Where possible, European minorities in Africa during this century have sought to insure their favored position, especially their economic position, through political action. The trend of labor legislation in Southern Rhodesia after it became a “self-governing Colony” in 1923 is a case in point. But this was not always possible. In Northern Rhodesia, for instance, the color bar was far more difficult to introduce, especially after Lord Passfield's 1929 revival of the native paramountcy doctrine for east and central Africa. The history of the white miners' trade union is apposite.

Brief notices in French newpsapers of October 22, 1940 announcing the death of Willi Münzenberg failed to attract the attention of the international press occupied with reporting the progress of the Second World War. Münzenberg's body had been discovered in the woods of Cagnet in Southwestern France with a wire garrote around the neck. The cause and macabre circumstances of death were shrouded in mystery. More than twenty years have blurred and obscured the career of the most exceptional propagandist of the communist movement.

The unexpected death of Adolf Johann Cord Rüter on August 11, 1965, has deeply affected his colleagues and co-workers, his students and his friends. But if for them all his decease was a grievous personal loss, for his country it was more; both the pursuit and the teaching of history have suffered inestimably through his passing. In the following pages an attempt will be made to give a brief outline of Rüter's work as a historian and a professor of history, an account of his activities as director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam being left to a more competent hand.

One of the best-known incidents in the history of the Bee-Hive is the reorganisation of 1870, which enabled the Junta to put in their own nominee as editor. What has received far less attention is the way in which the process began in 1868. The first intimation of this to the Bee-Hive's readers was the report of the half-yearly shareholders' meeting held on 29 May. After Potter had again stressed the effects of “the great depression in all trades”, Troup, on behalf of the Directors, “laid a plan before the meeting, by which he thought that the paper could be more advantageously carried on in the interests of the shareholders”. No details of this plan are given in the report; but from the ensuing discussion it is clear that it involved far-reaching changes, since Connolly, Whetstone, and others objected that “any alteration in the constitution of the paper” required the sanction of a specially-convened meeting. Having secured this respite, the shareholders then adopted a resolution, moved by Hartwell, which was obviously intended to provide an alternative solution to their problems – that arrangements should immediately be made for canvassing societies and holding district meetings to advocate the taking up of shares. But this was really a forlorn hope. At the special meeting, on 17 June, the discussion mainly centred round a proposal from the floor that a small committee should be elected to protect the shareholders' interests in the “impending negotiations”. Eventually this was withdrawn, and the Directors were empowered to make “such alterations in the management and arrangements of the paper as would probably effect the object they all desired – increased circulation and influence, and the payment of a dividend on the shares”.

The English Chartists of the nineteenth century were men who lived in very modest circumstances, and their mobility, their empiricism, their lack of filing facilities, the housepride of their wives and the discontinuity of their particular organisations militated against the proper preservations of their archives. For the history of Chartism we rely upon contemporary printed sources, Home Office Papers, a handful of Collections and a few autobiographies. Thus when A.R. Schoyen set out to write Chartist Challenge, book a centred round the person of the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, he was obliged to open his Preface as follows: “The impersonal nature of most of the available materials on Julian Harney, mainly newspapers and periodicals in which he wrote, leave one with no more than conjectures about some aspects of his life.”

The importance of the “Lavrists” or “Vperedovtsy”, named after the publication Vpered (Forward) (1873–1877) founded and edited by Peter Lavrovich Lavrov, in the evolution of the socialist ideas and groups in Russia has been recognized by historians from Alphonse Thun to Franco Venturi. The journal's role in the dissemination of the socialist credo among Russian Jews has never been seriously disputed, although seldom recorded in concrete terms.

Seit seiner Entstehung hatte sich der vor allem aus dem linken Flügel der Vorkriegssozialdemokratie hervorgegangene deutsche Kommunismus scharf von der SPD distanziert, deren „Ersatz-Marxismus”, wie Rosa Luxemburg auf dem Gründungsparteitag der KPD am 31. Dezember 1918 meinte, die sozialistische Bewegung „zu einem Dahinsiechen im Rahmen und auf dem Boden der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft verurteilte, ohne jedes ernste Bestreben, die Gesellschaft zu erschüttern und aus den Fugen zu bringen”. Trotz all ihrer Differenzen in wichtigen Fragen waren sich Lenin und Luxemburg einig in ihrem Haß gegen die „Sozialverräter”, wie Lenin die Sozialdemokraten verächtlich nannte. Und Rosa Luxemburg sagte von ihnen und den deutschen Gewerkschaftsführern, sie seien die „infamsten und größten Halunken, die in der Welt gelebt haben”; ihre „sogenannte sozialistische Regierung” sei in Wirklichkeit eine „Regierung der bürgerlichen Konterrevolution”. Die Frontstellung gegen die Sozialdemokratie bestimmte also bereits die Politik der jungen KPD und der im März 1919 gegründeten Kommunistischen Internationale, ehe am 23. März 1919 auf der Piazza San Sepolcro in Mailand von dem ehemaligen Sozialisten Mussolini die „Fasci di Combattimento” ins Leben gerufen wurden und Hitler im September desselben Jahres in die winzige „Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” eintrat, die einige Monate später den Namen „NSDAP” erhielt. Der Kampf gegen diese beiden politischen Gruppierungen, die Sozialdemokratie und den „Faschismus”, bestimmte in der Periode der Weimarer Republik in nicht geringem Maße die Politik der KPD. Wir wollen die Entwicklung des kommunistischen Verhältnisses zur Sozialdemokratie sowie vor allem die Geschichte des Begriffs „Sozialfaschismus” in Deutschland in einem kurzen Überblick betrachten.

Refuge traditionnel des exilés politiques au XIXème siècle, trait d'union géographique et historique entre le socialisme allemand et le socialisme français, la Belgique socialiste fut choisie, en 1900, par considération pratique, comme centre officiel de la IIème Internationale. Le Comité Exécutif Permanent du Bureau Socialiste International, qui assurait l'existence de l'association entre ses congrès, était exclusivement composé de Belges. Grâce à cette situation privilégiée, Émile Vandervelde, son président, et Camille Huysmans, son secrétaire depuis 1905, jouàrent sur le plan international, un rôle appréciable. La publication récente de la correspondance échangée entre Huysmans et Lénine vient encore, s'il le fallait, de le mettre en lumière.

In the first months of 1865 artisan and middle class Reformers in London established the Reform League with the publicly stated political goals of “manhood suffrage and the ballot”. Reflecting a new political awareness among artisan workingmen as well as a realization that workingmen and sympathetic bourgeois Reformers might achieve more when agitating together, the League resulted from experiences and associations in several recent working class and bourgeois campaigns, concerns, and agitations. London artisans, for instance, had been involved in trade unions (both amalgamated and local), the London Trades Council, Trades Union Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, Workingmen's Garibaldi Committee, Universal League for the Improvement of the Working Classes, and International Working Men's Association (“First International”). They also joined organizations and campaigns more closely associated with the middle classes: temperance groups, Liberation Society, National League for Polish Independence, Emancipation Society, and Ballot Society. Here the artisans met bourgeois Reformers who helped establish and finance the Reform League.

The emergence of nineteenth century socialism as a mass political movement required the cooperation of two distinct elements – a radical intelligentsia, and a working class whose interests the former purported to represent. In theory these two elements were to fuse into a harmonious whole, but in fact certain tensions arose, whether between trade union and party or between workers and intellectuals within the same organization. It is my intention to consider this problem within the context of the Russian Jewish socialist movement. Specifically, this entails an examination of the various forms of worker opposition to the leadership of the socialist “circles” of the 1880's and 1890's and to the leadership of the “General Jewish Labor Union in Russia and Poland” (the “Bund”), founded in 1897.

Der Revolution des Jahres 1848 gingen wichtige politische Ereignisse in mehreren Ländern Europas voraus. Die Niederwerfung des Krakauer Aufstandes 1846 und die auf die Einverleibung der Herzogtümer Schleswig-Holstein gerichtete dänische Politik wurden von allen fortschrittlichen Kräften abgelehnt. Der Ausgang des Schweizer Sonderbundkrieges war in den liberalen Kreisen Europas mit Genugtuung aufgenommen worden.

In the Northern textile areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the unskilled laborer's hostility to the new industrial middle classes led him to Chartism but not to class-consciousness, the recognition that his interests differed not only from the middle classes but from the upper classes as well. The unskilled workingman's antagonism to the middle classes did not depend upon developing feelings of working class solidarity nor was it directed towards the older rural gentry. When the unskilled worker reacted against the middle classes in the 1830's and ̓40's he was not yet prepared economically or psychologically for independence or class action.

In German history the concept of a “rising middle class” has been applied to three major periods of development in three different ways. Traditionally, German historians have been concerned with describing (1) the development of towns and an urban bourgeoisie during the Middle Ages; then (2) the rise of a bourgeois class of university trained jurists during the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries; and finally, (3) the rise the modern middle class common to an industrialized society.