By analysing and comparing three waves of contentious collective action employed by the pioneering generation of Chinese state workers at one particular state-owned enterprise from the 1960s to the present, this study aims to explain its varying forms and to analyse its effectiveness in different historical periods. I argue that the changing political opportunity structure in various historical contexts has greatly conditioned workers’ “repertoire of contention” at each moment and, hence, significantly affected the processes, strategies, and outcomes of workers’ contentious collective action. This article highlights the paradoxical role of the socialist social contract as a potential but crucial component of “the repertoire of contention”, by arguing that different interpretations of the contract, as conditioned by a certain political opportunity structure in different historical periods, could either empower or disempower workers. Both archival and oral history research are used in this study.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had a long tradition of anti-colonial activism since its foundation in 1920 and had been a champion of national liberation within the British Empire. However, the Party also adhered to the idea that Britain’s former colonies, once independent, would want to join a trade relationship with their former coloniser, believing that Britain required these forms of relationship to maintain supplies of food and raw materials. This position was maintained into the 1950s until challenged in 1956–1957 by the Party’s African and Caribbean membership, seizing the opportunity presented by the fallout of the political crises facing the CPGB in 1956. I argue in this article that this challenge was an important turning point for the Communist Party’s view on issues of imperialism and race, and also led to a burst of anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. But this victory by its African and Caribbean members was short-lived, as the political landscape and agenda of the CPGB shifted in the late 1960s.

The Schuman Plan to “pool” the coal and steel industries of Western Europe has been widely celebrated as the founding document of today’s European Union. An expansive historiography has developed around the plan but labor and workers are largely absent from existing accounts, even though the sectors targeted for integration, coal and steel, are traditionally understood as centers of working-class militancy and union activity in Europe. Existing literature generally considers the role coal and steel industries played as objects of the Schuman Plan negotiations but this article reverses this approach. It examines instead how labor politics in the French Nord and Pas-de-Calais and the German Ruhr, core industrial regions, influenced the positions adopted by two prominent political parties, the French Socialist and German Social Democratic parties, on the integration of European heavy industry. The empirical material combines archival research in party and national archives with findings from regional histories of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, the Ruhr, and their local socialist party chapters, as well as from historical and sociological research on miners and industrial workers. The article analyses how intense battles between socialists and communists for the allegiance of coal and steel workers shaped the political culture of these regions after the war and culminated during a mass wave of strikes in 1947–1948. The divergent political outcomes of these battles in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr, this article contends, strongly contributed to the decisions of the French Socialist Party to support and the German Social Democratic Party to oppose the Schuman Plan in 1950.

The ‘école barisienne’ refers to a group of intellectuals, active between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, who brought their academic and political activity together in order to bring the cultural heritage of Italian communism up to date and to construct a new theory of the revolution. Interpreting the student movement of 1968 as the historical agent of a social and political revolution, their intention was to transform the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into a ‘partito-società’ (‘party-society’) that could take hold of the new generation’s demand for democracy and overturn the hegemony of Christian Democracy, understood as the ‘partito-Stato’ (‘party-state’). This article retraces the life of this intellectual grouping, from the education of its proponents, marked by the Southern Question as a national question, through to the demise of their project. Specifically, it examines the relationship between the research activity of the école, highlighting some significant analytical categorisation used in its historiographical output, its political activity, and the national position of the PCI.

Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, published in 1827 after being detached from his string quartet Op. 130, appears to be the first work ever to have been allocated rehearsal letters. These were added by Beethoven’s friend Karl Holz at the request of the composer and his publisher Mathias Artaria. The rehearsal letters can be compared with the work’s structure, which is best perceived as dividing into three main ‘movements’, the third being much the longest. A different approach is necessary for analysing each of the three. In the first, reference to medieval rhythmic modes helps to clarify Beethoven’s procedure. The second is essentially a fugue, albeit unusually homophonic. The third is multi-partite but mainly in $$\raster="rg4"$$ , and includes a 32-bar theme that returns intact – the only substantial exact reprise of material. This movement also include two fugal expositions. Thus there are four full fugal expositions altogether, and each is a double fugue in which the exposition is more or less regular. Holz’s letters match up well but not perfectly with the structure of the work.

Until the present article, Massenet's influence upon the music of Olivier Messiaen has remained entirely unexplored. During the 1930 and 1940s, Messiaen professed his love for the music of Massenet and regularly used Massenet as a model in his teaching materials. Several examples of the way in which Messiaen selects and transforms passages from Massenet's Werther and Manon are considered. The inclusion of a harmonic formula borrowed from Massenet, contrasted with a melodic formula borrowed from Mozart, in ‘Amen du Désir’, the fourth movement of the Visions de l'Amen, reveals the operatic characters hidden behind the programme of one of Messiaen's best-known works. These intersecting source materials in Messiaen's teaching and composition open new roads for the analysis of the composer's music and pedagogy.

In the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality. In this article, I revisit the mid-century process of canon formation in order to excavate a deeper, less divisive understanding of its history. Using Benjamin Britten as a case study, I sketch a more ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between major and minor composers than has often been suggested. After illuminating key tropes in Britten's mid-century reception, I examine how the composer and his critics fashioned his canonical minority and, in the process, helped to construct the ‘majority’ of his modernist counterparts. I argue that, far from marginalizing his oeuvre, Britten's ambivalent, peripheral, and even diminutive relationship with the ‘major’ figures of musical modernism was central both to his mid-century appeal and his enduring place in the canon. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to Britten's complex and self-conscious canonical negotiations can teach us a lot not just about his own role in history, but also about the wider ways that twentieth-century canons are negotiated, mediated, transmitted, and performed.