The article investigates relations between workers and intellectuals in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party in St Petersburg and the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. It commences with a background examination of the social position and traditions of the intelligentsia in each country and the emergence of a stratum of so-called “conscious” workers. The position of workers in each party is then analysed, especially with respect to leadership, and the nature of tensions between workers and intellectuals explored. The investigation demonstrates that workers acquiesced in their subordination to a greater degree in Shanghai than in St Petersburg, and this and other differences are traced back to historical and cultural context. In conclusion, the implications of contextual differences are explored in order to suggest why the intelligentsia in the People's Republic of China (PRC) attracted greater odium from the party-state than its counterpart in the Soviet Union.

This article argues that historians have underestimated the importance and complexity of Marxists' engagement with feminism during the introduction of their doctrine into the French socialist movement before the First World War. It examines the ideological discourse of the Parti Ouvrier Français, the embodiment of Marxism in France from 1882 to 1905, in order to reveal the ambiguities and contradictions of the French Marxists' approach to the “woman question” – seeking to explicate the puzzling coincidence in the movement's rhetoric of a firmly feminist commitment to women's rights with an equally intransigent hostility to organized feminism.