Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society

恰逢十月革命一百周年，这个项目以新的视角看待西方的共产主义。历史学家的传统关注点一直是政党未能夺取国家。这个项目借鉴了安东尼奥·格拉姆西的思想，转而分析了各政党为改变公民社会(媒体、教育、科学、文化)而进行的零星和分裂的斗争。该项目编目、打开和分析了重要的档案材料，这些材料涉及共产主义在整个公民社会中的“阵地战争”，以及这种强调造成的党内分裂。它委托了新的跨学科学术研究，其中大部分来自新兴的研究人员，他们重建和比较共产党人在国际上的活动。该项目的活动和出版物突出并审视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英国共产主义所关注的一系列文化，向公众展示了它对英国共产主义的陌生。为期三天的国际会议和编辑的书籍首次将共产主义历史学家和政治哲学家聚集在一起，讨论共产主义的基本思想--资本剥削劳动不是不可避免的--未来可能会采取什么形式。一方面，该项目着眼于历史，询问那些以公民社会转型为目标的共产主义潮流在20世纪共产主义已经成为历史的今天，是否仍然具有现实意义。

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.