Chapter 2 looks at links with the homeland and Bengali politics. It begins with the movements for independence from Britain and for the formation of Pakistan; and it goes on to the growing movement for East Bengali autonomy and then independence, as the Bengalis came to believe they had exchanged colonialism under Britain for colonialism under West Pakistan. It also looks at Bengali responses to problems relating to immigration, which sometimes – as in the issuing of passports –overlapped with Pakistani politics. It charts the development of movements for democracy and independence in East Bengal and supportive activism in London. And it examines the role played by Bengali students and professionals in co-ordinating political mobilisation and in welfare activities – where, despite their radical left politics, they relied more on patriarchal bonds than on class analysis. The chapter explores the impact of Communist Party ideology on progressive politics, and especially revolutionary stages theory and popular-front organisation, which encouraged the activists to set aside long-term aims for socialism, and concentrate on immediate demands for national independence and on resolving community problems. It argues that, instead of leading to socialism, this marginalised the socialist aims that most activists claimed to support.

In the 1930s impoverished rural Algerians swarmed into already densely-populated urban areas. The traditional medina became both ruralised and Europeanised. The new urbanites maintained tight networks with their rural relatives, linking town and countryside ever more closely, while urban public space expanded. Initially, in the late 1920s, the Communist demand for independence had led to their severe repression. However, as public political space expanded in the mid-1930s, the Party attracted Algerian members precisely because of its call for independence; an autonomous Algerian Communist Party was launched in 1936. Although most Algerian nationalist leaders were not then calling for independence, appeals to fight colonialism and to demand independence struck an emotional chord with politicised Algerians. Nonetheless, the Comintern’s popular front strategy, developed in France, had an inherent European bias. This partiality was seen both in the focus on an anti-fascist struggle based primarily in a Europe dependent on colonial resources and in the damping down of the demand for Algerian independence to avoid alienating European settlers concerned with fighting fascism. Thus, the PCA’s organisational autonomy did not mean political autonomy.

This chapter deals with Julio Medem's film La pelota vasca, which is a documentary about the Basque nationalist movement in Spain. La pelota vasca is a polyphonic patchwork of speakers on this subject, whose range of perspectives and depth of feeling are interwoven in an inclusive montage that, in terms of finding a solution, is both open minded and, inevitably, open ended. Medem assembled the documentary by dividing out the pieces in sections. Its analysis takes into account the history of filmmaking in the Basque Country, wherein the union of political thought and action with film theory and practice propagated a forceful faith in documentary as an instrument of record and propaganda that contributed to a cultural offensive against the conventions of the centralised film industry during and after the dictatorship. The polemic made La pelota vasca the most commercially successful documentary in the history of Spanish cinema.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book attempts to understand how two sister centre-left parties, the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party (ALP), have sought to adapt to the modern era and effect changes. It examines aspects of the democratic renewal agenda and its prospects for the revitalisation of labour politics. The book identifies a range of drivers for Labour's desire to experiment and find new forms of citizen engagement. It also examines how far the New Social Democracy (NSD) has influenced Labour governments in Britain and Australia. The book establishes Labour's interest in democratic renewal, specifically, the role of political participation and civic engagement in the wider context of democratic theory.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a libel case, brought by a well-known female dancer against a maverick right-wing MP for the accusation of lesbianism. It looks at two inquests and three magistrate-court trials that involved women and drugs. The conundrum acts as a catalyst, opening up a fascinating terrain of questions concerning the law, the press, the public, young women and issues of morality. The book focuses on Edith Thompson; one way of accessing court proceedings has been via the account of the trial published as part of the Notable British Trial Series. It then focuses on Marguerite Marie Alibert Fahmy. The book centres on an extraordinary divorce case, that of Christabel Russell, involving cross-dressing, claims of a virgin birth, extreme sexual ignorance, and a particular brand of eccentric modern femininity.

Social democracy and social protest movements have been closely related since the rise of industrial society. This chapter discusses ideal, typical early social democratic formations and their relationships to social movements, and how these relationships changed as social democrats became reformist co-managers in democratic social market economies. Rapid cultural and social changes in occupational structures, residential suburbanisation, slow 'massification' of higher education and the coming of television obliged social democratic leaders to rely less on a 'big tent' model and more on new political technologies. The chapter also discusses more recent times social movements. Here, social democrats have had to confront the emergence of new, strong, and challenging social protest movements against a background of Europeanisation and globalisation, neo-liberal policy orthodoxies and the consequences of the huge post-2008 global financial crisis. In the new century many left-loser movements have also become parties, following the Green model.

The 'Smith/Party Group' was an informal faction inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the early 1970s. The focus of the Smith Group's critique of the CPGB programme The British Road to Socialism was the party's attitude and demeanour towards the supposedly 'mass party of the British working class', the Labour Party. The feminist critique of left-wing politics was clearly a factor in the eventual dissolution of the Smith Group, with what one member would charge was the Group's 'contentious mode of expressing ourselves' and reluctance 'to consider the problems of sexism'. Most Smith Group members were university lecturers or postgraduates, journalists or other non-affiliated professionals, what Antonio Gramsci would have characterised as 'traditional intellectuals'. There was never a fixed or even recorded membership, but rather 'a loose association of individuals', around 35 to 40 in London and a few others in contact elsewhere, mainly Manchester and Glasgow.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses Irish society in the early twenty-first century, but seeks to do so by consciously avoiding myth-making and generalisation. It explores how power works ideologically and through policy instruments to support dominant models of capital accumulation. The book discusses how neo-liberalism as both an ideology and practice continues to 'fail forward' despite being implicated as cause and aftereffect of the global economic crisis. It describes the powerful discursive and disciplinary force of 'development'; how it is invoked in politics and the media to nullify debate and to disguise its own ideological underpinnings and the provisionality of its assumptions. The book presents twelve events that span the years 2001-2009.

This chapter reviews a number of theories of punk's emergence. Punk was a response to alienation and domination on behalf of working-class youths, bolstered by indignation at the co-optation of previous youth rebellion. The idea that punk was a response to the alienation of working-class youth is associated with the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies (CCCS). Punk was also a response to frustration at the state of popular music in the UK in the mid 1970s. Punk was inspired by a number of earlier attempts to recapture the vibrancy and excitement of pop's history. Punk was the product of Malcolm McLaren's entrepreneurial machinations and/or the charisma of John Lydon. The chapter considers factor which has figured strongly in post-strain sociological theories of collective action: opportunity. Punk was a response to new opportunities for innovation within the music industry.