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.     

Blessed be Discord, 1910: Ricardo Flores Magón's Manifesto Mode

This article explores how Ricardo Flores Magón used images to transpose the graphic tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican political journalism into prose by deploying montage to craft both allegorical and prismatic images: while certain images are divorced from their original context and take on a new life, others, analogically related to a single idea, appear prismatically in fragments on the page. The affinities Flores Magón's writing shared with modernismo and the historical avant garde – as intensification of the former and precursor of the latter – have been a blind spot for literary history, to which this article attempts to restore the importance of his writing.     

Rambling through the fields of justice in search of well-being for all

The article looks at basic questions of what constitutes a justice that takes into account the needs of all people. Thus an attempt is made to outline some of the basic tenets of a needs-based justice.     

Who is this we that gives the gift? Native American Political Theory and The Western Tradition

Abstract

The allocation of self-determination rights to minority groups is a highly charged issue around the world, but the difficulties are particularly acute in the case of indigenous peoples within the white settler states. While liberal multiculturalism offers a ‘solution’ to this ‘problem of diversity’ through a system of differentiated citizenship rights, this comes only at the expense of excluding dissenting voices from the intercultural dialogue. Through an engagement with the multi-faceted critique of liberal multiculturalism advanced by Native American political theory, the limits of the recognition paradigm are identified, and the possibilities offered by a reconstructed Proudhonian federalism are described.     

Decentralization, Subsidiarity, Rodney King and State Deification: A Libertarian Analysis

This paper posits that the government is indistinguishable from a robber gang except for the fact that it enjoys exceedingly good public relations (supplied to it, symbiotically, by the intellectual classes) and thus legitimacy. The paper attempts to see beyond this superficiality, and thus to interpret cases in which the state and an ordinary criminal interact not in this manner, but rather as the interaction of two criminal organizations.     

Justice through defiance: political prisoner support work and infrastructures of resistance

This essay outlines the justice work done by the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) in the US, an organization that provides material and symbolic support to political and politicized prisoners. The history of this organization is briefly explored to contextualize its current composition, tactics, and goals in its mission to support political prisoners, as well as the way its driving philosophies distinguish the ABC from other organizations that are engaged in political prisoner-related issues. Unlike more well-known, mainstream organizations that use a human rights discourse, the ABC contributes to an overall ‘infrastructure of resistance’ to defy systematized exploitation. This essay situates this project within a broader anarchist strategy to creatively and actively construct justice alternatives that work to establish mutual aid and needs-based economies.     

Strategic Terror and Amateur Psychology

Terror is defined as deliberate acts of violence designed to create a psychological effect—terror—with the intention of causing a shift in the target's attitudes and behaviour. A distinction is drawn between tactical terrorism, when such acts are undertaken as part of a multifaceted campaign, and strategic terrorism, where they are undertaken as an independent means of achieving the desired political ends. This follows a familiar distinction in airpower theory. A set of historical examples from both airpower and terrorism, as well as the fictional works of H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, is used to demonstrate the reliance on amateur psychology, concerning the likely social responses to forms of attack. This helps explain why strategic terror is rarely successful, though tactical terror can be.     

War and pieces

There is increasing recognition among human geographers that conceptualising the spatiality of peace is a vital component of our collective disciplinary praxis. Within this emergent literature, this paper seeks to position anarchism as an ethical philosophy of nonviolence and the absolute rejection of war. Such an interpretation does not attempt to align nonviolence to any particular organised religious teaching, as has recently been advocated by some geographers. Instead, the paper argues that the current practices of religion undermine the geographies of peace by fragmenting our affinities into discrete pieces. Advancing a view of anarchism as nonviolence, the paper goes beyond religion to conceptualise peace as both the unqualified refusal of the manifold-cum-interlocking processes of domination, and a precognitive, pre-normative and presupposed category rooted in our inextricable entanglement with each other and all that exists. Yet far from proposing an essentialist view of humanity or engaging a naturalised argument that reconvenes the “noble savage”, the paper contextualises the arguments within the processual frameworks of radical democracy and agonism in seeking to redress the ageographical and ahistorical notions of politics that comprise the contemporary post-political zeitgeist.     

几种"社会主义"模式的比较和科学社会主义在中国的实行

介绍西方在一百多年来探索优于资本主义制度的几种社会主义模式的情况,并阐述了他们寻找到的科学社会主义的模式,这种模式被中国的知识分子接受并广为传播,而最终成为中国共产党人的选择.     

Book review

This article looks at the vast contributions political philosopher Hal Pepinsky has made to effecting a peaceful, needs‐meeting vision of justice in the academic fields of criminology and criminal justice over the past three decades. The article examines his life's work as reflected in his most recent book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist. This work demonstrates that those who push the boundaries of scholarly disciplines, such as he has done, sometimes find themselves in conflict with those most invested in controlling the allocation of the rewards those disciplines mete out. As Professor Pepinsky increasingly became an outsider he took the risk of taking on the burdens of other outsiders whose pain and suffering the vast majority of his academic colleagues turned their eyes from.