Labour and the Culture Wars of Modern Politics

Anyone who attempts to understand and reverse the major defeat suffered by Labour in the December 2019 general election needs first to appreciate why comparisons with the defeats of the 1980s are so unhelpful. In 1983 Labour was all but wiped out across southern England, but held on comfortably across the ‘red wall’. By contrast, in 2019 Labour did well in cities and university towns across the south, and appears to have solved its historic problem with the southern, educated middle class. However, this has been at the expense of alienating working class voters across the country, not just in its former industrial heartlands. But this is not inevitable. A reanalysis of testimony from hundreds of interviews with working people across England from the 1940s onwards allows insights into attitudes and values that are often obscured by survey techniques. Crucially, it points to a broad-based vernacular liberalism at odds with the culture wars model of a terminal crisis for social democracy.     

Beyond Political Binaries: The 2019 General Election and the Dagenham and Rainham Constituency

This article considers the results of the 2019 general election with reference to the Dagenham and Rainham constituency in outer East London. It was a key target for the Conservatives with a 70 per cent leave voting electorate. It did not change hands and might therefore provide insights into the wider debate regarding future coalitions and strategy within the modern left. This article considers these results with reference to arguments about a ‘Brexit realignment’ on the left and whether Labour should rethink the nature of its political ‘base’. It argues for a more nuanced debate than that which currently exists, built around simple binaries organised around Brexit, class, age, education and geography.     

Class dynamics and ideological construction in the struggle over fairness: a neo-Gramscian examination of the Fairtrade initiative

This paper develops a neo-Gramscian conceptual framework in order to examine the ideological constructs and political dynamics that frame the day-to-day workings of the certification-based Fairtrade initiative. To accomplish this goal, the paper resorts to the notion of a ‘comprehensive concept of control’, which accounts for the main ideological elements that constitute the Fairtrade vision of the world. The analysis of these imaginaries is complemented with an examination of the concrete ways in which they have been institutionalized in the Fairtrade system and the specific power relations between class fractions they promote. This is followed by an exploration of the way in which Fairtrade articulates the contradictory interests of a variety of class fractions, bringing them together under the shared objective of advancing the situation of small producers and workers in the global South. The paper finishes with a reflection on the main limitations inherent to Fairtrade’s concept of control and the political dynamics it entails.     

新时代“工会坚持自觉接受党的领导”再探析

党的十八大以来,习近平同志反复强调：“中国共产党的领导是中国特色社会主义最本质的特 征。”“坚持党的领导”作为习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想的重要内容之一,有着重要指导意义,为新 时代工运事业指明了方向。工会为什么要坚持党的领导,可以从理论、历史和现实三个视角加以考察分析;工 会怎样坚持党的领导,则需要辩证地处理好坚持党对工会的领导与工会独立自主地开展工作之间的关系,处理 好工会组织“公转”与“自转”的关系。     

Regionalisierung und Dezentralisierung in Mittel- und Südosteuropa 1997–2007

The review essay takes stock of the last decade of decentralisation and regionalisation research in Central and South Eastern Europe. Classifying the existing scholarship with regard to its focus of analysis, its explanatory programme, and methodological predilections, we suggest to distinguish three different agendas: system transformation, EU conditionality and subnational governance. We argue that scholarly interest in regionalisation and decentralisation issues from the perspective of state transformation or Europeanisation is vanishing. Instead, we witness the emergence of a subnational governance approach which is rooted in comparative politics and policy analysis. The debate about decentralisation and regionalisation in CEEC is thus in a process of “normalising” and converging with the Western European subnational political discourse.     

19世纪英国中产阶级性别角色分工观念探析

19世纪英国中产阶级的性别角色分工观念主要包括"两分领域"和"家庭天使"观,其形成有深刻的社会背景,对当时男性气质和女性气质的塑造、社会结构和社会关系有重要影响。     

浅析刑法因果关系理论的共同性

关于刑法因果关系出现了不同的理论学说,各种学说的实质是一样的,但判断标准却是模糊的,并表现出了较强的主观性,但这在一定的历史条件下无疑又是合理的。因此,我们有妊要对刑法因果关系理论的共同性进行深入的剖析。     

双重劳动关系法律问题研究

双重劳动关系是当前劳动关系的一种重要形式。承认双重劳动关系的合法性并不违背劳动关系的从属性特征,而且只有承认双重劳动关系的合法性才更有利于劳动者合法权益的保障。鉴于双重劳动关系的特殊性,应该对双重劳动关系进行规制。最高工时制度、最低保障制度、经济补偿金以及社会保险的有关规定对双重劳动关系也应该适用。     

走向谈判的工会:党巩固阶级基础的政治架构

在社会主义条件下,工会作为无产阶级执政党联结工人阶级的纽带,是党实现执政使命的重要组织资源。然而,在市场经济条件下,受传统体制的制度约束,工会组织亟待摆脱“制度性弱势”,完成党巩固阶级基础的“传动装置”的再启动。因此,需要在党的推动下实现工会制度创新,不断完善工会维权机制,提高工会组织的代表能力,赢得职工群众的信任,这有利于增强党在代表最广大人民根本利益层面的政治合法性。     

Sensory speculations:Visual discourse and the vision of visuality

It is now commonplace within the discipline of art history and visual culture to speak to theories of vision and visuality. Recent questions concerning the subject of vision, sexed positionalities and discourses of viewing are indebted to theories of visuality, which now occupy a privileged place within the study of visual culture. Theories of visuality have revealed both the terms of cultural visibilities and significantly the how of what we see. And yet despite this engagement of the opacity and duplicity of the visual, recent work into visuality has been plagued by a re‐occurring myopia regarding the corporeal This oversight within the visibilites of visual discourse is the unchallenged idea of a ‘human vision’ within the social constructivist project. In this article I assess how this universal operates as the matter for theories of visuality and of the ramifications of this for the project of the critique of vision.