To date, the study of Chinese propaganda photography has been limited. While some research has been made on post-1949 photography, the photographic production of the pre-1949 period has not been sufficiently explored. Focusing on the years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), this thesis aims at addressing this gap in the literature and at providing an analysis of how the Chinese Communist Party exploited photography for propaganda purposes during the war. Through the images taken by Party-affiliated photographers and printed on the Jin Cha Ji Pictorial, the first Communist photographic propaganda magazine, this study aims to show how this type of visual propaganda aimed not only at narrating the events of the war against Japan, but also at creating a new idea of the Chinese nation. This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first, The Jin Cha Ji Pictorial: A Brief History presents the history of the magazine and the work of the CCP affiliated photographers who contributed to its creation and popularity. Chapter two, The Geography of a Revolution, explores how a new cultural landscape was visually constructed to create the basis of the political legitimation that the CCP needed during wartime. Chapter three, Becoming Modern Women, investigates the symbolic and ideological value of the spinning wheel in 1943 in relation to women’s contribution to the war effort and the thorny issue of women empowerment. Lastly, chapter four, Moulding the Future looks at the visual representation of childhood and discusses the issue of militarisation and masculinisation of childhood during wartime. This study ends with few considerations on the propagandistic, historical and artistic value of Communist propaganda photography during the Second Sino-Japanese War as well as a reflection on how the symbolic and ideological significance of some of the photographs presented here are still recognisable in contemporary Chinese propaganda.

The thesis examines the Communist Party in Moscow between 1925 and 1932. Its structure, role and membership are studied, together with its relationship with the population of Moscow. A study is also made of politics in the period, with special reference to the oppositions of the 1920's. Four broad problems are discussed. The first is the relationship between the central Party leadership and the Moscow Committee. Second is the role of the grassroots activist in political life. Thirdly, the failure of the oppositions is studied in detail. Finally, popular influence over the Party is examined with a view to discussing how far the revolution had been 'betrayed' in this period. It is found that the Moscow Committee was less autonomous than other regional organs, but that grassroots initiative played an important part in political life. In general, people were reluctant to engage in formal opposition. This largely explains the defeat of the Left and Right oppositions, who failed to attract significant support. The majority of Muscovites remained apathetic or hostile to the Party, but a core of committed activists within it was responsible for many of the period's achievements. To the extent that they supported and even initiated policy, Stalin's 'great turn' included an element of 'revolution from below'.

In March, 1877, the radical worker Pëtr Alekseev gave his speech at the ‘Trial of Fifty,’ contributing to the social-revolutionary movement one of the founding documents in Russia’s fledgling, working-class history. In the decades that followed, many others of the workers’ circles of the 1870s would compose and contribute their own stories to this revolutionary, ‘workers’ history.’ It was understood that, for workers to ‘speak for themselves’ was one step towards a workers’ revolution, carried out by and for the working people. The ‘workers’ voice’ had been borne by Alekseev in 1877, and was shared by worker-memoirists and other worker-writers through the early twentieth century. Individual workers were called represent, embody, testify to and speak for the mass, or the working-class as a whole. Thus, the notion of the ‘workers’ voice’ tied together the propaganda, the historiography, and the philosophy of the Russian social-revolutionary movement. A study of the ‘workers’ voice’ in history and historiography reveals the connections between these areas of revolutionary thought and practice, and provides a better understanding of the role of individual workers - as activists and as writers - in the Russian socialist movement. Revolutionary historiography developed alongside and in concert with political theories of the social revolution, mass action, social law and social determination, individuality, and consciousness. For a small number of radical democrats-turned-‘rebels,’ anarchists, and social-revolutionaries – most, if not all, born into the educated elite, a few to the families of the high, landed nobility - adherence to the narodnik tenet that ‘the emancipation of the working class should be conquered by workers’ themselves’ made their own, committed or conscious choice of the ‘cause’ over the existing system of things marginal to the historical and social forces driving Russia towards revolution. The ‘going to the people’ movement was aimed at bringing ‘workers themselves’ into their movement. By developing certain working people into carriers of the socialist message, the movement hitherto limited to students, publicists, and the wayward sons and daughters of state officials, merchants and clergymen would become the ‘a working-class matter.’ Thus, a special place was allotted to the ‘self-educated’ or ‘self-developed’ workers who, like the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ were consciously committed, synthesising ‘consciousness’ with their own class experience and the social necessity behind it. The political and historical valorisation of the ‘workers’ voice’ extended this idea into the documentation and the history of the popular and workers’ movements. Just as the workers would have to ‘emancipate themselves,’ so too would they speak for themselves and write their own history. This history, it was thought, would eventually belong to the workers by right. Thus, historical writing and the documentation of a workers’ history, informed by judgments regarding individuality, society, class, history, and their relationships, became politically significant for the revolutionary movement as working people began to enter it and ‘speak for themselves.’ Late in the nineteenth century, the worker-revolutionaries of the 1870s began to write their own memoirs of events. Entering the documentary record as individuals, it was their task to testify to working-class experience. Thus, at the point where working people became ‘individuals’ for history and for future historians, marking themselves as different from the mass by leaving their own writings, and stories, and memoirs, they were also tied inextricably to a political viewpoint that identified every and any worker as practically identical. As political figures, ‘conscious’ radicals who had taken responsibility for their own actions, their lives were historically definite; as ‘working men,’ sharing in a victimhood that was common to millions, their lives were indefinite, unhistorical, alienated. In the attempt to explain one part of their lives by the other, in the juxtaposition of class experience with political experience, in the light of a political function that had workers become witnesses rather than writers, the worker-revolutionaries reproduced in their political and historical writings the class categories that their radicalism had contradicted. The awkward position of worker-intelligent – in one half unique, conscious, definite, historical, active, by the other: plural, instinctive, indefinite, and passive – was stamped into ‘workers’ writings.

This is an analysis of the nature and political significance of Russian messianism: the idea that the Russian people or the Russian State is the `chosen people' or the `chosen instrument'. I outline the genesis of the theory of Moscow, the Third Rome and discuss the ideas and activities of the nineteenth-century Slavophils, the pan-Slavists, Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. I examine the influence of messianism on Russian Communism, considering Berdiaev's views. The main part of the work investigates the rebirth of interest in Russian messianism in the Brezhnev period. I try to investigate the links between this cultural movement and the Russian nationalist elements within the political éite. My main sources for this are samizdat journals and articles, in particular the journal Veche, cultural journals such as Novyi mir, Molodaia gvardiia and Nash sovremennik, Party documents and éigré/ journals. I find that Russian messianism has been especially important at times when the country is in crisis: Russia is in Golgotha, but where there is suffering there is also redemption, not only for Russia but for humanity. It has by no means been always dominant in intellectual thought. It has had little influence (under either tsars or Communists) on the fields of nationality policy, policy towards religion or foreign policy. Today, as in the nineteenth century, its adherents can be opponents or supporters of the existing State structure. The growth of non-Russian nationalism under Gorbachov, combined with glasnost', has fuelled Russian nationalism. This is unlikely to be co-opted into the official ideology, because it would increase the dissatisfaction of the non-Russians.

This dissertation comments on the current period of intense social change in the former Soviet Union by charting processes of elite production at a business school in Riga, Latvia. It is concerned with an ethnically diverse group of students from the Baltic states who attend a Swedish institution established to accelerate the transition. I suggest that rather than producing 'catalysts of change' the business school represents a foreign-direct-investment into human capital. The thesis tackles the transnational complexities of the organisation by combining ethnographic description with an analysis of the historical and ideological shifts in international relations and a review of the anthropological literature on socialism. The thesis also responds to the lack of anthropological research on elites by presenting the first ethnographic study of a business school. It investigates elite schooling practices and parameters through an engagement with the debates on reproduction in education. In Riga an off-the-peg curriculum sidelines issues specifically concerned with the Baltic context; instead of addressing local problems students are increasingly drawn towards transnational corporations. During their attendance they partially develop their own agenda, which is a finding that questions prevalent assumptions about the docility of students in elite education. Other key factors of the students' transformation are language, image, style, school space and consumption. Their collective grooming project forms an important part of the esprit de corps at the school. Additionally, the thesis highlights the establishment of multiethnic networks on the basis of shared interests, thus challenging one-dimensional reports of nationalism in the region. Caught between the post-Soviet context and a forceful Swedish vision of change students experience upward mobility along with problematic negotiations of ongoing circumstances. Intended as a contribution to anthropological studies of post-socialism the thesis explains how the business school generates graduates who are willing and desirable recruits for the capitalist expansion.

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This thesis is a contribution towards negotiating a way through the terrain of contemporary Marxist theory in the conditions of late capitalism. A Marxism which is responsive to the prevailing conditions and open to reconfiguration. I have chosen to concentrate on the works of Bhaskar, Jameson and Laclau because they all have attempted to develop their own projects rather than reiterate an orthodox Marxist line. I begin the thesis through an examination of the contribution of Althusser. Althusser's theoretical work sets up the conceptual parameters of the thesis, and offers a way into negotiating a path beyond the Marxism/post-Marxism divide. In the first chapter I demonstrate the ongoing influence of Althusser on all three of the theorists in question. This inevitably has to include a historical contextualisation and a restaging of the events that gave rise to Althusser's Marxism. Althusser had an enormous impact on Marxist theory, and the rapid decline of structural Marxism left a void which has yet to be dealt with adequately. Althusser has thus provided the possibility of connecting all three thinkers and at the same time has enabled an overview of the distinctive approaches of them. A critical evaluation of Bhaskar, Jameson and Laclau will be the theme of chapters two, three and four. The approach I will take will be to argue that each of the protagonists offers something different for a reconfigured Marxism. I will orientate the chapters on Bhaskar, Jameson and Laclau around the following critical considerations: What does Marxism in the conditions of postmodernity entail? If one takes seriously the criticisms posed by postist thought, then what remains distinctively Marxist after this process? The issue of class has been central to any Marxist analysis, but is it possible to articulate a class transformative project alongside the new social movements? How have Bhaskar, Jameson and Laclau responded to these issues and others relating to contemporary Marxism? It is in trying to answer these questions as applied to these three theorists, that the originality of the thesis lies.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the fiction-of Kathy Acker, a radical and transgressive American female writer (1947-1997). The study maps the development of Acker's fiction by focusing on the political dimension of her aesthetic strategies. It explores the politics of plagiarism and appropriation; the subversive representation of gender and sexual politics; and the anarchistic impulse of Acker's work. The main theoretical and political approaches employed are: feminist theory, poststructuralism, abjection and anarchism. The study begins with an introduction to Acker's life, since there is a significant if problematic autobiographical impulse in her writing, and her socio-cultural context. It proceeds to a detailed critical exploration of work published between 1968 and 1986, drawing attention to Acker's affinities with a poststructuralist project. Acker's strategies of juxtaposition, paradox, and contradiction, alongside her fragmented, non-linear, digressive narratives, are read as a form of social critique. Her use and abuse of the white, male, Euro-centric canon is examined in light of the construction of female sexuality, and Acker's focus on phallocentric language as a source of subjugation is also considered. The study then argues for and interrogates Acker's move towards a more affirmative narrative strategy before looking in detail at her fiction of the 1990s - fiction which, until now, has received slight attention. Through close readings of her later novels, the study illustrates how Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject is fruitful for an examination of Acker's work, and examines cross-cultural intertextuality (from the horror film to the avant-garde). It also relates the trope of piracy that is present in Acker's later works to the political ideology of anarchism. The conclusion to the thesis argues that Acker's strength lies in her uncompromising belief in the avant-garde, and details her sustained attempt to make critically incisive political art.

The world views of Economics and History which derive from the writings (themselves often derivative) of Karl Marx have been further progressed through two channels - which I here first categorise as STATIST and ANTI-STATIST. The historical Communist parties, and those Social Democrats who accepted a measure of Marx's analysis, have sought to gain control of some form of State apparatus. In this, they shared an objective with other groups to the Right who may well have been travelling the same route for much longer. To the Left, in the other channel, are those who refute any claimed superiority for statist formulations and who, as an alternative, offer the concept of federation among localities. In instrumental terms, this is the difference between Parliamentary or representative 'democracy' and Councillist or participatory 'self-government'; between the delegated and the mandated. It should be noted that both systems offer potential for extended, cross-boundary, co-operation; in the self-governing mode through a. federation of federations for specific purposes. This latter arrangement, which may be properly termed 'Anarchist', allows for negotiated contract as in the international postal service. By definition, Anti-Statist concepts contain the eventual intent of a total break with, and replacement of, the historically developed 'State' - which latter is seen as a ruling-class invention and as maximising reification. Local institutions, economic and more widely cultural, can be created within the interstices of existing states as seeds of desired, post-State, circumstances. But, again by definition, Anti-Statists cannot look to take over existing Governmental systems. Rather, they must view a different perspective of change and the practice of their ideas in modern times has so far been restricted to short experiments during, for example, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Spanish worker-managed co-operatives of 1936-1939. These were both genuinely 'bottom-up' growths, but the Anarchist dream (or tendency to be pursued) has also influenced the decentralised organisation of some more conventionally originating Socialist states - as in Algeria, Libya and Yugoslavia for different periods during the second half of the twentieth century. The linking of Anarchism with trade-union activity in large-scale industry (Anarcho-Syndicalism) is usually associated with the nineteenth-century school of Michael Bakunin, but anti-statists also connect with more general examinations of 'freedom' such as those set out in William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of 1798. This Thesis is concerned with the acceptance of Marx AND Bakunin's thinking into the mindset of Libertarian British working-men during the four decades immediately preceding the First World War, and relates that acceptance to longerstanding notions of 'rationalism' It does so with particular reference to the intellectual journey of one very special artisan: Samuel Mainwaring (1841-1907), South Wales born but lastingly internationalist. A fuller summary of the content of Chapters is given in the Introduction, but the salient points are as follows. In Chapter One, I look at Mainwaring's earliest subversive, neighbourhood, links with Welsh Unitarianism and the most radical elements in the seventeenth-century English Revolution. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine the nature of early nineteenth-century proto-Syndicalism in England and its 1850s influence on the first of the New Model trade unions, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers – which Mainwaring joined as soon as he was of an age to do so. In Chapters Four and Five, I find similarities between Capitalist Exploitation in the United Kingdom and the United States (where Mainwaring lived for some years during the 1860s and 1870s), compare the writings of American mechanic Ira Steward with those of Marx and Bakunin, and discuss the Marxist-Bakuninist split in America following the transfer of the First International's controlling Council from London to New York. In Chapter Six, I show the existence of a 'Bakuninist' strand on the British Left in the last quarter of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Explaining Mainwaring's prominent position in that alignment, I also indicate his leading role in international Anarchist initiatives. My research involved what I believe to be a closer reading of three relevant London-based periodicals (The Crisis, The Pioneer, and The Leader] than had previously been carried out by historians, and I also draw on largely unpublished material held at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and at the State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. In my Conclusion, I compare the 'hidden from history' story of the Anarchist Left with that encountered by Feminist researchers.

Marxism is largely absent from the historiography of the discipline of International Relations (IR). This is striking because the formative years of the discipline coincide with a vibrant period in Marxist political thought. This was, after all, the era of, among others, Lenin, Kautsky, Bukharin and Luxemburg. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate to what extent and in what ways Marxist writings and precepts informed the so-called idealist stage of the discipline. Building on the work of revisionist scholars, the thesis reconstructs the writings of five benchmark IR thinkers. The cases of John Hobson, Henry Brailsford, Leonard Woolf, Harold Laski and Norman Angell, are analysed in order to explore the influence that Marxism might have played in their thinking, and in the “idealist years” of the discipline more generally. The thesis demonstrates that although Marxist thought has been neglected by mainstream IR disciplinary historians, it played a significant role in the discipline’s early development. As such, this thesis both challenges the exclusion of Marxist thought from the mainstream disciplinary histories of IR and contributes to a deeper understanding of the role it played in early 20th century IR theory.