The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’:The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4

 Jeffrey Burds

The question arises: why should bourgeois states treat the Soviet socialist state more gently and more good-neighborly than any other bourgeois state? Why should they send into the rear of the Soviet Union fewer spies, wreckers, saboteurs and assassins than they send into the rears of allied bourgeois states? Where did you come up with such a notion? Is it not more accurate, from the perspective of Marxism, to suppose that bourgeois states might dispatch into the rear of the Soviet Union two or three times more wreckers, spies, saboteurs and assassins than into the rear of any bourgeois state?Is it not clear that so long as capitalist encirclement exists there will also be among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs and assassins dispatched into our rear by agents of foreign states?I.V. Stalin, 3 March 1937

Perhaps the most distinctive category in Stalinist policing of the 1930s is the symbol of vrag naroda— ‘enemy of the people’ — and its ready adaptation to the evolving (re-)conceptualization of Stalinist enemies. Vragi— ‘enemies’ —was a label applied as easily to descendants of the exploitative classes of the pre-revolutionary era — nobles, bourgeoisie, clerics, right-wing intellectuals —as it was after 1928 to industrial ‘wreckers’ (vrediteli), kulaks(‘wealthy peasants’) and their podkulachnik accomplices, Trotskyites (‘Left-Wing Deviationists’) and Bukharinites (‘Right-Wing Revisionists’). Vragi narodabecame the catch-all to include all forms of anti-Soviet (anti-Stalinist) thought,predilection, or action.

ANARCHIST FEMINIST RHETORIC OF FREE LOVE WOODHULL, GOLDMAN, DE CLEYRE

Beyond Rights and Virtues as Foundation for Women's Agency: Emma Goldman's Rhetoric of Free Love

Western Journal of Communication, 2011

Kate Zittlow Rogness

Early U.S. women legitimated their public presence through two topoi or commonplaces for rhetorical invention: rights and virtue. They appealed to woman's unique moral qualities, such as her ability to nurture, while advocating that men and women were fundamentally equal in the eyes of the state. These topoi created a paradox that women still face today. We revisit Emma Goldman's free love rhetoric to recover a third possibility. Arguing that marriage be rejected, Goldman challenged audiences to ignite their inner desires, living life in balance with humanity. We argue that Goldman's third topos, passion, is a productive lens through which to read discourses that may not fit the virtuous or civic ideal, such as those articulated by third wave feminists.

Publication Date: 2011

Publication Name: Western Journal of Communication

The Intersectional Style of Free Love Rhetoric

Victoria Woodhull, Emma Goldman,Voltairine de Cleyre

As described above, women have accounted for their bodiesby adopting a feminine style of discourse. Re

fl

ecting the means bywhich women learned the crafts of housewifery and motherhood,women’s speech in the nineteenth century embodied a femininestyle by presenting arguments inductively and by offering personalexperience as the justi

fi

cation for claims.

34

 By affirming the quali-ties of femininity, particularly piety, women were able to accountfor the positivity of their bodies in public spaces by becoming themoral arbiters of public reason. Yet this morality, as it was embod-ied through feminine style, celebrated the unmarked woman, theprototypical bead in Spelman’s metaphysical pop-bead jewelry. Thespeci

fi

c feminine qualities embodied in feminine style (purity, piety,domesticity and submissiveness) translated into a particular visionof a “true woman”: dainty, weak, and

 pale

.

35

 In this regard, somewomen were able to abstract from their particular selves in order toful

fi

ll an abstract feminine subjectivity, while other women wereexcluded altogether. Fear of the body thus translates into fear of thefemale body.Responding to this public pubic psychosis, an ever presenttheme within feminist discourse and activism has been the desirefor a fullness of expression and experience—or a return to the body.Gloria Anzaldúa describes this desire as the path of El Mundo Zurdo,Lorde describes it as the erotic, and, at the turn of the twentieth

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THE INTERSECTIONAL STYLE OF FREE LOVE RHETORIC

65

century, Victoria Woodhull, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Gold-man described this desire as free love.

36

 Each conceptualization isunique and transformative, focusing on the “lifeforce of women; ofthat creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of whichwe are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing,our loving, our work, our lives.”

37

 While advocates of free love didnot agree on a unifying de

fi

nition of free love, the nature of theirpublic discourse suggests that agreement was secondary, even in-signi

fi

cant, for women’s and men’s movement toward liberation.Woodhull, de Cleyre, and Goldman privileged the personal ratherthan the political, demonstrating how one’s personal experienceshapes her or his vision of freedom. Their attention to the personal,speci

fi

c experiences of women and men conveys an openness to themultiple ways equality might be envisioned and embodied throughfree love within intimate, social, and political relationships. Theseaccounts may be read as a precursor to later critiques of power thatinform intersectionality.Reading free love discourse from an intersectional perspectivelends insight into how women respond to the constraint that theirbodies are always gendered, sexualized, raced, classed, and national-ized. Not quite straight, not quite American, and not quite white,Woodhull, de Cleyre, and Goldman transgressed cultural norms offemininity that were de

fi

ned through heterosexuality, a patriarchalrepublican civic ideal, and whiteness. While their trajectories to-ward wholeness differed, Woodhull, Goldman, and de Cleyre com-municated a common emancipatory spirit that might be ful

fi

lledthrough free love. As I argue below, Woodhull, de Cleyre, and Gold-man not only articulated a vision of free love that resisted a concreteor static sense of womanhood, but the way they articulated thatvision also suggests an intersectional style of discourse that is char-acterized through impropriety, play, and possibility.Free love began as a lifestyle, a central organizing ideal amongutopian communities that were scattered across the United States.As a lifestyle, free lovers believed that the legal institution of mar-riage was unnatural because it inhibited individuals from develop-ing and ending relationships on the basis of desire and emotion.Free love transformed from a lifestyle into a feminist issue in the1870s with Victoria Woodhull’s 1871 speech, “The Principles of So-cial Freedom.” As a feminist issue, free love viewed the institutionof marriage as unnatural: marriage disrupted the social order andcreated conditions of dependency, servitude, despotism, prostitu-tion, and a sexual double standard. As an alternative to marriage,free love would liberate women and men from the roles of husband

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CHAPTER 2

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and wife and the cultural assumptions of gender that were politi-cally and socially policed through those roles. Free love would re-store social order, creating the conditions for true freedom. Over itstenure as a movement, free love began as a supplement to suffragealongside the debates on divorce, and evolved into a core argumentof anarchist feminism. Unlike suffrage, which primarily addressedwomen’s civic rights, free love considered the force of both politicsand culture in women’s condition and liberation. Three importantproponents of free love are Victoria Woodhull, Voltairine de Cleyre,and Emma Goldman

The Feminist Eugenics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

MP: An Online Feminist Journal Spring 2013: Vol.4, Issue 1

Women ‘Waking Up’ and Moving the Mountain;
The Feminist Eugenics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

By Susan Rensing

The 1910s were a period of tremendous visibility of eugenic ideas throughout the United States, in large part because of Progressive Era enthusiasm for scientific solutions to social problems. Americans were concerned with how to improve the hereditary quality of the human race and eugenics was the science dedicated to pursuing that goal.Parallel to this expansion of eugenics in the public sphere was a revitalization of the women's movement that began to be called ‘feminism.’ Both eugenics and feminism were being constructed and expanded in the 1910s, and the interaction between the two ideologies is the focus of this paper. On the one hand, eugenicists attempted to use eugenics to shape the scope of feminism, and limit the roles of women to motherhood and breeding for racial betterment, what the British doctor and widely read science writer Caleb Saleeby termed “eugenic feminism.”

 On the other hand, “the foremost American female feminist” during this period, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, argued that the new age of women’s equality would shape eugenics, not the other way around, and articulated a feminist eugenics that separated breeding from motherhood

 Feminist eugenics, as Gilman envisioned it, constrained the choices available to men by subverting their role as sexual selectors, taking away their economic power in marriage,and targeting the sexual double standard.

White Women's Rights - The Radical Origins of Feminism in the United States
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Speaking of Sex: The Rhetorical Strategies of Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, and Ida Craddock

2005

Inez Schaechterle

Publication Date: 2005

SPEAKING OF SEX: THE RHETORICAL STRATEGIESOF FRANCESS WILLARD, VICTORIA WOODHULL, AND IDA CRADDOCK

ABSTRACT
While a growing body of rhetorical and historical research about American female reformers and the movements in which they were involved exists, little or nothing has been done focusing on the sexual aspects of reform speech. This is a significant omission; just as women's social and legal standing at that time was inexorably bound to their sexual and reproductive capacities, so too did many reform efforts center on issues of women’s sexuality. Defining"public sexual discourse" as reform-oriented text that explicitly or obliquely addressed vaginal intercourse between men and women and that was produced specifically for distribution to an audience via speech or publication, this study first examined the texts of three late nineteenth-century female reformers: Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; Victoria Woodhull, public speaker and publisher of a free love newspaper; and Ida Craddock, writer and distributor of sex-in-marriage booklets. Rhetorical examination of each text was based in the general biographical information and the sexual experiences and opinions of each rhetoric and was foregrounded against the social and reform climates of her time. A specific historical or rhetorical problem for each rhetoric was also explored based on her public sexual discourse. Next, a model of late nineteenth-century women reformers' public sexual discourse was developed. According the most generalizeable points of the model, nineteenth-century women reformers’ public sexual discourse was based on the perception that men sexually victimized women and that contemporaneous marriage could trap women into sexual,financial, and reproductive abuse. Sexual reform would protect women’s rights to control their own bodies within sexual relationships and to choose when to become pregnant. Reform would also encourage couples to form intimate relationships founded in supportive religious or spiritual belief systems, and those relationships would, in turn, improve the entire culture. Sexual reformers themselves held radical religious beliefs relative to the protestant Christian norm.Finally, the model was interrogated in light of the discourse of white women's sexuality found in the anti-lynching rhetoric of Ida B. Wells

 Love's Labour's Lost: A History of the Question 
"Why is there No Socialism in the United States?" 

Alexander M. Dunphy
 Portland State University 2014
BA Honors Thesis

EXCERPT
Marx celebrated the history of the United States’ Working Men’s parties of the 1820s and 1830s as some of the first labor-oriented political organizations in the world. Emanating from  the concerns of craftsmen and skilled journeymen over their low social and economic status, the members of the Working Men’s parties, or “Workies,” pressed for universal male suffrage, equal educational opportunities, protection from debtor imprisonment, greater financial security, and shorter working hours. Marx and his partner, the German social scientist, political theorist, and philosopher Friedrich Engels also admired the Knights of Labor (KOL), the first national labor organization in the United States. Organizing along industrial lines, rather than the more conservative craft model, the KOL engaged in struggles for the eight-hour workday without regard to ethnicity, sex, or skill set in the years following the U.S. Civil War. Engels even went as far as to advise the “backwards workers” of Britain to follow their example. The existence of these unions was a sure sign of the advanced level of the working class of the United States. 

Socialism and Modernity

Peter Beilharz

U of Minnesota Press, 2009 - Social Science - 225 pages

0 Reviews

This first collection of Peter Beilharz's highly influential thought traces the themes and problems, manifestations, and trajectories of socialism and modernity as they connect and shift over a twenty-year period. Woven throughout Beilharz's analysis is the urgent question of modern utopia: how do we imagine freedom and equality in modernity?

The essays in this volume explore the relationship between socialism and modernity across the United States, Europe, and Australia from the mid-1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a time that witnessed the global triumph of capitalism and the dramatic turn away from Marxism and socialism to modernity as the dominant perspective. According to Beilharz, we have seen the expansion of a kind of Weberian Marxism, with the concept of revolution giving way to the idea of pluralized forms of power and the idea of rupture giving way to the postmodern sense of difference. These changes come together with the discourse of modernism, both aesthetic and technological.Socialism and modernity, Beilharz argues, are fundamentally interrelated. In correcting the conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and socialism that occludes contemporary political thinking, he reopens a space for discussion of what socialist politics might look like now-in the postcommunist-postcolonial-postmodern moment.

Contents

Modern Hopes Postmodern Shadows	1
2 Socialism by the Back Door	17
3 The Life and Times of Social Democracy	27
4 The Fabian Imagination	42
Beyond Laborism?	50
6 Australian Laborism Social Democracy and Social Justice	72
7 The End of Australian Communism	87
8 Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity	95

10 Socialism in Europeafter the Fall	116
11 Intellectuals and Utopians	142
Zygmunt Bauman and the Other Totalitarianism	167
Marx and Bellamy	179
14 Socialism and America	189
Notes	201
Publication History	221
Index	223

Liberalism?	107

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