Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society

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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.