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Picturing the Proletariat

Author: John Lear

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1477311505

In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revolution and the Communist Party, fortified the legacy of the prerevolutionary print artisan José Guadalupe Posada by incorporating modernist, avant-garde, and nationalist elements in ways that supported and challenged unions and the state. By 1940, the state undermined the autonomy of radical artists and unions, while preserving the image of both as partners of the “institutionalized revolution.” This interdisciplinary book explores the gendered representations of workers; the interplay of prints, photographs, and murals in journals, in posters, and on walls; the role of labor leaders; and the discursive impact of the Spanish Civil War. It considers “los tres grandes”—Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco—while featuring lesser-known artists and their collectives, including Saturnino Herrán, Leopoldo Méndez, Santos Balmori, and the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR). The result is a new perspective on the art and politics of the revolution.

Picturing the Proletariat

Author: John Lear

Publisher:

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781477311257

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The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Author: Stephanie J. Smith

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1469635690

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Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.

The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto

Author: Slavoj Zizek

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-02-25

Total Pages: 23

ISBN-13: 1509536124

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No other Marxist text has come close to achieving the fame and influence of The Communist Manifesto. Translated into over 100 languages, this clarion call to the workers of the world radically shaped the events of the twentieth century. But what relevance does it have for us today? In this slim book Slavoj Zizek argues that, while exploitation no longer occurs the way Marx described it, it has by no means disappeared; on the contrary, the profit once generated through the exploitation of workers has been transformed into rent appropriated through the privatization of the ‘general intellect’. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have become extremely wealthy not because they are exploiting their workers but because they are appropriating the rent for allowing millions of people to participate in the new form of the ‘general intellect’ that they own and control. But, even if Marx’s analysis can no longer be applied to our contemporary world of global capitalism without significant revision, the fundamental problem with which he was concerned, the problem of the commons in all its dimensions – the commons of nature, the cultural commons, and the commons as the universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded – remains as relevant as ever. This timely reflection on the enduring relevance of The Communist Manifesto will be of great value to everyone interested in the key questions of radical politics today.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Author: John Ehrenberg

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

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Offers an analysis of Marx's controversial theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, arguing that it can no longer be displaced or ignored as the viable democratic centre of Marxist political thought. The book traces the development of the theory from the early work of Marx and Engels to 1924.

Proletarian China

Author: Ivan Franceschini

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 1149

ISBN-13: 1839766344

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In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party's humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China's leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers organised by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labour struggles during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China's global push today, this book reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the early twentieth century to this day (and beyond). This will be achieved through a series of essays penned by scholars in the field of Chinese society, politics, and culture, each one of which will revolve around a specific historical event, in a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what constituted the experience of being a worker in China in the past century. Contributors: Corey Byrnes, Craig A. Smith, Xu Guoqi, Zhou Ruixue, Lin Chun, Elizabeth J. Perry, Tony Saich, Wang Kan, Gail Hershatter, Apo Leong, S.A. Smith, Alexander F. Day, Yige Dong, Seung-Joon Lee, Lu Yan, Joshua Howard, Bo renlund Srensen, Brian DeMare, Emily Honig, Po-chien Chen, Yi-hung Liu, Jake Werner, Malcolm Thompson, Robert Cliver, Mark W. Frazier, John Williams, Christian Sorace, Zhu Ruiyi, Ivan Franceschini, Chen Feng, Ben Kindler, Jane Hayward, Tim Wright, Koji Hirata, Jacob Eyferth, Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, Ralph Litzinger, Jonathan Unger, Covell F. Meyskens, Maggie Clinton, Patricia M. Thornton, Ray Yep, Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Joel Andreas, Matt Galway, Michel Bonnin, A.C. Baecker, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Tiantian Zheng, Jeanne L. Wilson, Ming-sho Ho, Yueran Zhang, Anita Chan, Sarah Biddulph, Jude Howell, William Hurst, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Chlo Froissart, Mary Gallagher, Eric Florence, Junxi Qian, Chris King-chi Chan, Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, Jenny Chan, Eli Friedman, Aaron Halegua, Wanning Sun, Marc Blecher, Huang Yu, Manfred Elfstrom, Darren Byler, Carlos Rojas, Chen Qiufan.

Chinese Posters

Author: Lincoln Cushing

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2007-09-27

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780811859462

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Introduction -- People, poverty, politics, and posters -- Nature and transformation -- Production and mechanization -- Women hold up half the sky -- Serve the people -- Solidarity -- Politics in command -- After the cultural revolution.

Proletarian Peasants

Author: Robert Edelman

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

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In this book, conceived and written for the general reader as well as the specialist, Robert Edelman uses a case study of peasant behavior during a particular revolutionary situation to make an important contribution to one of the major debates in contemporary peasant studies. Edelman's subject is the peasantry of the right-bank Ukraine, and he uses local and regional archives seldom available to Western scholars to give a detailed picture of the ways in which the inhabitants of one of Russia's most advanced agrarian regions expressed their discontent during the years 1905-1907. By the 1890s, the landlords of Russia's Southwest had organized a highly successful capitalist form of agriculture, and Edelman demonstrates that their peasants responded to these dramatic economic changes by adopting many of the forms of political and social behavior generally associated with urban proletarians.

Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens

Author: John Lear

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 9780803229365

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Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens examines the mobilization of workers and the urban poor in Mexico City from the eve of the 1910 revolution through the early 1920s, producing for the first time a nuanced illumination of groups that have long been discounted by historians. John Lear addresses a basic paradox: During one of the great social upheavals of the twentieth century, urban workers and masses had a limited military role, yet they emerged from the revolution with considerable combativeness and a new significance in the power structure. ø Lear identifies a significant and largely underestimated tradition of resistance and independent organization among working people that resulted in part from the changes in the structure of class and community in Mexico City during the last decades of Porfirio Diaz's rule (1876?1910). This tradition of resistance helped to join skilled workers and the urban poor as they embraced organizational opportunities and faced crises in wages and access to food and housing as the revolution escalated. Emblematic of these ties was the role of women in political agitation, street mobilizations, strikes, and riots. Lear suggests that the prominence of labor after the revolution was neither a product of opportunism nor one of revolutionary consciousness, but rather the result of the ongoing organizational efforts and cultural transformations of working people that coincided with the revolution.

The Proletarian Dream

Author: Sabine Hake

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 3110550202

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The proletariat never existed—but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant—and even more important, how it felt—to claim the name "proletarian" with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment.