BENSAÏD, DANIEL. Les trotskysmes. Deuxième éd. [Que sais-je?, 3629.] Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2002. 128 pp. € 6.50.

CHARPIER, FRÉDÉRIC. Histoire de l'extrême gauche trotskiste. De 1929 à nos jours. Editions 1, Paris 2002. 402 pp. € 22.00.

MARIE, JEAN-JACQUES. Le trotskysme et les trotskystes. D'hier à aujourd'hui, l'ideologie et les objectifs des trotskystes à travers le monde. [Collection L'Histoire au present.] Armand Colin, Paris 2002. 224 pp.€ 21.00.

NICK, CHRISTOPHE. Les Trotskistes. Fayard, [Paris] 2003. 618 pp. € 23.00.

The Trotskyist Fourth International went through many quarrels and splits after its foundation in 1938 – understandably, given the political and social isolation in which the movement generally functioned. Its enemies to its left and right crowded the Trotskyists into an uncomfortably narrow space. Trotskyists' intense internal discussions functioned as a sort of immune response, which could only be effective if theoretical and programmatic issues were clearly formulated. The more practical success eluded them, the more programmatic clarity served as compensation and monopolized their attention. In the name of various “isms” their passions sometimes took acute forms, while, under the surface, “ordinary” human shortcomings threw oil on the fire.

At the very beginning of the investigation, it is necessary to find a word to describe the European masses before the coming of the twin revolutions, the French and Industrial, that have contributed so much to the making of the modern world. “Proletariat” is clearly anachronistic; “wage-earners” is inadequate in a society where cash wages were far from being the most common form of payment for labor. “Working class” is too much identified with nineteenth century developments and, what is worse, conjures up an image of a homogeneous group that does not conform to eighteenth century realities. “Laboring poor” is by far the best, for it emphasizes two primary facts about the people with whom we are concerned: first, that, to one extent or another, they earned their living by doing manual labor, and, second, that they were being continuously impoverished, as Professor Labrousse has shown. The category has several virtues as a tool of historical analysis. It is large enough to take account of the complexities of eighteenth century social conditions, stressing the mobility and social intercourse that existed, albeit on a diminishing scale, between the master artisans and shopkeepers, their apprentices and journeymen on the one hand, and the domestics, beggars, criminals and floating elements in the population, on the other. Classes laborieuses and classes dangereuses lived side by side and recruited their personnel from one another. They did in fact form a whole, whom contemporaries called “les classes inférieures”. If we look toward the future, we see that the French Revolution Was to bring about a temporary split in their ranks by politicizing those among them who became the sans-culottes, and that the Industrial Revolution was to complete this division on other bases by allowing some of the laboring poor to become petty capitalists, While forcing the majority to become proletarians or to fall further still into the nether world of the lumpen-proletariat. In sum, the use of the concept of the laboring poor enables us to come close to the reality of eighteenth century paris and to watch the disagregation of that reality with the passage of time.

The history of working-class politics in Britain during the last hundred years might be written in terms of changing attitudes towards Liberalism; a Liberalism which was continuously redefining itself as its social composition altered and political circumstances changed. Successive generations of working-class leaders attempted both to identify themselves with Liberalism and to disengage themselves from it. Those who saw the political future of labour in terms of full incorporation within the Liberal party were never left unchallenged; those who believed in political independence rarely thought of that independence as involving a complete break with Liberal values. From the eighteen-sixties onwards the conflict between the desire to be assimilated and the urge to independence was continuously present within individuals as well as within movements.

This article discusses how residents of early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, defined vagrancy. Commentators on the 1890 Penal Code sought to explain the terms of the article related to vagrancy, article number 399, and its application. Evaristo de Moraes, a lawyer, essayist, and public intellectual at that time, similarly dedicated several works to this topic, as did journalists and literary writers who worked in the press. But these debates in the lettered realm were not isolated from the views and actions of average citizens, a phenomenon that one can observe by reading the criminal proceedings against women who were arrested for repeat offenses against anti-vagrancy laws. In the interventions and arguments of the accused and their defenders, it is possible to observe how vagrancy took on new meanings and how, over the course of time, the relationship between these women and the world of work evolved.

One of the most important aspects of late nineteenth century European intellectual life was the revival of Thomism, which enveloped the philosophical, social and political outlooks of Catholics. The great influence of the Neo-Thomistic intellectual current appears somewhat enigmatic in view of recent criticism of the methods and substantive propositions employed by turn of the century Thomistic philosophers. The very word “philosopher” might in fact be justifiably denied to many of these Neo-Thomists, since they seem to have forgotten too often that philosophy means asking questions. It is rare to see in their works a creative application of Thomistic ideas to the modern world. Instead, they attempted to fit modern society into a rigid, dogmatic framework of Thomistic principles. And if these principles turned out to be straightjackets, neither philosophy nor Aquinas, but only the Neo-Thomists are to blame. For Aquinas' philosophy, as Etienne Gilson and Ralph M. McInerny have recently pointed out, was an extremely creative adaptation of Aristotle's thought to medieval intellectual, social and political conditions, as well as to the principles of Christianity. Aquinas' method of continuous questioning stood in contrast to the dogmatism of most of his self-proclaimed disciples in modern times.

This article is a case study of wrecking, based on a database of hundreds of shipwrecks that occurred between 1780 and 1870, in what is today Estonia. Through a qualitative analysis of narrative sources, it examines the wrecking activities of manorial lords as well as of their peasants. Contrary to the international scholarly tradition, which views wrecking as an activity of the common people, this article sheds light on the deceptive and opportunistic activities of manorial lords, who were responsible for enforcing the law at the local level by performing police and court functions, but who, at the same time, benefited on a large scale from wrecking. The article contrasts this with the opportunities coastal peasants had to wreck for their own profit. In wrecking and salvage, the three characteristic elements of peasant-landlord relationships – exploitation, partnership, and patronage – emerge. In contrast with studies focusing on the friction between peasants and their lords in regions dominated by manorialism, this article argues that, in wrecking, their collaboration apparently proceeded without much conflict in this period.

This article considers the transformation of labour relations in wool farming in the Cape Colony/Province between 1865 and 1950. It focuses specifically on shepherds and how their relationship with farmers changed as a result of the requirement to improve production through the implementation of fenced camps in the late nineteenth century. It was expected that this innovation would reduce the demand among farmers for shepherds. This article shows, however, that the demand for shepherds continued due to the existence of jackals and the lack of sufficient water in the dry Karoo. It was not until the 1910s that, on the most progressive farms, the demand for shepherds was markedly reduced. But the shepherds were replaced by camp walkers – people who managed fences rather than sheep. Among farmers who had not invested in fencing and water supplies, the demand for shepherding continued, and, to compete, those farmers hired younger shepherds.

This article analyses the role coerced intermediaries had on colonial power and authority in the prisons of British India. Coerced intermediaries in this context were convicts placed in positions of control by the colonial prison administration as warders, overseers, and night watchmen and night watchwomen, summarized here under the term “convict officers”. These convict officers were employed by the colonial authorities to maintain a coercive order and became essential to the exercise of colonial authority and control in the prisons of British India. The article argues that with their employment, the colonial administration created a third group within its prisons, situated between the colonial administration and the inmates. This contradictory practice blurred the lines of colonial control and authority and raises larger questions about intermediation by unfree and coerced people in unfree and coerced colonial contexts. The focus here is not so much on what intermediation is but on what it does. At the same time, the article relates the system of convict officers as intermediaries to the theoretical concepts used by Foucault and Goffman and questions the binarity used in most of their theories.

Der Aufsatz „Luther als Schiedsrichter zwischen Strauss und Feuerbach” erschien im zweiten Band der von Arnold Ruge 1843 in der Schweiz herausgegebenen „Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik”, Seite 206–208, und war gezeichnet mit „Kein Berliner”. Rjazanov druckt ihn in der MEGA, I,1,1, S. 174–175, ab mit der Bemerkung, die Autorschaft von Marx sei „als sicher anzunehmen”. Von der MEGA übernehmen den Aufsatz unter anderen die im Dietz-Verlag erscheinende Ausgabe „Marx-Engels-Werke” und die von H. J. Lieber veranstaltete „Karl-Marx-Ausgabe” in der Wissenschaftlichen Buchgesellschaft. Die von Hermann Becker 1851 herausgegebenen „Gesammelten Aufsätze von Karl Marx” und die von Franz Mehring veranstaltete Ausgabe „Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von K. Marx, Fr. Engels und F. Lassalle” enthalten den Aufsatz nicht.

This article aims to identify migration systems in north-western nineteenth-century Portugal to contribute to the understanding of the puzzle that is Portuguese migration dynamics. Through the analysis of the passport and parish registers from the concelho of Vila do Conde, it was possible to determine three systems, the Atlantic, the Lisbon, and the local. The occurrence and characteristics of the systems varied according to socio-economic contexts, both in the sending and receiving areas, and also according to the emigrants’ life cycles.

This article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

This article examines legal relations between estate owners and their servants and workers on Danish estates in the nineteenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the traditional privileged role of Danish estate owners was changing, and their special legal status as “heads of household” over the entire population on their estates was slowly being undermined. The article investigates the relationship between estate owners and their servants and workers in legislation and court cases during these times of change. It examines the Danish servant acts from 1791 and 1854 and identifies the asymmetric order of subordination and superiority in this legislation. The core of the relationship was still a “contractual submission” that, to some extent, was private and unregulated by law, and estate owners were entitled to impose sanctions and physical punishment on their servants and workers according to their own judgement. When the Servant Law of 1854 abolished estate owners’ right to punish adult servants physically, it was a significant break from the old legal order. However, a central element in the legislation, before and after 1854, was that servants’ and workers’ disobedience towards estate owners was illegal. By analysing court cases, the article examines the borderlands of the legal definition of disobedience. The elasticity in the legal system was substantial – and frequently favoured the owners. In the legal system, the notion of disobedience served to protect the last remnants of the traditional legal order of submission and superiority.

Although much has been written about the history of the German Communist Party, little is known about who actually belonged to it or supported it. Yet knowledge of the social composition of German Communism is an important, in many ways crucial, factor in assessing the role of the KPD in the development of the German workers' movement during the Weimar Republic. Aside from a census of party members conducted by the national leadership in 1927, and voting returns in elections, there are no national sources on which to base an analysis of the social structure of the Communist movement in Germany. Local and regional sources, though sporadically preserved and until now little exploited, offer an alternative way to determine the social bases of German Communism. This article contributes to the history of the KPD by attempting to analyze one source about support for German Communism in a major industrial city. In October 1923 the KPD staged an insurrection in Hamburg, resulting in the arrest and conviction of over 800 persons. A social analysis of these known insurrectionaries can indicate some of the sources of support for the KPD and suggest some of the ways in which the KPD fit into the history of the German working class and workers' movement.

While scholarship on “women's liberation” under historically existing socialism focuses on heroic women making inroads into male-dominated domains, this article explores a previously overlooked group of women in socialist China. Known as jiashu in Chinese, these women are the female dependents (wives, mothers, and in-laws) of both male and female employees in a workplace. Specifically, it centers on the experiences of the jiashu of textile workers in the city of Zhengzhou from 1949 to 1962. It argues that, despite being portrayed as “parasitizing” off formal workers, jiashu performed a wide range of work, both paid and unpaid, inside and outside the household. Similar to their counterparts under capitalism and other state-socialist regimes, these Chinese women's unpaid domestic work sustained the daily and generational reproduction of the labor force and was thus essential to industrial accumulation. Moreover, jiashu also worked on the shopfloor and in collectivized service facilities as paid laborers. Such remunerated work also subsidized accumulation, and the resistance from these women contributed to the eventual collapse of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This research advances the field in two ways. First, it expands theories about the relationship between women's work, social reproduction, and capital accumulation to include work that is both reproductive in nature and remunerated – a previously understudied form of labor. Second, while existing literature focuses on structural analysis and explains why women's work is functional to accumulation, this study gives equal attention to women's agency, showing how interactions between the two shaped historical trajectories.