Working with an approach to the interpretation and analysis of life stories based in the Marxist tradition this study looks at the lives of six teachers of literacy to adults who live and work on The Isle of Thanet in Kent. The study reviews points of divergence between postmodern theories based within a narrative constructionist approach to the interpretation of life stories and a Marxist approach. A case is made for a Marxist approach to life story work being both valid and informative. The first part of the study looks at considerations of methodology as these affect life story work in general and Marxist life story work in particular. Some work from Goethe and Balza is presented to show how Marx's own scientific worldview grew out of wider artistic and scientific traditions beyond those with which it is usually associated. Attention is drawn to the relationship between Marxism and humanism and how both can be brought together to provide a fertile and humane form of social science. The life stories of the six teachers are presented in a form agreed to by those whose stories are told. Three themes emerging from the stories are selected by the researcher for further investigation. These themes are class and identity, managerialism, and place. Each of these three themes is analysed to show the relationship of the six life stories to Marxism. On this basis the argument is then put forward that Marxism itself has an important contribution to make to the academic study of life stories. This final argument forms the substance of the concluding chapter.

This thesis utilises the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze alongside theory from the field of 'utopian studies' in order to think through how the concepts of utopia and utopianism might be relevant in an age that seems to have given up on the future. It develops – and argues in favour of - a 'nomadic utopianism', which proceeds through non-hierarchical organisation, maximises what Deleuze calls 'difference-in-itself and creates new forms of living as it proceeds. From this, nomadic utopias are produced, meaning that the relationship between utopianism and utopia IS inverted, such that the former is ontologically prior to the latter. I show how such an approach maintains an etymological fidelity to the concept of utopia as 'the good place that is no place'. I also develop the concept of 'state utopianism', in which a utopian vision functions as a 'perfect', transcendent lack orienting political organisation to its realisation and reproduction. I argue that this is a dystopian politics, and consequently that the state utopia is a dystopia. Contrary to received wisdom - which sees today's 'capitalist realism' as anti-utopian – I argues that the contemporary world can be seen as a state utopia in which 'there is no alternative'. This makes utopia a central force in contemporary ideology. These two forms should not be seen simply as opposites, however, and this thesis also shows how nomadic utopias can ossify into state utopias through the emergence of tyrannies of habit. These theoretical concepts are then applied to works of utopian and dystopian literature (Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Albert Meister's The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed); and the practices of 'musicking' (with a focus on the symphony orchestra and collective improvisation) and education. It is hoped that this will offer a new way of theorising utopia and utopianism, as well as generating a productive political approach from the thought of Gilles Deleuze, and contributing to debates on the political function of musical and educational practice.

This thesis examines, classifies and evaluates the tactics and organisational methods of British and Irish anarchist groups, which operated in the period 1984-1999 (although reference is made to groupings and events outside of this period). The thesis explains how class struggle anarchism, which was a minority trend even within the libertarian milieu, has developed into a significant and lively (anti-)political movement. This thesis examines recent groups through their own publications and their accounts of their recent actions. Previous studies have attempted to assess anarchist methods through either liberal or traditional Marxist categories. This thesis develops a mode of assessment that is consistent with the methods of evaluation used by anarchists themselves. This prefigurative ethic is used to build up an ideal-type of anarchism that is consistent with the main characteristics of libertarian theory. Anarchist prefiguration - which demands that the means must be synecdochic in relation to the ends - requires that the oppressed become the agents who bring about change. Oppression is irreducible to capitalism alone, but in most contexts, economic oppression will be a significant force in the creation of the oppressed agent's identity. Anarchists' preference for 'direct action' captures their commitment to the means being in accordance with the ends, and the primacy of the oppressed in resisting their oppression. The anarchist ideal is used as a standard to assess the operations of existing anarchist groups. Consistent with prefiguration, anarchist organisation and tactics have to be multiform and flexible, without strategic priority being given to any single organisation or structure. Anarchist tactics must also involve a variety of oppressed subjects, while undermining hierarchies of power. It will be shown that certain organisational methods associated with anarchism; such as old style syndicalism is incompatible with the prefigurative ethic. Similarly certain organisational structures, often dismissed as inconsistent with anarchist principles, such as temporary small groups carrying out selective propaganda by deed, can, under certain conditions, be consistent with anarchism. The growth of class struggle anarchism is shown to be a result of its prefigurative and multiform organisation and its corresponding diversity of tactics.

No description available.

The thesis is a qualitative study that analyses the personal narratives of isolation and resistance of former Baader-Meinhof prisoners (RAF) in the period 1970-1995 within the context of imprisonment and penality in Gennany. The thesis constructs a picture of isolation and resistance through these individual narratives that illustrate how a state policy to control the communication of individual RAF prisoners was translated into techniques of immobilization - solitary confinement - and surveillance - searches, censorship and monitoring. The narratives recount how these techniques, though central to security and order in prison, were applied and adapted in order to disable the group both within prison and on the outside, and to diminish the (political) resolve of the individual prisoner. The narratives also give insight into individual and collective resistance to isolation, namely the rationales of individual survival and striving for community in the pursuit of collective detention of RAF prisoners. The thesis contributes to the literature on RAF imprisonment by framing the lived experiences of former women and men RAF prisoners and the meanings they attach to isolation and resistance within a power and gendered dimensions of prison life and penality. The study also hopes to contribute wider discussions on imprisonment and penality in Gennany, in particular the governance of women and men prisoners who are constructed as dangerous.

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.