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1	A study of communist thought in colonial India, 1919-1951 Jan, Ammar Ali January 2018 (has links) Despite having roots in 19th century Europe, Marxism had a deep impact on the trajectory of political ideas in the non-European world in the twentieth century. In particular, anti-colonial thinkers engaged productively with Marx’s ideas as part of their struggle against Empire. Yet, little attention has been paid to the displacements and innovations in political thought as a result of this encounter between anti-colonialism and Marxism. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by studying the history of Indian communism, focusing on the first three decades of the communist movement (1921-1950). I claim that this is an ideal time period to interrogate the formation of political ideas in India, since they presented themselves with particular intensity in the midst of an unfolding anti-colonial struggle, and arguably, the birth of the Indian political. The entry of communist ideas into the charged political environment of the 1920s had an impact on the ideological debates within the Indian polity, as well as stamping Indian communism with its own specific historicity. Through a tracing of debates among communist leaders, as well as their non-communist interlocutors, this work seeks to provide a novel lens to consider the relationship between ideas and their historical actualization, or between the universal and its instantiation in the particular. Moreover, the dissertation argues that the radically different socio-political and historical landscapes of Western Europe and colonial India necessitated a confrontation with the stagist view of history dominant in the history of Western Marxism, prompting novel theoretical work on the issue of political temporality. Consequently, the relationship between necessity and volition, central to enlightenment thought, was radically transformed in the colonial world, particularly in terms of its entanglement with the problem of subjective violence. Engagement with such questions not only impacted Indian political thought, but transformed global communism itself, putting into question the concept of an “originary site” for political ideas. Thus, this work intervenes in debates in three distinct registers: Global Intellectual History, Marxist theory and Indian political thought.
2	An “empire” without imperialism? A study of the Soviet-colonial dialectic from the October Revolution to its defeat Strandlund, Tyson Riel 22 October 2021 (has links) An analysis of Soviet history and political thought in the context of imperialism and colonialism This study attempts to clarify problems with dominant liberal narratives and historiography relating to the Soviet Union, particularly relating to questions of empire and colonialism, and instead platforms Third World Marxists and other anti-imperialist scholars and revolutionaries whose views have been effectively sidelined and stifled. By tracing the history of political thought around these questions from pre-revolutionary Marxists through to Cold War era anti-colonial and pan-African scholars and revolutionaries alongside developments in the dynamic and forms of imperialism, and by situating anti-colonial nationalisms in the context of worldmaking rather than state building, this text aims to contribute to analyses of Soviet policy and its relationship to the global history of decolonisation in the 20th Century. This work identifies serious theoretical and ideological deficiencies in existing literature and concludes that concise definitions of imperialism and empire such as those used by V.I. Lenin and Kwame Nkrumah are not consistent with commonly held beliefs about the role played by the Soviet Union in the history of anti-colonial and national liberation movements. Western liberal literature on this subject has suffered significantly as a result of political and ideological prejudices stemming directly from the US Cold War victory and psychological warfare campaigns targeting communist and anti-colonial movements to this end. My research indicates that misidentification and misuse of terms relating to empire and colonialism pose serious obstacles and risks to present and future efforts geared towards global peace and equality which add urgency to the correction of mistakes both in scholarly and popular historical, political, and cultural approaches to interpretations of Soviet history. / Graduate Soviet History Decolonisation Racism Imperialism National Liberation Colonialism Africa Anti-Imperialism Asia Cold War Communism Cosmopolitanism Engels Ethno-nationalism European History Fascism George Padmore Global History Historical Materialism Hitler India KUTV Kwame Nkrumah Lenin Marx Marxism M.N. Roy Marxism-Leninism Nationalism Nazism Nehru Neocolonialism October Revolution Pan-Africanism Philosophy Political History R. Palme Dutt Social Democracy Soviet Union Socialism Social History social fascism social imperialism Theoretical History United Nations USSR Afghanistan Indonesia Globalisation Walter Rodney WWI WWII United States Empire Russian Empire Third World Anti-Colonialism

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A study of communist thought in colonial India, 1919-1951

An “empire” without imperialism? A study of the Soviet-colonial dialectic from the October Revolution to its defeat