Abstract: "Luddism ended on the scaffold."After reviewing the historiography of the Luddite rebellions, this article details the process of criminal justice administration at the time of the rebellions. The various legislative acts that comprised the "Bloody Code" are identified and the associated history of capital charges and executions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are examined. Relying on trial records and newspaper and other accounts, results of the Luddite trials are presented and compared with the execution and pardon rates for Assize trials in England and Wales. Providing details of occupations, ages, and charges for those at risk of the mass executions at the Luddite trials reveals the extent ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As political interest in basic income (a government-guaranteed minimum income) has grown in recent years, so has interest in Thomas Paine's pamphlet Agrarian Justice. In what is often considered his last major work, Paine laid out a vision and a rationale for a state-managed trust fund that would provide a measure of social security to the elderly, as well as providing seed capital to young people starting out in life. Because the revenue would come from a tax on natural resources (land), Paine's vision bears a family resemblance to the most celebrated example of a basic income variant in action in our own day: the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays dividends to all Alaska residents out of invested oil revenue. This ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Cuban Revolution and the long endurance of the Castro government continue to fascinate scholars, political activists, and other concerned parties. The passions aroused by Revolutionary Cuba have abated somewhat of late, but even so the ideological divide between partisans for and against this island nation remains stark and sizeable. Margaret Randall's Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity stands unequivocally with those who endorse, admire, and cheer the record amassed by the Cuban government since the Revolution of 1959.An American-born poet and prolific writer who lived in Cuba from 1969 to 1980, Randall is a long-time champion of leftist causes in Latin America and elsewhere. Throughout this work ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Paul Jackson's recent monograph is a detailed study of the political career of British neo-Nazi Colin Jordan (1923–2009), whose activism, writing, and persona continues to reverberate in global fascist circles. Rather than a full-scale biography of Jordan, Jackson formulates an "ideal type" model to understand fascist intellectuals and the culture of post-World War II neo-Nazism (13).The first chapter, "A Working Definition of Neo-Nazism," is a robust methodology chapter that sets up Jackson's chronological narrative of Jordan's activism (chapters 2–7). Although the ideal type includes a lengthy definition of neo-Nazism, one that cannot be completely unpacked here, it is worth emphasizing several key features of ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: M usic, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism is an important book tracing how fascist political activists in Britain coopted a small subset of the punk rock youth subculture to propel the fascist nationalist movement forward and, in a paradox, globalize nationalist fascism. Shaffer addresses this punk-infused transformation of fascist activism in eight chapters. In the introductory chapter, Shaffer puts forward an interesting argument about British nationalist fascists paradoxically becoming transnational in order to stay relevant. They accomplished this task by using the fascist fringes of punk youth subculture to spread their ideas. As a result, Shaffer asserts that modern British fascists ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Some books take decades to be translated into English, but it is worth waiting for them because they provide insights into topics that remain valuable despite the passing of time. Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingsberg's Revolutionary Yiddishland, originally published in French in 1983 (Le yiddishland révolutionnaire) is one of those books that has finally reached a broader audience. It describes "revolutionary Yiddishland, a world that is more than lost, being actually denied" after it "failed to achieve its hopes, its utopias, its political programmes and strategies" (xi). It consequently survived only in the form of memory, namely the accounts of former representatives of this "revolutionary Yiddishland." The ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: There is probably no better illustration of the asymmetry between most American social activism and the Establishment response than the experience of student dissidents in Oklahoma in the 1960s. In a detailed but succinct treatment of the student movement in the Sooner State, Sarah Eppler Janda explores what even many participants believed was a moderate variation of the New Left. Despite the absence of armed students on campus or militant takeovers of university buildings, student activists confronted official coercion and a seemingly impregnable wall of social intolerance. Prairie Power quietly underlines the persistent challenges of fostering progressive change in America's red states.After detailing the links ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Robyn Spencer's The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland provides a thought provoking account of Oakland, California's Black Panther Party. The book collectively addresses multiple significant factors shaping the Black Panther Party in Oakland—local politics, gender, and the dynamics of organizational transformation in the face of government repression. The Black Panther Party emerged in 1966 to become the vanguard of a global Black Power movement. With over forty branches established around the United States, it stretched internationally to communities in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the organization would also become the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is a cliché that we live in an unusually polarized time, one in which those from one side of a political fence tend to vilify those on the other side. Certainly in the United States, this dynamic is more the case now than it has been for quite some time. But in the current and recent issues of our journal, the articles and reviews have ranged across the political spectra and, even when the authors indicate their own political allegiances, the articles nonetheless have been not about making rhetorical points, but foremost about expanding and deepening our understanding of radical individuals, groups, movements, or themes. JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism has in the hopper many forthcoming articles on the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the mass media, radical left-libertarian movement (RLLM) actors—such as anarchists and autonomists—are often portrayed as subcultural deviants and violent troublemakers who primarily engage in disruptive forms of protests.1 Some of these themes can also be found in academic research, when scholars aim to pinpoint the distinctiveness of RLLM actors vis-à-vis other types of social movements. For instance, some studies tend to describe anarchists, autonomists, and similar movement actors as being more defined by their actions, ways of organizing, or by fluid identities, rather than distinct and stable collective identities.2 In contrast, other studies have tended to portray RLLM actors as mainly subcultural or ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1937, a dark, late year of the Depression, the literary critic Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) published a second small gray book in The New Republic dollar editions entitled Attitudes toward History. Intending a sociological sequel to his 1935 Permanence and Change, a wide-ranging discussion of the period's intellectual culture, the author would compare the books' relationship as similar to Plato's utopian Republic against his more practical, Laws.1 In Permanence and Change, Burke posited a complex body pursuing its survival through creative linguistic gesture—a "metabiology"—and "poetry" (language) as the site for an "ideal cooperation." Its sequel, Attitudes toward History, turned from the question of what humans ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The last stage of political violence in Peru confronted the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Partido Comunista del Perú- Sendero Luminoso; PCP-SL) and the Revolutionary Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru; MRTA) against the Peruvian state that lasted until the year 2000,1 ending with the defeat of both armed groups.2 In 2001 the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación; CVR) was established in order to analyze the causes, responsibilities, and costs, both human and material, of the violence that ravaged the Andean country for two decades. The "Informe final" (Final Report) concluded that there were approximately 69,280 people ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1970, the anarcho-pacifists Judith Malina (1926–2015) and Julian Beck (1925–1985) took their twenty-two–year-old performance project to Brazil. Rejecting bourgeoise and college student audiences, they went searching for an economic class of people who were, in theory, endowed with the power to sustain the revolution. Engaging with foundational anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Pitr Kropotkin (1842–1921), and drawing on the Black Panther Party's (BPP) reconceptualization of Marx, the Living Theatre worked to activate the Lumpenproletariat in the poor mining town of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. By openly studying and working with the "man on the street" (as Julian called the average Joes ... Read More PubDate: 2020-04-11T00:00:00-05:00
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