focuses on interactions between the CNT and the UGT between 1931 and 1936 within this socio-political context, primarily from the perspective of the CNT. The thesis traces and analyses the evolution of CNT as a national actor’s overall position on the UGT from one of outright hostility to a stance of proposing a revolutionary alliance with it in 1936. The thesis also examines interactions between the two organizations in Catalonia, which was both the CNT's birthplace and stronghold and a region in which the UGT had historically garnered little support. In addition to highlighting the pivotal role that the Catalan CNT had in determining the CNT's national-level stance on the UGT throughout this period, the thesis explores how the anarcho-syndicalist movement in the region presented its socialist counterpart as the embodiment of a socialist- and state-sponsored project to destroy the CNT, and also examines the largely hostile encounters between CNT and UGT unions in workplaces and localities across the region.

This thesis examines the role played by intellectual dissidents in the French Communist Party from 1972 to 1981, focusing primarily on the philosopher Louis Althusser and the historian Jean Elleinstein, whose ideas in relation to the FCP were closer than previously thought. The introduction sets the background out in which the FCP evolved after the Second World War and brings us to the 1970s, the decade during which the FCP lost its steam against most expectations - as the thesis demonstrates it. The first chapter deals with the perception communist intellectual dissidents had of their Party’s internal organisation – an organisation which was deemed too rigid and too inflexible to encompass the plurality of opinion of its members. This rigidity was demonstrated by the Leadership’s refusal to recognise the right to create tendencies within the Party, as the second chapter of this thesis shows. In this context, the third chapter argues that communist intellectual dissidents felt suffocated by a Party which did not give them enough leeway, even more so since it claimed to be the Party of the working class – a position which threatened the Party’s adaptation to social change and which is developed in chapter four. However, this thesis also puts the criticisms expressed by Althusser and Elleinstein into perspective. Indeed, if these intellectual dissidents were free to express des idées libérales et avancées, this was not the case for the FCP leadership. The Soviet Union and its KGB had too strong a grip over the Party and its General Secretary, Georges Marchais, for the FCP leadership to be able to act freely. In that sense, if the FCP gave up the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976, as the fifth chapter shows, it could not criticise the Soviet Union too much, as chapter six demonstrates, nor get too close to the French Socialist Party as chapter seven shows, nor let its dissident intellectuals go on expressing des vues trop dérangeantes, as chapter eight concludes. Each chapter is set against the Party’s historical background and brings us to the modern times, which have seen the French Communist Party transform itself – a transformation which would have been welcomed by Althusser and Elleinstein back in the 1970s.

More than six decades after its occurrence, China's ‘peasant revolution' of 1949 remains an enigma. According to classical Marxism, peasants are passive ‘objects of history' who must be transformed into industrial workers before they can become agents of revolutionary change. This line of argument is reinforced by much extant Sinology and historical sociology, both of which have treated Maoism either as a disguised continuation of peasant exploitation, or as a failed emulation of Stalinism. Contra these interpretations, this thesis argues that China's peasant revolution was a real historical phenomenon which involved a previously unthinkable form of peasant political agency. To substantiate this argument, the thesis deploys Leon Trotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development (U&CD) which posits social development as a non-linear process constituted via multi-societal interaction. This reveals that the origins and specificities of the Chinese Revolution can best be understood with reference to a 'combined development' emerging from China's long-run and short-run interactions with variegated social forms. The first chapter of the thesis shows how China's ‘peasant revolution' remains an insurmountable paradox for the relevant literature, expressed in a shared problem of anachronism. Chapter 2 introduces Uneven and Combined Development as a theory of inter-societal causation that might overcome the problem by virtue of its non-linear conception of social development. Chapter 3 demonstrates how this inter-societal perspective is central to understanding the longue dureé ‘peculiarities' of China's development: the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies made the Chinese peasants directly subject to a centralizing empire, configuring their political agency quite differently (and with quite different potentials) from that of their European feudal counterparts. Chapter 4 analyzes the specific intersection of the Chinese social formation with the universalizing dynamics of Western capitalism, an intersection which generated the context of China's modern combined development. Chapter 5 then provides a conjunctural analysis of how the revolutionary agency of the peasant came to the fore in China's revolution in terms of a pattern of combined development that substituted the peasantry for the weak bourgeoisie and nascent proletariat as the leading agency of a socialist modernization that fused anti-imperialist struggle and campaigns for rural restoration and national liberation into a single process aimed at overcoming China's backwardness. Finally, Chapter 6 shows how this argument resolves the Sinological debate on whether modern Chinese history is ‘China-made' or ‘West-made'; for it reveals how the interaction of China's premodern social forms with Western modernity co-determined the peculiarites of China's modern transformation. It also provides a critique of extant Marxist historical sociology, arguing that it is built upon a mode-of-production analysis that tends towards falsely unilinear, ‘internalist' explanations.

Most historiography on British Anarchism has concluded that the Anarchists contributed very little to the political, social and cultural life of Britain. This thesis aims to provide an alternative view. The failure of Anarchism as a coherent political movement has been adequately charted by others. The purpose of the present work is to investigate the impact of Anarchist ideas and practices within the wider political culture. It will demonstrate that Anarchism had significant things to say about many of the issues troubling British society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The Anarchist contribution often demonstrated a high degree of originality and coherence and therefore deserves to be taken seriously. The first chapter outlines the evolution of British Anarchism from the 1880's onwards in order to construct a chronological and organisational context for the thematic debates that follow. It provides an historical account of the various Anarchist groups in Britain and their relations with the rest of the Socialist movement. Chapter Two builds on this by discussing the various social and cultural mileux characteristic of British Anarchism. The following chapters present evidence of the Anarchist contribution to a variety of diverse developments in British society between the 1880's and 1914. In order, these are educational practices, communal ways of living, trade unionism, Syndicalism and finally the status of women in society. The conclusion maintains that, although Anarchist influence was weakened by sectarianism and organisational failures, the Anarchists nevertheless made an original contribution to the political culture, both as theorists and practical activists.

This thesis examines the role played by protest song in the development of the political culture of Germany’s industrial working class between 1844 and 1933. Protest song was an integral component in the struggle of the German working class to achieve some measure of political and social equality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout this period, the working class found itself subjected to varying levels of political repression by the German authorities, and in order to promote their political views, industrial workers used the medium of song to protest against injustice. The thesis seeks to determine the significance of protest song for the political development of the German industrial working class through an analysis of song lyrics. The study of working-class protest song lyrics has largely been the preserve of historians from the former German Democratic Republic, where scholarship was shaped by the unique political imperatives of history writing under the Communist regime. This thesis seeks to redress the historiographical imbalance that this approach engendered, arguing that protest song produced under the auspices of the Social Democrats was both a culturally valid and politically significant feature of German working-class political life, albeit one that offered a different ideological approach to that of the overtly revolutionary output of the Communist movement. Additionally this thesis will acknowledge that working-class song was not merely used as an instrument of protest, but also as a medium to communicate political ideology. Protest song was an integral part of the cultural capital of the working class milieu, creating a distinct canon upon which German industrial workers drew in a variety of political, social and cultural situations. This study will engage with this canon in order to establish how the cultural practice of singing endowed working-class protest songs with an intrinsic political significance.

This thesis will be concerned with articulating and defending a form of realist social theory entitled "emergentist Marxism". As such its principal objective is less to investigate or review the voluminous literature on "social realism" and more to show the ways in which Marxian social theory can be legitimately "constructed" as a specific "materialistic" application of ontological and methodological realism in the human sciences. The significance of this research is that it functions simultaneously as a contribution to the social science component of Roy Bhaskar's philosophical realism and as a Marxist commentary upon and perhaps intervention against it. The latter is less certain, however, because Bhaskar's depth realism appears to be consistent with the form of anti-reductive materialism defended here. "Realism" or "emergentism" refers to an ontological position denoting a stratified social world of irreducible levels, of which persons, practices and structures are the most fundamental, all of which are efficacious by virtue of the properties and powers which pertain to each of them. "Materialism" denotes the ontological position that the material structures of social systems vertically explain social and cultural structures without "explaining them away". Thus "emergentist Marxism" is an anti-reductive socio-historical ontological materialism and attendant dialectical realist method. Translated into practical social research, it is applied concretely here to the task of theorising the interface between the properties and powers which pertain to human agents and those which pertain to social structures in shaping the constitution and dynamics of social systems.

Spurred by recent developments in the history of emotions, this thesis looks at the place of emotion and irrationality in socialist political philosophy. I give particular attention to the shifting ways that socialists depicted the emotions of revolution. I argue that socialists had a complicated understanding of human nature, drawing on various philosophical discourses and scientific theories to grasp the ‘irrational’ and to relate it to the socialist project. Building on philosophies of ‘the passions’ developed by G.W.F. Hegel and Charles Fourier, Karl Marx sought to grasp the multi-faceted emotional forces of human nature and critique the primacy of acquisitiveness in liberal thought. During the British ‘socialist revival’ of the 1880s and 1890s, theorists like William Morris and E. Belfort Bax sought to follow Marx’s critique of self-interest. They pushed the passion known as ‘sympathy’, ‘solidarity’ or ‘fellowship’ to the fore as an integral and universal source of socialist feeling, which drove the struggle against inhuman conditions of late-Victorian capitalism. Darwinian thinking about the instincts and emotions challenged this ethical conception of ‘the passions’, and socialists sought to reframe the critique of capitalism around biological categories. They emphasised such concepts as the ‘social instinct’ of Karl Pearson and William Trotter’s ‘herd instinct’ to account for the natural need for sociability and the damaging artificiality of economic egoism. The industrial ‘Great Unrest’ of 1910-14, the First World War, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 spurred socialists to an examination of the emotions driving struggle between classes and nations. In the years after the Russian Revolution, the theories of Leninism, instinct theory, and Freudian psychoanalysis shared a moment of intense interest among British socialists. Both opponents of the Bolshevik regime like Bertrand Russell, and defenders of the Soviet state in the new Communist Party of Great Britain like Cedar and Eden Paul, drew on the so-called New Psychology to understand the meaning of 1917, to predict the direction of the revolution, and to inform their own approaches to socialism.

By engaging with ‘realism’ in the context of Socialist Realism in Bulgaria, a notion that inhabits the space in between fine art, ideology and art history, this practice-based research offers new insight into the examination of continuities between fine art during Communism and post-Communism, exploring the relationship between the abstract and the figurative and their functioning both within, and exceeding, the pictorial space of painting. The two main research questions that inform the studio work and underpin this study have been: How can art practice explore the official representations of Socialist Realism in post-Communist Bulgaria in the axis between photography and painting? How can this process affect an understanding of the relationship between abstract and figurative painting within the context of ‘realism’ of Socialist Realism and contemporary fine art in the country? By focusing on these research questions, this study conceptualises the relationship between the abstract and the figurative in the context of Socialist Realism in fine art in Bulgaria and its official representations after the collapse of the Communist regime. This relationship marked one of the central oppositions in fine art during the Communist era in the country, often constituting a dividing line between what was considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ art. This study is concerned with the differences in the definitions of ‘realism’ within Socialist Realism in Bulgaria over the years, differences which may be considered as ruptures in its development. Yet it acknowledges these differences within the framework imposed by the Communist ideology. The latter remained unchangeable, yet had a determining impact on the development of fine art throughout the Communist period. Furthermore, the study explores how fragments of this framework are transferred into the post-Communist period, and how they function in state-funded institutional representations of Socialist Realist works and in examples of former ‘official’ artists’ works, as well as in the readings of Socialist Realism after the fall of the Communist regime, readings which fluctuate between the oppositions of ‘official or unofficial’ art, praise or disavowal of Socialist Realism. In order to explore both the ruptures and the continuities, the research looks at Socialist Realism and its specificities in Bulgaria in relation to Socialist Realism in fine art in the Soviet Union and other post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe. The relationship between the abstract and the figurative is situated within this context and explored through a series of transformations of photographic sources into paintings. These transformations are performed by my practice, engaging with the photographic sources’ production, dissemination and display in relation to ‘realism’ in Socialist Realism.

This thesis is concerned with main cultural discourses of the second phase of Communism in Romania (1964-1989), period largely identical with that of Ceauşescu’s rule. A secondary aim of the thesis is to look at the post-1989 continuations of these publicly influential discourses with the aim of understanding how the educational system (HE, in particular) is positioned in relation to the cultural domain. With regard to the Communist period, the main assertion of the thesis is that analysis of these discourses reveals an underlying cultural mechanism equivalent with a central mode of governance employed by the Communist party. According to this assertion, the mission of this cultural mechanism, with origins in Lenin’s drastic distinction between the party and the proletariat and in the idea that the party must bestow consciousness on the proletariat, is to create and regulate positive avatars (heroes imbued with the best of humanity) for each social category so as to fulfill and safeguard the aims of the Party. For this reason, this device has been entitled the hero-mirror mechanism. The device has also been linked with religion and theology. This perspective has found that the mirror-mechanism corresponds to the notion of “imago Dei,” and its axes to the notions of “kenosis” and “imitatio Dei.” The assessment of these cultural discourses via the mirror-mechanism results in three dimensions of research, each with its own universes of investigation, and each with its own findings. In the first dimension, the mirror-mechanism deals with discourses as identity, and thus with the deconstruction of Romanian identity. If, as observed, the mirror-mechanism receives its first major blow in the 1980s and begins to crumble after 1989, what has replaced it since and with what implications for Romanian identity? The second dimension views the same discourses as mainly intellectual. Here, the notion of ‘inner utopia’ is highlighted as a dominant and recurring theme, and, therefore, as possibly the dominant feature of the Romanian cultural/political scene during and after Communism. If, because of the notion of ‘inner utopia,’ ‘true education’ is viewed as lying outside the provinces of formal institutions, what then is the educational role ascribed to the public space in relation to the HE system? Finally, the third dimension assesses these discourses in terms of their claims for anti-Communist resistance while providing a typology for elucidating such claims.

This thesis seeks to conceptualise an anarchist response to the politics of security. Understanding security as a discourse of conceptual and political mastery, and as therefore resistant to incorporation within a framework of emancipation, it argues that anarchism offers theoretical and practical resources through which creative insurrections in the political-metaphysical fabric of security might be made. The thesis is built around an ethnography of UK-based anti-militarist activism, interpreting a variety of practices, tactics and strategies through a conception of anarchism which emphasises prefigurative direct action and a ceaseless resistance to relations and discourses of domination and hegemony. Three central interventions in the logics of security are identified. The first involves the subversion of the hegemonic ontology of agency which can be identified across both traditional and critical understandings of security; those anti-militarists under examination do not appeal to „the state‟ to redress their grievances and insecurities, preferring instead to „directly‟ engage in practices of security. The second intervention emphasises those forms of anti-militarism which can be seen to subvert the security/insecurity binaries themselves, and to open spaces and possibilities beyond the totalising frameworks which constitute our contemporary politics of security. The third examines those moments and movements where, as they subvert these binaries, anti-militarists prefigure forms of subjectivity which displace those forms of rationality and relationality which underpin the politics of security (and militarism). Together these three interventions destabilise the politics of security in ways which offer powerful opportunities for rethinking and resisting contemporary forms of political domination and violence. This also functions as an argument about the politics of resistance, which is conceptualised here not as a programmatic, strategic or confrontational posture, but a tactical, prefigurative and anarchic exploration of becoming otherwise.