One-day conference
5 April 2011
Old Whiteknights House, Seminar Room
Graduate School in Arts and Humanities
University of Reading
Programme
9.30-10: Registration
10-11: Opening address: Kevin Morgan (University of Manchester): From Infantile Disorders to the Fathers of the People: Youth and Generation in the Study of International Communism.
11-11.15: Coffee break
11.15-13.15: Morning Session: Communist education (Chair: Matthew Worley, University of Reading) Guillaume Quashie-Vauclin (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): Between Dance and Demonstration: the Union of the Republican Youth of France. 1945-1956; Elke Weesjes (University of Sussex – United Academics): Communist Identity: the Public vs. the Private Sphere; Leo Goretti (University of Reading): Irma Bandiera and Maria Goretti: Gender Role Models for Communist Girls in the Early Cold War Years (1945-1956).
13-15-14: Lunch
14-14.30: Screening of the trailer of the movie The Train to Moscow (Kiné-Vez Film);
14.30-17.00: Afternoon Session: Communism, Consumerism and Mass Culture (Chair: tba) Pia Koivunen (University of Tampere): A Dream Come True: Experiencing Socialism at the World Youth Festivals in the 1940s-1950s; Mark Fenemore (Manchester Metropolitan University): Glossy Socialism: the Youth Magazine Neues Leben, 1954-1969; Matthew Worley (University of Reading): Shot By Both Sides: Punk, Politics and the End of Consensus in Britain.
This event is funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Economic History Society.
Attendance is free but registration is required. For any additional information please contact the organisers: Matthew Worley (m.worley@reading.ac.uk); Leo Goretti (l.goretti@reading.ac.uk).
socialist history news 
One of the wittier placards displayed in the recent tuition-fee protests – “They say cutbacks, we say Feuerbach” – showed a sense of history as well as humour, for
Ludwig Feuerbach is back on the agenda. Karl Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach – “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point is to change it” – provides the title of Eric Hobsbawm’s magisterial How to Change the World, which joins a series of major works exploiting the recent rise in
Marx’s fortunes, as capitalism’s crisis marks the return of its greatest rival.
This book offers extensive coverage of pre-Marxian sources; meticulous accounts of Marx’s milieu through painstaking excavation of his predecessors, contemporaries and
heirs; strenuous readings of key texts including Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848); and
assiduous treatment of the legacy of Marxism as a world-changing philosophy..
How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism