Anti-Semitism: the Touchstone Issue for the Next Labour Leader

As the Labour Party ponders who its next leader should be, dealing with anti-semitism within its ranks has become a touchstone issue. Ivor Gaber, who has watched anti-semitism within Labour fester long before it hit the headlines, takes a personal view of its roots and consequences and recommends a possible way forward.     

The Politics of England

Party political interest in the so‐called ‘English Question’ has grown in recent years, due to the enmeshing of constitutional issues with a growing political and public affiliation with and expression of English national identity and culture. More recently, attention has shifted to the decentralisation of government within England. The ‘English Question’ is thus defined by two interconnected but distinctive ‘English Questions’. This article will assess whether, in seeking to find answers for these ‘English Questions’, the Conservatives and Labour are establishing a more distinctive ‘politics of England’. It will first consider the extent to which the politicisation of English identity and civic society have stimulated a more nationally framed political culture and party politics, and then assess whether constitutional reforms undertaken in Westminster, especially the introduction of EVEL, and regional devolution initiatives within England might facilitate greater party political engagement with an emergent ‘politics of England’.     

Holocaust Historiography: The Return of Antisemitism and Ethnic Stereotypes as Major Themes

Ofer addresses the return of antisemitism as a major factor in explanations of the Final Solution, and explores the significance and meaning of the reinstatement of antisemitism at the centre of historical work on the subject. She refers mostly to three books published in the mid-1990s. The one that caused the greatest uproar was Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the title of which makes clear its thesis, as does that of John Weiss's Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. The third book discussed is the first volume of Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. Ofer demonstrates the role of antisemitism in explaining the Holocaust at different stages of post-war research, the historiographical trends in histories of the Holocaust and the transition that these three publications suggest. The main part of the article addresses these books which, despite their common message, are very different in their methodologies and the perceptions of their authors, and are also associated with different historiographic schools.     

A Mountain to Climb: The Labour Together 2019 Election Review

The Labour Together review of the 2019 election brings together polling data, survey data, interviews, and submissions from across the Labour movement. An unpopular leader, tensions around the Brexit position, and a manifesto which was not seen as credible, are all found to have contributed to the scale of the defeat, but Labour’s unexpectedly strong performance in 2017 also masked long-term issues in its connection with the electorate and within the party’s campaign organisation. The report attempts to move beyond simply diagnosing the difficulties the party faces, but some of the thorniest issues for the party to resolve are nonetheless left unresolved.     

Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

This article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.     

Net Gains and GUD Reactions: Patterns of Prejudice in a Neo-fascist Groupuscule

Using the student organization Groupe d'union et de défense (GUD) as a case-study, Griffin argues that the radical-right groupuscule should not be treated as an embryonic or stunted form of the inter-war 'armed party' epitomized by the Italian Fascist and German Nazi parties. Rather it is to be seen as a genus of extra-parlia-mentary political formation in its own right, perfectly adapted to the inhospitable climate of relatively stable liberal democracy and capitalism in which revolutionary nationalism has had to survive since 1945. As such the groupuscule's true significance lies in its existence as one minute entity in a swarm of similar organisms which can be termed the 'groupuscular right'. This takes on a collective force greater than the sum of its parts by conserving and transmitting fascism's diagnosis of the status quo and its vision of a new order despite its acute marginalization from mainstream politics. Having surveyed GUD's history and activities over the years, Griffin focuses on its ideology, which he identifies as a form of Third Positionism theoretically allied to anti-western Arab nations and heavily influenced by the Nouvelle Droite notion of 'cultural war' against the homogenizing effects of globalization and on behalf of a reborn Europe. He then considers the extraordinary network of historical and contemporary radical-right associations emanating to and from this one formation, a process considerably facilitated by the Internet. He concludes by suggesting that the importance of the groupuscular right, apart from its formation of cadres who may be recruited by mainstream parties such as the Front national, lies in its function as a self-perpetuating, leaderless, centreless and supra-national 'energy field' of neo-fascist beliefs, which, like the Web, is unaffected by the weakness or loss of individual nodal points (organizations).     

The post-war paths of occult national socialism: from Rockwell and Madole to Manson

Kaplan takes an in-depth look at the religious and cultic aspects of American national socialism in the post-war era. Beginning with the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, in the late 1950s, he follows the development of occult beliefs and practices in the tiny and fractious American neo-Nazi movement. He emphasizes as well the brief turn to revolutionary violence in the 1970s through an examination of the National Socialist Liberation Front, and, finally, examines the attraction of Charles Manson and his followers to the occult fringes of the national socialist 'movement'. The article is built primarily on fieldwork, in-depth interviews with adherents of occult national socialist beliefs, and primary source materials from the 1960s to the present.     

The Morphology of the Labour Party's One Nation Narrative: Story,Plot and Authorship

By applying narrative theory to the party political texts emerging within the UK Labour Party after 2010, which make up the corpus of One Nation discourse, we can grasp the underlying significance of this ideational revision of Labour Party and leftist thought. Through an identification and analysis of the sequence of texts and their constitution as a “story” that interpolates an underlying “plot,” we can see how a revision of Labour's “tale” offers to leadership a new party discourse appropriate to it, mediating—if not reconciling—the problematic duality of narrative authorship by both party and leader.     

The Politics of Postcapitalism: Labour and our Digital Futures

This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post-work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It first surveys how the relationship between labour market trends, technological change and wider political-economic shifts is articulated in the postcapitalist literature. It then explores how concepts from Marx are deployed to depict social relations as a constraint on technological development and its utopian potentialities, leading to political demands for new class actors and electoral blocs centring on the new forms of economic and political activity associated with digital networks. It also considers the role of the state and how this theoretical and political approach envisions historical change, situating utopian visions of an incipient postcapitalist alternative to capitalism within the contemporary political context of authoritarian populism and challenges to liberal democracy. Finally, it explores the continuing relevance of humanism as a critical counterpoint to the social and philosophical agenda of present day ‘posthumanism’. It concludes that, in unfavourable political conditions, it would be strategically unwise to stake too much on an over-optimistic approach to the unfolding future. This outlook, it is suggested, carries considerable risks and consequences for a contemporary left in search of a viable electoral coalition and route back to power.     

‘Spending Wisely: Principles for a Good Spending Review': The First Report of the Fabian Commission on Future Spending Choices

This article examines the work of the Fabian Society Commission on Future Spending Choices published in June 2013. The Commission is undoubtedly the most detailed and ambitious attempt by a centre‐left think‐tank to analyse the structure of UK public spending since Labour's 2010 defeat. The Commission makes an eloquent case for a strategic approach to UK public spending, filling the substantial void in thinking on the centre‐left since Labour's 2010 defeat. Inevitably, the proposals raise fundamental questions about the capacity of the British state and the constitutional framework of the UK political system to accommodate a long‐term, future‐orientated approach to public expenditure, which deserve to be properly aired and debated.     

Back to the Future: The Pulling Apart of our Towns and Cities

Growing divisions between Britain’s towns and cities have created a dilemma for the Labour Party in seeking to represent very different parts of the country. There are some who argue that Labour must choose the global networked youth—who largely reside in cities—in order to maximise its electoral chances. This is an argument that defies electoral gravity and fails to address the root causes of the gulf between towns and cities. As jobs and investment have gone into cities, many towns have seen the local population age and local economies become unsustainable. In both towns and cities there is a clamour for power to move closer to home and for the renewal of democratic institutions, offering Labour the chance to win power and end the divisions that have come to characterise British politics.     

百年以来中国共产党推进国家现代化的历史演进——基于概念史研究的论析

推进国家现代化是百年以来中国共产党孜孜以求的奋斗目标。为应对资本主义现代化的冲击,中国共产党在长期的革命斗争中逐渐明晰:现代化之于中国的首要意义在于改变落后挨打的命运,赢得国家独立,迎接现代化成为先进政党改变落后国家状态的战略选择。新中国成立后,中国共产党最初将现代化定义为工业化,将其作为摆脱贫穷落后面貌的根本途径,并在探索中逐步明确和丰富了“社会主义现代化”的发展目标与基本内涵,开启了追赶世界现代化的征程。党的十八大以来,中国共产党人愈加自信,“社会主义现代化”就是要实现中华民族的伟大复兴和人民对美好生活的向往,而中国式现代化道路也是可以引领世界现代化前进方向的中国智慧。