The ideology of anti‐bolshevism

Continuity existed between Marx and Lenin on the peasant problem. Marx recognized that the capitalist peasant, the tenant‐farmer, would not support a proletarian revolution, but the capitalist peasant could be a revolutionary force in a liberal revolution. Marx felt that if a liberal revolution was found to be progressive for the proletariat, an alliance could be formed between proletariat and tenant‐farmers in the bourgeois revolution. Moreover, in Vol. III of Das Kapital Marx discerned the evolution of an agricultural proletariat. These agricultural wage‐labourers would support a proletarian revolution, and thus were allies of the urban proletariat in a socialist revolution. Lenin was familiar with the arguments of Vol. III of Das Kapital and incorporated them in his Development of Capitalism in Russia (composed in 1898). And certainly by 1901, and not in the revolution of 1905 as most commentators maintain, Lenin's ideas on the peasantry had fully matured and were entirely consonant with the views of Marx. By 1901, by extending the insights of Marx to Russia, Lenin had formulated the policy later enunciated in 1905 in Two Tactics of Social‐Democracy in the Democratic Revolution: two revolutions were brewing in the countryside, between capitalist farmers and aristocracy and between agricultural wage‐labourers and capitalist farmers, and the urban proletariat could find an ally for either a liberal or socialist revolution by allying with the capitalist farmer in the bourgeois revolution or the agricultural wage‐labourer in the socialist revolution.     

The Liquefaction of Desire: Music,Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour.

Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.