Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society

在十月革命一百周年之际，这个项目以新的眼光看待西方的共产主义。历史学家的传统焦点一直是政党未能夺取国家。该项目借鉴安东尼奥·葛兰西的思想，分析缔约方为改造民间社会（媒体、教育、科学、文化）而进行的零星和分裂性斗争。该项目编目、开放和分析了关于共产主义者在民间社会中的“立场之战”以及这种强调所造成的政党内部分裂的重要档案材料。它委托新的跨学科学术，其中大部分来自新兴的研究人员，重建和比较国际共产主义者的活动。该项目的活动和出版物突出并仔细审查了倡导植根于公民社会的方法的共产党人。曼彻斯特人民历史博物馆的两个展览通过展示其文化关注的范围，为公众介绍了英国共产主义。为期三天的国际会议和编辑的书第一次汇集了共产主义历史学家和政治哲学家，目前正在讨论共产主义的基本思想-资本剥削劳动力不是不可避免的-在未来可能采取什么形式。一方面，从历史的角度来看，该项目询问那些以公民社会转型为角度的共产主义潮流在今天是否仍然具有相关性，因为二十世纪的共产主义已经成为历史。

Coinciding with the centenary of the October revolution, this project takes a new look at Communism in the West. The traditional focus of historians has been the failure of Parties to seize states. Drawing on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, this project instead analyses Parties' sporadic and divisive struggles to transform civil society (media, education, science, culture). The project catalogues, opens and analyses significant archive material about Communist 'wars of position' across civil society and the internal ruptures within Parties that this emphasis caused. It commissions new interdisciplinary scholarship, much of it from emerging researchers, which reconstructs and compares the activities of Communists internationally. The project's events and publications foreground and scrutinise Communists who advocated approaches rooted in civil society. Two exhibitions at Manchester's People's History Museum defamiliarise British Communism for the general public by showcasing the range of its cultural concerns. A three-day international conference and edited book bring together for the first time historians of Communism and political philosophers currently debating what form Communism's fundamental idea--that exploitation of labour by capital is not inevitable--might take in the future. On one hand historically focussed, the project asks whether those currents of Communism angled at the transformation of civil society remain of relevance today, when so much of twentieth-century Communism has passed into history.