Ende 1910 machte man sich in Wien Gedanken darüber, wie sich die Sozialdemokratie auf den dreißigsten Todestag von Karl Marx vorbereiten solle. Gustav Eckstein berichtete Karl Kautsky am 27. Dezember:

Für Freitag Abend bin ich zu einer „Marxisten-Konferenz” geladen, bei der die Situation besprochen werden soll, die sich aus der Freigabe von Marx' Schriften ergeben wird. Braun teilte mir mit, daß geplant sei, entweder eine internationale Aktion oder wenigstens eine der deutschen Marxisten zur Neuherausgabe von Marx' Schriften einzuleiten: und da Hilferding und ich jetzt gerade hier sind, soll Freitag eine Konferenz darüber stattfinden, an der Goldendach, Renner, Max Adler, Braun, Bauer, Hilferding u. ich teilnehmen sollen. Natürlich erwähnte ich nichts von Dietz' Plan und werde davon auch ohne Ihre Einwilligung nichts erwähnen.

More or less by definition, civil war refers to an armed conflict between citizens of the same country. However, the two outstanding European examples of this century, the civil wars in Spain and Russia, were in fact complicated by foreign intervention. Indeed, in the case of Spain, intervention by foreign powers proved decisive.

The debate over the labour bureaucracy has changed considerably since Robert Michels first argued that oligarchy was inevitable whenever humans organized. Recent work has tended to play down the notion of the labour bureaucracy as a body distinct from, and often in opposition to, the rank and file. Indeed, in the pages of this journal, Jonathan Zeitlin has maintained that “no clear line can be drawn between trade union officials and the ‘rank and file’”. Carrying this argument to its logical conclusion Zeitlin has urged that the “‘rank and filist’ paradigm is fundamentally unsatisfactory and should be abandoned rather than further refined”. Though others would not push the revisionist argument this far, the general tendency has been to agree that the earlier generalizations were over-blown and that it is difficult to distinguish between bureaucrats and members. Many of Zeitlin's earlier opponents now appear to be nearly indistinguishable from him, and few argue that the interests of the labour leadership differ in any important degree from those of the rank and file. I believe, however, that the reports of the demise of the labour bureaucrat have been somewhat exaggerated. This paper will argue that though the argument needs to be re-formulated, the paradigm of the labour bureaucracy remains a useful one. Such a reformulation must shift the focus from differences of ideology separating the leaders from the members and instead must turn to an analysis of the power relationship between the two. This paper will trace the recent twists and turns in the debate and will suggest ways in which it is possible to view the labour bureaucracy as a distinct layer of the union movement.

The National Socialist planning for a recolonization of Africa was based on a new social and labour policy and focused chiefly on the “labour question”. In designing their schemes, planners strove to mobilize wage labour and circumvent the much-feared “proletarianization” of the workers. The key problem in exploiting the African colonies had two main aspects: a shortage of manpower and migrant labour. Therefore, planners designed complex systems of organized, state-controlled labour recruitment, and formulated rules for labour contracts and compensation. An expanded labour administration was to ensure that the “deployment of labour” ran smoothly and that workers were registered, evaluated, and supervised. Furthermore, “white labour guardians” were to be assigned the responsibility of overseeing the social wellbeing of the African workers. As was evident not only in Germany but in the colonial powers, France and Great Britain, as well, these concepts all fit into the general trend of the times, a trend characterized by the application of scientific methods in solving social issues, by the increased emphasis on state intervention, and by the introduction of sociopolitical measures. Nazi planning was based on Germany's prewar politics but also reflected the changes occurring in German work life after 1933.

The present first volume of a study of the Dutch working-class movement between 1876 and 1886, covers the period from 1876 to 1883, in which each of the three currents of this movement found its definite course.

First of all the origin of the three large working men's organizations, their ideology and activity are sketched. In 1871 the A. N. W. V. (Algemeen Ncderlandsch Werklieden-Verbond — General Dutch Workers' Union) was founded in opposition to the First International, which had a small branch in Holland. This union was general in name, but liberal in character; it acknowledged private ownership and aimed at reconciliating the classes of society. In 1877 the Calvinist workmen, repelled by the Liberalism of the A. N. W. V., founded a society of their own, named Patrimonium. They also desired peace, but in a christianized, patriarchal society, in which the social distinctions ordained by God were mitigated by Christian love and fellow-feeling. In 1881 the S. D. B. (Sociaal Democratische Bond — Social Democratic Union) finally united all the scattered adherents of Socialism. This society soon came under the leadership of the ex-minister of religion Domela Nieuwenhuis. Though in its economic principles the influence of Marx was apparent, it was certainly not Marxist in character; in these years the socialists really lived in an eschatological expectation of salvation.

The present study is based on the vast number of letters written by and addressed to Lassalle, which have only been discovered during the last twenty years, and which have hitherto hardly been regarded seriously by historians. This study does not deal with the theories of the famous propagandist, but only with his political activity. It investigates his real motives for drafting the programme of the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein; for what he was agitating; and why he failed to attain his object. A short analysis of the internal situation of Prussia adds to a better understanding of the real possibilities, of Lassalle's schemes.

Special attention has been paid to the arguments which Lassalle used to convince Bismarck of the necessity of granting a general suffrage—the principal item of his programme—, and the analysis of his attitude towards the monarchial system of Poland and the caesarism of Napoleon III. His friend Rodbertus wanted to persuade him that caesarism was the "signatura temporis" for future Europe, and that consequently the dictatorial system had far better chances to succeed in solving the problem of the proletariat than democracy. But Lassalle was too much of a politician to let himself be persuaded that in the long run it would be possible to divorce the social elements from politics.

Finally the author compares the way in which Lassalle tried to influence the political outlook of his age with that of his rivals Marx and Engels.

Until 1916, though much had been written about Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy), nothing was known of the life of its author John Francis Bray, except that he was a journeyman printer in Leeds. In December of that year John Edwards published in the Socialist Review the results of research that he had made into Bray's career based on letters discovered in Leeds which had been written to Bray by his brothers. With these, he described Bray's life up to 1850 and discoveries of other letters by Alfred Mattison of Leeds brought the story up to 1854 which is the last date mentioned by Max Beer in his article on Bray in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

In common with many other countries, Australia has had, since 1920, a Communist Party, which is an obvious and continuing symbol of international reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Naturally enough the formation of this Communist Party and its subsequent history has attracted a degree of attention from historians and scholars of Communist movements and Australian politics. The impact of the Profintern, on the other hand, has been completely neglected. Even at the international level no full-scale study of the Profintern and its related trade-union organisations is yet available, and though one scholar has noticed that in Australia “the history of communism in the unions is […] separate from CPA political history”, the bases of this separation have been left relatively unexplored. This article seeks to examine Moscow's links with the Australian trade-union movement via the Profintern in the period 1920–35. It would seem that these links overshadowed the CPA as a “Communist” influence in the Australian context, at least for the first decade of the Comintern's existence. The separation of CPA history from the wider influence of Communism in the unions is discernible almost from the very start.

This article examines the roles of Mongolian monasteries and lamas in transportation between the Qing Chinese (1636–1911) and Russian Romanov (1613–1917) empires during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A series of treaties between 1858 and 1882 granted Russian subjects the right to trade in Mongolian territories under Qing sovereignty, and the resultant increase of Russian trade across Mongolia provided new wage-earning opportunities. Larger monasteries, with their access to pack animals and laborers, acted as brokers, while for poorer lamas haulage was one of the few sources of paid labor available in Mongolian territories, making working in transportation a strategy of survival for many Mongolian lamas. Mongolian porters provide a window on to how the broad processes of nineteenth-century imperialism in the Qing empire affected labor on the Sino–Russian frontier, and on to how imperialism was experienced in one of the most remote corners of the Qing empire.

The arrest and prosecution in 1945 of a small group of London anarchists associated with the radical anti-militarist and anti-war publication War Commentary at first appears to be a surprising and anomalous set of events, given that this group was hitherto considered to be too marginal and lacking in influence to raise official concern. This article argues that in the closing months of World War II the British government decided to suppress War Commentary because officials feared that its polemic might foment political turmoil and thwart postwar policy agendas as military personnel began to demobilize and reassert their civilian identities. For a short period of time, in an international context of “demobilization crisis”, anarchist anti-militarist polemic became a focus of both state fears of unrest and a public sphere fearing ongoing military regulation of public affairs. Analysing the positions taken by the anarchists and government in the course of the events leading to the prosecution of the editors of War Commentary, the article will draw on “warfare-state” revisions to the traditional “welfare-state” historiography of the period for a more comprehensive view of the context of these events.

The image of the crowd as an irrational, spontaneous multitude is commonly related to the works of a first generation of social psychologists writing in the early twentieth century, yet its basic features can be found in conceptual innovations developed as early as the Enlightenment. This article focuses on a particular protest in eighteenth-century Spain in order to reflect on the transformation in the meaning of essential terms which occurred in the semantic field of disorder. The so-called motín de Esquilache of 1766 forced the authorities to renew their discourse in order to deprive the movement of legitimacy, fostering semantic innovation. The redefinition of riot implied a process of conceptualization that not only stressed the protagonism of the disenfranchized but also altered a long-established tradition that linked riots to conspiracies and devised a new anthropology depicting the populace as a subject unable to produce ideas on its own.

The article examines the debates at the Asian Socialist Conference's (ASC) inaugural gathering in Rangoon in January 1953, using a variety of sources, including the minutes of the conference meetings found in the Swedish Social Democratic Party archives. The focus is on the efforts of Asian socialists to define Asian socialism in terms of three broad subjects: international politics; domestic politics; and economic politics. Throughout, particular attention is accorded to the role played by understandings of European socialism. The argument is threefold: that socialism was central to the ASC project, prompting efforts to define Asian socialism; that these efforts invariably raised the fraught question of Asian socialism's relationship with European socialism; and that the stakes involved in Rangoon were not limited to Asian socialism, but also involved socialism's potential as a global movement.

The period 1870–1880 represents an important phase in the history of social movements in Russia. Within that decade ideas and groups merged whose influence can be discerned in the events that preceded and those that followed the upheaval of 1917.

Among those groups one of the more interesting was the so-called Lavrists, or vperedovtzy, named after the publication “Vpered” (Forward), founded and edited by Peter Lavrov (1823–1900) and first published in Zurich, Switzerland, where volumes I and II were brought out in 1873 And 1874 respectively, and then in London, where volumes III, IV And V (the last-named not under the editorship of lavrov) as well as a bimonthly edition of “Vpered” were published during 1874–1877. In addition, the printing office of “Vpered” also produced several books and pamphlets.

England's first important socialist organization was the Social-Democratic Federation. During the eighteen-eighties this organisation was in the forefront of the socialist movement. It came to present an extreme and dogmatic socialism. But it is curious to recall that in origin the organization was not socialist. Although it had a few socialist members, it had no socialist program. The leader of the S.D.F., the wealthy Cambridge University graduate, the formerly pro-Tory journalist, H. M. Hyndman, is always associated with the growth and development of this organization. Yet it has not been recognized that in the very early days of the S.D.F. there was no certainty that Hyndman would hold the reins. Our aim in this essay is twofold: I. to detail the non-socialist beginnings of the S.D.F. and 2. to indicate Hyndman's connection with the new organization. The story of the formation of the S.D.F. – at first called the Democratic Federation – has never been told in its entirety. We will relate what happened at the first meetings. We will show how Hyndman came to gain control and how the Member of Parliament from Newcastle, Joseph Cowen, who could have been the leader, was superseded.

Havana's status as a colonial port shaped both its infrastructure needs and the patterns of labor recruitment and coercion used to build it. The port city's initial economic and political orientation was maritime, with capital and labor invested largely in defense and shipbuilding. By the nineteenth century, Cuba had become a plantation colony based on African enslavement, exporting increasing quantities of sugar to Europe and North America. Because the island was relatively underpopulated, workers for infrastructure projects and plantations had to be imported through global circuits of coerced labor, such as the transatlantic slave trade, the transportation of prisoners, and, in the 1800s, indentured workers from Europe, Mexico, or Asia. Cuban elites and colonial officials in charge of transportation projects experimented with different mixes of workers, who labored on the roads and railways under various degrees of coercion, but always within the socio-economic and cultural framework of a society based on the enslavement of people considered racially distinct. Thus, the indenture of white workers became a crucial supplement to other forms of labor coercion in the building of rail lines in the 1830s, but Cuban elites determined that these workers’ whiteness was too great a risk to the racial hierarchy of the Cuban labor market and therefore sought more racially distinct contract workers after 1840.