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Celebrated as the father of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi was also a transnational activist. This chapter explores the transnational dimensions of Gandhi’s career and influence. It argues that Gandhian nonviolence—what he called ‘satyagraha’—was a transnational production: it was developed as a political performance that might allow those on the colonial periphery to influence metropolitan targets; it drew upon British, European, American, and Indian influences; it reflected intercultural relationships that spanned the continents. Second, it contends that the global career of Gandhian satyagraha was enabled by the mass communications of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and by a repeated labour of translation, shared among a community of nonviolent advocates in India and the West. The history of Gandhian protest therefore demonstrates the longevity of global activism. It also highlights the centrality of transnational networks to the forging of successful global careers and campaigns.

Social movements emerged quickly in Australia and exerted a rapid and important influence on the development of politics and society. Not only were Australian men among the first to enjoy the privilege of the suffrage, they were also among the first to extend this privilege to women, to form powerful unions, to forge parties of labour capable of wielding national power, and to host movements of environmental protection. Indigenous people also used methods of petitioning and demonstration from the nineteenth century, though with notably lesser success. The precocious mobilisation of Australian social movements reflected the nation's history as a penal colony and a settler colony. The state was a powerful agent and the object of political claims. It acted to repress the most radical political agents, but also to incorporate and legitimate the demands of major political campaigns. This process was evident from the nineteenth century until the twenty first. It was jeopardised by the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing unwillingness or incapacity of the state to conform to past practices. In understanding the trajectory of Australian social movements, one therefore grapples with more general questions concerning the relationships between movement, state, empire, and economy.

Australia was a precocious mass democracy. In the middle of the 19th century the franchise was extended to nearly all white male adults, the secret ballot was introduced, and other important reforms implemented. Surprisingly, these developments have attracted little recent attention. Dominant interpretations are based on selective surveys of particular colonies; they either elevate the gold diggings or else cynically claim that democratisation was mostly accidental and inglorious. This paper encompasses a survey of the three major colonies. It argues that widespread collective action was a spur to political change, and that electoral reforms were introduced to contain future contention.

The rise of Hansonism provoked a campaign of demonstrations, rallies, marches and walkouts. This movement was frequently received within the media as violent, disruptive, and illiberal. However, I argue that anti-Hanson contention represented a noteworthy form of active citizenship. It contested the presence of the One Nation Party, undermined the ideological claim that Hanson represented ‘ordinary’ Australians, and garnered substantial publicity. The anti-Hanson campaign was concerned not only with the staging of dissent in public space, but with how that dissent was framed within the public sphere. Reflecting these public dynamics, the anti-Hanson movement moved over time from a reliance on contestational gatherings, that directly opposed the One Nation Party in physical space to autonomous gatherings, that attempted to create separate spaces of anti-racist politics. Ultimately, therefore, the campaign can be understood as a flexible, democratic and self-reflexive form of political mobilisation.

The emerging forms of global economy and culture have stimulated a recent, feverish interest in the possibilities of social movements in a globalized environment. Transnational social movements have beckoned as new political actors; global civil society has loomed as a new forum for democratic decision making; and new(ish) technologies, such as the internet, have promised fresh forms of international mobilization and organization.1 This has coalesced with the postmodern insistence on contemporary transformation, difference, and play, so that the near future has seemingly promised newly minted, international, performative, fractured, mass-mediated, and technologically wired social movements, operating in a historically novel fashion on the terrain of global civil society. However, this enticing prospect has recently been questioned on a number of grounds. The political capacities of social movements to contest globalization have been found wanting;2 the tendency of global civil society to amplify the values and powers of the advanced industrial societies has been highlighted;3 and the cyberdemocratic appeal of the internet doubted.4 More than that, the historical novelty of contemporary social movement practice has also come under strong attack. Historians have identified such playful and expressive activities as demonstrations, boycotts, and public assemblies in the eighteenth century.5 They have emphasized the international circulation of ideas like popular sovereignty in the period before the American Revolution6 and the transnational scope of such venerable movements as the campaign for working-class emancipation.7

This article attempts to place the philosophy of Marxism inside the web of Communist political practice within the Communist Party of Australia between 1942 and 1956. It argues that Marxism was presented as an objective knowledge, and the prestige of Marxism was used by Party leaders to build internal discipline and unity, and quell dissent. Party intellectuals selectively called upon Marxist authorities in order to entrench their own power, and to justify political strategies. Detailed attention is given to three specific uses of Marxism: the way Marxism was used to justify Party policy, to explain the Party's growth between 1941 and 1945, and to justify ‘loyal’ dissidence within the Party. The result of these ideological uses of Marxism was that Communists failed to understand their political environment and the extent of their political influence. The events of 1956 threatened the health and internal equilibrium of the Communist Party, and the implications of these events on the subsequent use...

This article argues that the Australian Labor Party was transformed in the 1950s, shedding its rhetorical commitment to socialism as well as many of its democratic ties to the organised working class. It also attempts to explain this transformation. The argument that this transformation was the product of rising working-class incomes and declining class consciousness is considered, before being rejected on both empirical and theoretical grounds. An alternative political explanation, which focuses on the interactions between the Party, its working-class constituency, and its leadership, is then offered. The article thereby aims not only to reconceptualise a specific moment in the history of Labor, but to reorient our theoretical approach to the Party, and our understanding of political change in the early postwar decades.

‘Pressure groups’ and ‘social movements’ were not a central concern of the first Australian political scientists. The earliest studies focused on the structures of government and the role of formal institutions. ‘Pressure groups’ were only a marginal reference in these works, and ‘social movements’ were not referred to at all.

This article deals with European Nuclear Disarmament's (END) difficult positioning in the Cold War of the 1980s. Its vision was for a humanistic socialism from below that would be capable of breaking up the Cold War and unite a divided Europe that in turn could act as a possible "third way" between the liberal capitalism of the USA and the orthodox Communism of the Soviet Union. However, it proved difficult to build these alliances across the Cold War divide without talking, at the same time, to representatives of the "official" peace movements of the Communist states. END found itself between the Scylla of having no dialogue at all with Eastern Europe or the Charybdis of having a dialogue also with the Communist regimes which was seen sceptically by the dissidents. The article traces the difficulties of END of building humanistic socialist alliances for peace from below with special reference to END's Working Group on Germany.

This article studies the rise of the modern labour technocrat within the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Union, which developed in this period a large research, educational and publicity apparatus, a vibrant shop steward movement, and independence from the political parties of the labour movement. Intellectual work within the union at first aimed to encourage rank and-file intervention in industry. A series of defeats and changing political relationships altered the focus of intellectual work to an alliance with Labor in government. Thus the union's intellectuals took on a different role, that of technocratic expert. The rise of the modern labour technocrat- a new and dominant actor in the labour movement of the 1980s - was not inevitable. There was a contest over the place and role of the labour expert in the 'modern union' during the 1970s and 80s.