Expo afterlife: corporate performance and capitalist futurity in the Carousel of Progress

This article discusses a theatrical spectacle created by Walt Disney and General Electric for the 1964 New York World’s Fair that has run for the last five decades: the Carousel of Progress, a history pageant that stages the evolution of domestic technology in the twentieth century. As a spectacle dedicated to celebrating tools that bolster women’s participation in the social reproduction of capitalism, the author argues, the Carousel shows how expos utilize theatricality in order to inscribe industrial technologies within corporate ideologies. By apprehending the Carousel of Progress as a site of corporate performance, the author demonstrates how the Carousel’s afterlife in theme park entertainment has enabled Disney to theatricalize disparate modes of capitalist futurity in response to shifting cultural sensibilities. The author situates the Carousel within an economy that has consistently presented female domestic labor as subordinate to corporate capital, culminating with its late-1990s staging of an illusory prefeminism, which fantasizes a twentieth century in which no feminist movement took place. Engaging with theories of corporate performance, this article takes up the Carousel of Progress’s production history as an indication of theatricality’s longstanding utility to corporate capitalism.     

Progressivism in British Politics: Some Revisionist Themes

This article argues that a return to the history of progressive political thought can help us to think afresh about what a renewed centre‐left politics might look like today. The article identifies some significant aspects of this history that attracted little attention in earlier debates over the British progressive tradition—in particular, debates about social ownership, nationalism and distributism. This revisionist history of British progressivism points the way towards some common ideological ground that could provide a starting point for a new dialogue between different ‘progressive’ political parties and interests.     

The Blue (White and Red) Orchestra: a soundtrack for the country that never was

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’s Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.     

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.     

Social history, (Neo-)revisionism and mapping the 1930s Spanish left*

Revisionist historians and their Neo-Revisionist/conservative fellow travellers identify the Spanish left as the main cause of the civil war (1936–1939) that culminated in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Such claims are possible because these historians distort both the history of the left and the nature of social protest and mass mobilisation during these years. In part, the reliance of Neo-Revisionist/conservative historians on the methods of traditional political history – combined with their stubborn aversion to social history – makes it impossible for them to understand the left. This article argues that only through social history is it possible to comprehend the complex and shifting nature of protest dynamics in the 1930s. Indeed, many of the conflicts that played out in the political arena during these years were conditioned by structural economic problems and social tensions that resulted in diverse forms of radical contestation among the grassroots of leftist movements. Social, and indeed cultural history, are, therefore, central to any analysis of the myriad forms of these protest energies that flowed from the bottom up to shape the orientation of the leftist organisations.     

中国特色网络意识形态话语体系的基本内涵、特征和价值

构建中国特色网络意识形态话语体系是时代发展的必然要求。中国特色网络意识形态话语体系是一个内涵极为丰富的新样态、新概念、新范畴、新范式,理应成为一个严谨的学科概念、学术概念。中国特色社会主义是中国特色网络意识形态话语体系的核心要义、本质特征、独特标志、主要内容。中国特色网络意识形态话语体系本质上就是中国特色社会主义的话语表达体系、思想阐释体系、价值引领体系,具有鲜明的价值观表达、阐释、整合、传承价值。     

论中国特色社会主义思想路线的哲学基础

解放思想,实事求是,与时俱进,是我们党建设中国特色社会主义的思想路线。其中,实事求是是中国特色社会主义思想路线的集中体现,解放思想是中国特色社会主义思想路线的本质要求,与时俱进是中国特色社会主义思想路线的基本原则。实事求是、解放思想、与时俱进三者密切联系,相互贯通,浓缩了辩证唯物主义和历史唯物主义的基本原理和根本要求。     

党的十八届三中全会对全面深化中国特色社会主义事业的新概括新发展

党的十八届三中全会提出了全面深化改革的指导思想、目标任务、重大原则,描绘了全面深化改革的新蓝图、新愿景、新目标,合理布局了深化改革的战略重点、优先顺序、主攻方向、工作机制、推进方式和时间表、路线图,汇集了全面深化改革的新思想、新论断、新举措,形成了改革理论和政策的一系列重大突破,是我们党在新的历史起点上全面深化改革,推动中国特色社会主义事业取得新成绩的科学指南和行动纲领。     

中国特色社会主义理论产生的社会历史根源

中国特色社会主义是社会主义自身发展的产物.社会主义体制危机呼唤社会主义的理论创新.现代生产力是中国特色社会主义理论产生的物质前提;时代主题的转换为中国特色社会主义理论的产生创造了合适的国际环境;中国共产党创新马克思主义的优良传统,以及它的领袖邓小平崇高的理想、高尚的情操、坚强的意志、丰富的经验、深厚的理论素养和创新的思维能力,是中国特色社会主义理论产生的不可或缺的主观条件;马列主义,毛泽东思想是中国特色社会主义理论的理论基础和主要理论来源;当代世界文明发展的优秀成果是中国特色社会主义理论的重要理论来源;中华民族优秀传统文化是孕育中国特色社会主义理论的深厚土壤.     

改革精神：马克思主义基本精神在中国的当代表达

邓小平南方谈话的精神实质是改革精神。一方面,实践精神是马克思主义首要的基本精神,是邓小平改革战略的精神原点;另一方面,改革精神是我们这个时代精神的特质和精华,当属社会主义核心价值体系。改革精神是马克思主义实践精神的时代表达,在中国社会改革与发展的关键时期,需要我们继续秉承和大力弘扬。