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A journey through the crisis years
The slump, travel and anti-fascism
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Wilkinson’s experiences of the early 1930s furnished her with a renewed revolutionary outlook. The rise of fascism in Germany and across Europe brought about a second radicalisation of her political thought. She once again talked explicitly of the need for revolution. Yet the grounds for this changed. In the early 1920s, Wilkinson impatiently condemned the futility of reformism, optimistically expecting imminent revolution, spreading from the youthful Soviet Union. In the 1930s, darker horizons of crisis, fascism and the threat of war rendered revolution necessary. Partly, this was premised upon her travels to the US which provided the most dramatic illustration of modern capitalism and its failings, including that of a New-Deal style rescue. Her odyssey also traversed moments of hope and the revolutionary potential of mass mobilisation in Paris, Flint and Asturias. The events of the 1930s, however, loosened the moorings of Wilkinson’s second radicalisation. By the end of the decade, there was a marked drift in her ideas showing that her second radicalisation was a temporary phenomenon as she had to grapple with the great dilemmas that confronted activists who were against both fascism and war.

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‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson

Her ideas, movements and world

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