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Linehan 07 13/6/07 11:33 Page 128 7 Communist lifestyle: fostering correct habits, good behaviour and right ways of living I remember the look on Hymie’s face as he questioned me, hiking one Sunday afternoon along the lovely road to Whalley. ‘What would you do’, he asked, ‘if you were given the opportunity to return to America at once, and the Party forbade you to go?’ I stared at him incredulously … ‘What has the Party to do with my private life?’ I had still a great deal to learn.1 As we saw in the previous chapter, the body became an important site of
Linehan 04 13/6/07 11:31 Page 67 4 A single communist personality? Communist couples and red families Because my brother John was a communist I was half-way toward joining the Party.1 The communist marriage represented the next stage of the life cycle of Party membership. Communist couples were much in evidence in the CPGB. This chapter will consider why this was so. It will also focus on the contexts and circumstances in which communist marriages occurred, as well as the institution of the communist marriage, including its conventions and defining
Linehan 08 13/6/07 11:34 Page 146 8 Communists at play It’s a free country – but try walking on it.1 Despite being over-burdened with Party tasks and other responsibilities, Britain’s interwar communists did find space to play. Engagement in a fairly varied recreational life that included social functions, dances, concerts and day-trips to the seaside would brighten lives usually heavily over-determined by the more serious business of striving to steer the historical process towards the final destination of proletarian emancipation. Communist limbs strained
Linehan 06 13/6/07 11:32 Page 115 6 Tending the communist body: the quest for physical fitness Springiness, elasticity, always implies strength, and is much more preferable to sheer bulging over-muscledness.1 The body would function as an important site of British Communist Party (CPGB) efforts to implant the communist spirit and way of life in its members. During the interwar years the CPGB was keen to ensure the physical well-being and fitness of its activists. For the Party, healthy bodies enabled members to withstand better the attacks of rapacious
2 The French Communist Party: from revolution to reform David S. Bell The left The PCF: from revolution to reform Introduction Under the Fourth and Fifth Republics the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was one of the most important forces in the shaping of the party system. This status only began to diminish in the 1980s with the victory of François Mitterrand in the presidential and legislative elections of 1981. Although the Communist Party is a shadow of its former self, the shape of the party system and its behaviour over the post-war period is explicable
Lenin and Manabendra Nath Roy, a leading Indian communist. 2 This new departure allowed for collaboration between communists and nationalists in colonial regions. The precise form which such alliances might take was not spelled out, but it was assumed that the independent character of the proletarian movement would be preserved. 3 Problems arising out of the ambiguous nature of the policy became
3 British communists and Palestine Despite its relatively small membership in relation to the Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain took a leading role in anti-colonial campaigns. While the Labour Party between the wars put forward policies to reform the Empire through economic development and administrative training in the colonies, the international communist movement advised communist parties to support nationalist struggles seeking to throw off imperial rule. There were subsequently fluctuations in the communist movement’s position on the role
Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.
For the PCF’s Algerian region, 1930 represented the pinnacle of repression. Public political space contracted sharply. Communists and trade unionists were subjected to a state of siege - hounded, imprisoned and deported south. This continued into 1931. Lutte sociale was repeatedly seized. When it appeared, Boualem’s name figured prominently, promoting the decisions of
Comintern aimed to guide the international revolutionary movement. Yet there was an inherent tension between its internationalist aims, its growing insistence on the Russian Revolution as the paradigm for revolutionary success, and the increasing influence of the Soviet Communist Party on its executive. 9 Nonetheless, its vision of world revolution fuelled capitalist fears around the world. In France a