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.

The Conseil d'Etat of the Second Republic was dissolved on 2nd December 1851. A letter of protest, signed by eighteen of the forty Conseillers, was sent to Boulay de la Meurthe, Vice-President of the Republic. The Conseil was distrusted by Louis Napoleon; although initially well-disposed towards him after his election, it had generally sided with the Legislative Assembly in its clashes with him. Less than a month before the coup d'état, the Conseil clearly demonstrated where its sympathies lay; in November 1851, a large majority backed the Assembly and not the President over the project of law on “la responsibilité des dépositaries de l'autorité publique” (the “Loi des Questeurs”).

Décembre 1872. Depuis sept mois, la loi Dufaure a mis l'Internationale en dehors du droit commun. Les informateurs de la police, soucieux de prouver la réalité de la grande conjuration contre l'ordre, surveillent méticuleusement toutes les organisations populaires. L'un d'eux rapporte la discussion qui s'est tenue au Cercle Fraternel de Pierre Scize, dans le faubourg lyonnais de Vaise: «Voici ce que l'on aurait dû faire et l'on [sic] aurait pas perdu», déclare l'ouvrier coopérateur Terrasse, ancien trésorier, en 1867, d'un groupe de 1'Internationale: «il aurait fallu que les grandes villes se lèvent pour protester et dire à Versailles de laisser administrer Paris seul, et s'il s'administre bien, vous serez dissous [sic]. Si l'Assemblée avait vu toutes les villes se lever pour défendre Paris, elle se serait vue obligée de céder à la Commune.»

Central to Professor Pollard's “Reflections on a Re-consideration” is the contention that in 1917 Britain's co-operators decided to enter electoral politics as a result of the acceleration of long-run economic and social change. This decision, it is argued, emerged naturally from the steady prewar growth in class-consciousness established by secular shifts in the fabric of Britain's economy and society. We can agree that there is some evidence of a slow growth of class-consciousness before 1914, but not that this should have as its “natural” outcome the establishment of a political party by the British co-operative movement. It remains my contention that this departure was principally the result of the post-1914 experience of British co-operators.

August Becker, wegen seines roten Barts der „rote” Becker genannt, war zunächst - in den dreissiger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts – in der hessischen radikal-liberalen Bewegung, dann in der deutschen kommunistischen bzw. sozialistischen Bewegung des Vormärz eine führende Persönlichkeit. Bis zu seiner Emigration nach Amerika (1853), wo er im deutschsprachigen Journalismus erneut hervortrat, spielte er – nicht zuletzt während der Jahre 1848–49 – eine aktive Rolle in den wechselvollen Geschicken der deutschen Demokratie. Sein Leben war abenteuerlich, bohemienhaft und unsicher. Wenn auch sein Denken nicht immer die Kraft und Kohärenz besass, die das Denken anderer Revolutionäre aufwies, strahlte er doch immer Mut und moralische Stärke aus. Ein autobiographischer Beleg dafür ist sein in Karl Gutzkows Telegraph fur Deutschland, einem der liberalsten deutschen Blatter der damaligen Zeit, veroffentlichtes Gedicht „Bei alle dem”, in dem er seine Einstellung zum Leben darstellt.

I and my son are bakers and barbers, you and your sons are lapidaries and gardeners, but if you bid one of your sons be barber, a second baker, a third lapidary and a fourth gardener, all is confusion, and how can good come out of it? Furthermore he is no barber nor baker who does not belong to the Guild of the Barbers and the Guild of the Bakers. If your son [does not go] to the peshkadim and rank himself among the apprentices; next to the tehaoosh, to bid him inscribe his name on the rolls; then to the kihaya, to pay him toll, how should he be a member of the guild? Ask of the scheikh if I have not spoken well.

It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.

This paper investigates the history of the labour process in New Zealand's state-owned railway workshops and questions the idea that large-scale industry inevitably destroyed whatever agency skilled workers had enjoyed. It also shows that relations of production vary with the political and cultural contexts. Craft control of the labour process survived in New Zealand's state-owned railway workshops and the union played only a minor role. Jop control was more important in achieving bureaucratic instead of autocratic control over such matters as hiring and firing; the retention of apprentice-based crafts; the institutionalization of seniority; and in resisting both de-skilling and the “premium bonus”. The strength and vitality of shop culture, based on craft control of the labour process, also survived and modified the Government's vigorous attempt to introduce “scientific management”. In brief the article concludes that productive processes do not inevitably determine social relations of production, that capitalism has been neither homogeneous nor uniform, and that mechanization never inevitably results in de-skilling.

“MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH BAKUNIN is in San Francisco ”, announced the front page of Herzen's Kolokol November 1861. “HE IS FREE!Bakunin left Siberia via Japan and is on his way to England. We joyfully bring this news to all Bakunin's friends.” Arrested in Chemnitz in May 1849, Bakunin had been extradited to Russia in 1851 and, after six years in the Peter-Paul and Schlürg fortresses, condemned to perpetual banishment in Siberia. On June 17, 1861, however, he began his dramatic escape. Setting out from Irkutsk, he sailed down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, where he boarded a government vessel plying the Siberian coast. Once at sea, he transferred to an American sailing ship, the Vickery, which was trading in Japanese ports, and reached Japan on August 16th. A month later, on September 17th, he sailed from Yokohama on another American vessel, the Carrington, bound for San Francisco. He arrived four weeks later, completing, in Herzen's description, “the very longest escape in a geographical sense”.

This article offers a sensitive reading of oppositional political cartoons in Togo in the early 1990s, during the period of structural adjustment, which was accompanied by the swift reversal of democratizing trends and the restoration of authoritarian rule. Togolese satirists perceived this moment as a moment of “fraudonomics”, thus contesting rampant corruption and clientelism in politics. They poked fun at the president, local politicians, businesspeople, and bureaucrats of the international institutions. The article begins by examining the making of satirical newspapers with a focus on the biographies of the satirists. As students, they started out on the adventure of publication with their own money and learned most of their drawing and printing techniques as work progressed. Secondly, an analysis of the readership shows that, although the satirical newspapers were a crucial element of the media in the early 1990s, it was mostly an elitist and urban phenomenon. The third section analyses the changing visual repertoire of contention through in-depth analysis of four selected caricatures.

The primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes – the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition – the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in order to keep its leading position in transnational work for women's rights and to maintain the sympathies of women from countries outside Europe. The main focus is on the contradictions, negotiations, and adjustments inside the WIDF with respect to the new political situation and the demands of women from Africa and Asia, in particular, during the highest period of anticolonial transformation (1950s to early 1970s). This article also pays attention to Soviet ideas on the emancipation of women and, in particular, to the influence of Soviet experiences of emancipating women from non-Slavic (Eastern and Southern) parts of the USSR on the WIDF's perception of and policies for the improvement of the situation of women in Asia and Africa. This article is based primarily on analysis of the WIDF's archival documents preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, along with the WIDF's official publications.

The history of urban labor in modern China is deeply entangled in questions of the communist revolution, and so are the interpretations of that history. If we leave out two important accounts of labor in Chinese written by organizers before the 1960s, studies of labor in modern China only have a four-decade history.

Edmund Dene Morel was born in Paris in 1873, the son of a French civil servant father and an English mother. Modestly educated in England, he emerged at age thirty from the obscurity of a clerkship in a Liverpool commercial firm to launch a journalistic crusade against the murderous exploitation of blacks on the rubber plantations of the Congo Free State. Largely as a result of this effort he became critical of what he considered the deviousness of the British Foreign Office, and by 1911 he was questioning the extent of the commitment to France in the Entente Cordiale. He was pro-German only in the sense that he opposed the prevalent anti-German hysteria and believed that an Anglo-German confrontation would be catastrophic for both countries. Morel was one of a number of free-trade, anti-imperialist, foreign- and imperial-affairs specialists associated with the pre-war Liberal Party; J. A. Hobson, H. N. Brailsford and E. G. Browne were others. But it was the war which made him the butt of nationalist fury and the victim of government prosecution for his advocacy of a negotiated peace and for his infuriating insistence that Germany's share of the blame for the war's origin was much less than that of Tsarist Russia or even of Britain's Liberal government.

In one of the supreme ironies of history, the austere Lycurgan system at Sparta failed in its primary aim – the fossilization of martial virtue – and succeeded in military victories, the heady profits of which undermined the precarious communism of the bivouac state. Conditioned to repress fear, the Spartan compensated by indulging greed – bribery, not cowardice, was his fatal weakness. After the collapse of the Spartan Empire at the Battle of Leuctra in 371, mercenary service became the principal Spartan occupation, even for Xenophon's model officer and gentleman, King Agesilaus. With landed estates encroaching on the traditional lots and great fortunes swollen by the gains of empire and mercenary adventure, the common Spartan found himself reduced to an equality of obligation only. The inflation and economic stress of the Hellenistic era intensified the imbalance between wealth and poverty in Lacedaemon. In a brief reign (244–241), the idealistic young King Agis IV tried to revive Sparta's military glory by restoring „Lycurgan ways” and did effect the abolition of debts but failed to redistribute land lots – his agent, Agesilaus, avoided the issue until a counter-revolutionary coup led by the deposed King Leonidas overthrew the reformers and lynched Agis. In 227, Leonidas' son, Cleomenes III, seized power and completed the aborted reforms of Agis-his subsequent success forced his rival for leadership of the Peloponnse, Aratus of Sicyon, into an alliance with Macedon, and Cleomenes was defeated at Sellasia in 222 to die shortly after in exile in Egypt.