法国大革命中的拉法叶特

拉法叶特是法国大革命时期重要的政治活动家.从1789年大革命爆发,到1830年7月革命胜利,在40余年中,拉法叶特始终如一地坚决反对封建专制君主制,主张以资产阶级的宪法限制王权、神权和贵族特权,建立资产阶级的君主立宪制国家.他的这一政治主张,是当时大资产阶级、中等资产阶级、小资产阶级和广大人民的共同政治要求,是符合当时法国社会经济发展水平的.他的政治立场,也因此应予基本肯定.     

民初政体模式失效的宪政文化反思

辛亥革命以革命的方式取缔了封建专制制度的合法地位,制定了资产阶级性质的宪法,设计了资产阶级的政体模式,是中国历史上制度文明的一次飞跃。然而资产阶级的政体模式并没有因为其历史进步性而获得实践的合法性,民初的政体模式以失效而告终。失效的深层原因在于宪政文化没有根基。清末民初广大民众的宪政文化是缺失的,而资产阶级革命派的宪政文化总体上是异化的,这使得资产阶级政体模式因缺乏宪政文化基础而不能成功。     

Colours of a revolution. Post-communist society,global capitalism and the Ukraine crisis

Abstract

The Ukraine crisis is usually treated either as Russia’s return to the old-style empire-building (the right) or as a clash of two imperialisms (the left). However, the essence of this crisis can be understood only from the dual perspective of the consequences of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the modern global capitalism. The most rotten sections of the Soviet bureaucracy moved the society to capitalism. However, this effort could secure only a peripheral (Ukraine) or at best semi-peripheral (Russia) position in the capitalist world-system as a provider of cheap raw materials. Meanwhile, modern capitalism led to world economic crisis. In these conditions, the capital of the core capitalist countries obviously decided to strengthen its control over the periphery, and Russia’s aspirations to secure its domination over the former Soviet space were in the way. To thwart them, Western powers decided to provoke a Ukraine crisis, exploiting Ukrainians’ justified indignation at the backwardness and corruption inherent in their own peripheral capitalism. Hence, a study of the properties of the post-Soviet societies and their place in the world hierarchy is the key to understanding the Ukraine crisis.     

Revolutions: a twenty-first-century perspective

Abstract

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.     

The 2008 Election

The 2008 presidential election will be significant both for domestic and for foreign policy. Issues of security in domestic policy will continue to trump issues of freedom. The difficulties of resolving our military presence in Iraq will be the first among many important issues the new administration must confront. In both domestic and foreign affairs the new administration will have to deal with the unanticipated consequences of inherited policies even as it creates its own agenda and its own set of unintended consequences.

US democracy assistance programs in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution

The 2004 Orange Revolution failed to skyrocket Ukraine into the ranks of consolidated democracies. Some previous research claimed that, in the similar case of post-Rose Revolution Georgia, its vague democratic perspectives can be explained by, among others, a negative impact of politically biased US democracy assistance programs. This article examines five groups of US programs (electoral aid, political party development, legislative strengthening, NGO development and media strengthening) implemented in Ukraine in 2005–2010, and concludes that US diplomatic support for the pro-Western “Orange” leadership did not translate into political bias of US-funded democracy assistance programs.     

African Green Revolution,food sovereignty and constrained livelihood choice in Mozambique

This article examines the complicated food security agendas of the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty models in Mozambique. Drawing on fieldwork conducted by the author in Mozambique in 2014 and 2015, the paper analyses how smallholder farmers engage with these two agrarian models. Whereas the literature frequently presents the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty in oppositional frames, this paper finds that farmers in Mozambique utilize some of the tools that these models offer in complementary rather than competing ways. One such area is the use of commercial hybrid seeds and herbicides by some farmers associated with food sovereignty, an approach that runs counter to food sovereignty’s principles of agroecology. In Mozambique, farmers’ “lived experience” of food sovereignty is more a strategic response to their limited livelihood options, using whatever tools are available to them, rather than a resistance to power.     

Die Wiederherstellung des Marktsubjekts

The UK is generally considered a laboratory for styles of governance influenced by New Public Management: outsourcing, internal markets, targets, auditing. The shifts in governance style, and the new instruments that have accompanied them, were once synonymous with “Thatcherism” but have since been adopted and refined by New Labour. Early critical social scientific analyses deployed the Gramscian notion of hegemony to analyse this shift. This was followed by Foucault inspired analyses of “governmentality”. The latter focused more explicitly on the micro-level of conduct. This article follows that lead, but seeks to address the central puzzles thrown up by this experiment through Max Weber’s conception of a “bureaucratic revolution” and Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the constitution of a “market subject” via a “double movement”: a simultaneous loosening and tightening of control. The Weber-Polanyi approach allows us, we argue, to make the link more explicit between micro-level changes in the “conduct of life” (Lebensführung) and the meso-level instruments designed to bring about such a re-orientation of conduct. The article makes the case with reference to empirical material from a number of public services, notably education and health. Overall, the decisive factor is not a weakening of the state, but a change in its capacities and instruments.     

评俄国政党在1905年革命中的作用

1905年革命中,俄国各政党纷纷登上政治舞台,在推动革命进程中发挥了不同程度的作用。首先,从资产阶级在革命中的影响以及革命的进程看,资产阶级及其政党做出了重要贡献。其次,社会革命党在革命期间积极扩大在农民和工人群众中的影响,在推动革命进程中也起到重要作用。再次,作为俄国无产阶级的代表,社会民主党在革命中同样发挥了重要影响,但就其整体而言,不足以与资产阶级政党相抗衡,其作用是有限的。     

Historical origins of the party-army relations in the Soviet Union and China

It is established that Party-army relation followed a "separated" pattern in the Soviet Union as opposed to an "infused" pattern in China. This article explores the historical origin of this difference in the revolutionary periods. By analyzing the biographies of communist military elites, it argues that this discrepancy took shape before the revolutionary takeover and resulted from the differentiated intensities of warfare across Russia and China. In China, the numerous civil wars and military defeats, radicalized the old military structure and boosted societal militarization; thus, eroding the mutual exclusion between the military and revolutionaries. The effect was lesser in Tsarist Russia than in prerevolutionary China, making the old military a conservative and professional corporate that the Bolsheviks could not completely subordinate to Party control.