Dans cet article nous nous proposons de dévoiler, autant que possible, les origines souvent tràs cachées des opinions différentes et divergentes qui après la révolution de septembre 1868, lorsque le mouvement ouvrier pouvait s'exprimer librement, s'y sont manifestées. A cet effet nous devrons décrire le milieu où le mouvement s'est développé pendant les années qui précèdent immédiatement la révolution, aussi bien pendant les périodes où on ne pouvait travailler que dans la clandestinité qu'aux moments où le gouvernement avait une attitude tolérante vis-à-vis du mouvement. Or, il est indispensable de décrire de façon globale quelques-unes des forces les plus importantes qui ont déclanché la révolution en question.

German Socialism drifted towards the whirlpool in 1914 in a vessel straining with contradictions. In internal matters the SPD paid lip service to Marxist doctrine but was, in its day to day operations, profoundly revisionist. It had long since effected a compromise with the Bismarckian state. In foreign affairs the party was pacifist but had no plan to preserve the peace. It cherished the international solidarity of the proletariat but would not use force to preserve it. It deplored the militarism of German foreign policy but did not see that the state, to which Socialists no less than Conservatives were deeply attached, could not be defended with pacifist gestures. Its ideology hobbled its patriotism, while its investments, other material interests and radiant political prospects made it a party of “irresolute Marxists.” The SPD was the Hamlet of international socialism.

The British Labour Church movement which was discussed by Mr. K. S. Inglis in a recent article is of some importanceto New Zealand for two resons. A native New Zealander, H. A. Atkinson, was one of the early leaders of the movement in Britain, and he later introduced the idea of the Labour Church to New Zealand and formed the first openly socialist organisation in this country.

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.

Die Schriften Lassalles geben Aufschluss genug, wie eine Verquickung von allgemeinem Wahlrecht und sozialistischem Staat versucht wird. Es ist dabei auffällig, dass die Forderung nach dem Wahlrecht als not-wendige Voraussetzung fär den sozialistischen Staat erscheint. So schrieb Lassalle in dem „Offenen Antwortschreiben”: „Das allgemeine und direkte Wahlrecht ist also…nicht nur ihr politisches, es ist auch ihr soziales Grundprinzip, die Grundbedingung aller sozialen Hilfe. Es ist das einzige Mittel, um die materielle Lage des Arbeiterstandes zu verbessern.” Lassalle identifizierte hier, wie Brandis bereits richtig bemerkt hat, die parlamentarische Demokratie mit der sozialistischen Gesellschaftsordnung. In der Überantwortung des Staates an die arbeitenden Klassen durch das allgemeine Wahlrecht schien ihm die Voraussetzung für die „freie Arbeit als herrschendes Prinzip der Gesellschaft” gegeben. Das allgemeine Wahlrecht als Emanzipationsmittel schuf ihm den politischen Unterbau, auf dem der „soziale Staat” errichtet werden konnte.

Edward Spencer Beesly was born in the village of Feckenham, Worcestershire in 1831. His father was an evangelical minister, a man of severe moral standards. He imposed upon his son an onerous system of academic and religious discipline, and in 1849 dispatched him to Wadham College, Oxford, which was at that time the stronghold of the evangelical party in the University.

Beesly was not only friendly with Marx, but was well acquainted with his circle. He knew Lafargue, he got to know Engels, and there were mutual acquaintances, such as Eugene Oswald. Among workmen, he was not only the friend of Odger, Applegarth and Lucraft, but was on close terms with such working-class confidants of Marx as Jung and Eccarius, and to a lesser extent with Dupont. In the sixties he was a familiar figure, not only in the offices of the Carpenters and Joiners, the London Trades Council or the Bee-Hive, but was also at home in the “Golden Ball” where the most radical of London's workmen talked with continental revolutionaries over a clay pipe and a pot of beer. Here one could get the flavour of European proletarian politics: that other “World of Labour” in whose ideals Beesly was as deeply interested as he was in those of English trades unionism. Indeed, for many years he expressed his desire for the amalgamation of trade unionism – with its implicit recognition of the priority of social questions—, and proletarian republicanism – with its generous enthusiasm and its larger view.

La connaissance des tendances qui prédominaient dans les milieux ouvriers barcelonais avant 1868 quant au travail et à la politique, nous permet d'évaluer avec quelque certitude l'influence exercée par la visite de Fanelli sur l'orientation du mouvement ouvrier, et de mieux comprendre la signification des courants qui se manifestèrent au Congrès Ouvrier de Barcelone en juin 1870.

Im Jahre 1855 war Karl Marx Londoner Korrespondent der Neuen Oder-Zeitung. Im Anhang zu diesem Artikel veröffentlichen wir die nicht verloren gegangenen Briefe aus seiner Korrespondenz mit dem Redakteur der Zeitung, Elsner. Unser Artikel wird einiges über die Geschichte der Zeitung mitteilen, insbesondere Marx' Mitwirkung an ihr beleuchten und schliesslich einige bibliographische Daten bringen, welche dazu beitragen mögen, die Lücken auszufüllen, die in allen bisherigen in betracht kommenden Veröffentlichungen gerade in bezug auf Marx' Tätigkeit für die Neue Oder-Zeitung festzustellen sind, sowie ein Standortsverzeichnis der noch übrig gebliebenen Exemplare der Zeitung enthalten.

Zahlreiche monographische Arbeiten zur sozialdemokratischen Parteigeschichte führen wohlbegründete Klage über das Fehlen einer modernen Gesamtdarstellung, die zu erarbeiten ein erstes Anliegen der Geschichtsschreibung der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung sein müsse. Dass es noch einer umfassenden Darstellung ermangelt, ist um so eigenartiger, als sich eine Fülle von historischen Zeugnissen und Dokumenten dem Historiker zur Bearbeitung anbietet. Gleich-wohl erschöpft sich die bisherige parteigeschichtliche Bibliographie in Einzeldarstellungen – abgesehen von einigen gedrängten, zu partei-politischen Zwecken geschriebenen übersichten—, und es gilt die etwas verfrühte Rüge Adolf Mengers über die mangelhafte Geschichtsschreibung des Sozialismus heute – trotz Mehring – in erhöhtem Masse für die Geschichtsschreibung der sozialdemokratischen Partei.

To make generalisations, whether in speech or in print, is always a dangerous thing to do – dangerous not only in everyday affairs but also in scholarly research. All too frequently we are inclined to draw general conclusions from a larger or smaller number of special cases. Because the living voice of an age long past is no longer there to put us right, this inclination has become, from a danger, a positive menace in the study of history; and not least is it present in modern scholarship as concerned with ancient Greece.

This essay was written with the thought in mind that there is need for more clarification in the terminology used to describe certain socialist philosophies of the nineteenth century. It seems clear that the terms ‘democratic socialism” or “social democracy” have lost much of the meaning they might have had in the past. “Democratic” as an adjective or “democracy” as a noun, have been so abused that today they may convey the idea of either a civil libertarian kind of government or a form of totalitarianism. Indeed, the words made for confusion in the nineteenth century when Jacobins, Babouvians, Blanquists, even Bonapartists, claimed each to be true representatives of the general will, and either executed or would have executed those representing opposing wills. Nonviolent were P.-J.-B. Buchez and Louis Blanc, each of whom claimed to be a democratic socialist. Yet in 1848 they opposed each other with intense vehemence. There is need then, for definition and delineation.

The “war communism” of the Jacobins, mobilizing all economic forces for the defence of the Republic, has many features which seem to anticipate later regimes more self-consciously and more consistently socialist. At the same time it appears in some respects as a partial return to the étatisme of the Ancien Régime in reaction against the liberalism of 1789. Particularly is this true of the adoption, in 1793, of a system of price control for essential commodities.

The survival of a concept is generally only secured at the price of an intellectual odyssey in the course of which it is transformed out of all recognition. The nineteenth century fortunes of the idea of solidarity exemplify this axiom only too strictly. It became the victim of a multiplicity of ingenious puns and metaphors as well as outright malicious distortions that rendered a simple, technical word, drawn from the sphere of jurisprudence, at once emotive and obscure, influential and diffuse. As the eminent and caustic critic of the twentieth century, Julien Benda, formulated this vital problem of the fate of concepts, “pour l'historien des idées des hommes, la réalité ce n'est point ce qu'ont été les idées dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont inventées, mais ce qu'elles ont été dans l'esprit de ceux qui les ont trahies… car il est clair qu'une doctrine se propage d'autant plus largement qu'elle est apte à satisfaire un plus grand nombre de sentiments divers.” This pessimistic view has been all too frequently verified in human history.

When Warren Hastings established the English East India Company's opium monopoly in Bihar in 1773, the contractors who undertook its management were expressly forbidden to compel the ryots (tenant-cultivators) to grow poppy. Later, Warren Hastings allowed this restriction to be quietly dropped from the contracts, and in the 1780's the ryots were protected only by implication, in that the contractors were required to deliver to the Company as much opium as could be procured “lawfully and reasonably”. Although no legal powers of coercion were granted, it accorded well with native custom that the ryots should be compelled to keep up the cultivation where it had previously existed, and when Lord Cornwallis investigated the matter in 1788 he found it to be generally understood that such compulsion was in force. Cornwallis intended to bring to the Company's terriories the benefits of personal freedom under the rule of law, but he did not wish to disrupt the opium arrangements. He therefore laid down fixed scales of remuneration for the opium ryots which he hoped would be generous enough to make them willing to continue and extend the cultivation, but did not immediately proclaim their emancipation. The contracts of 1789 were ambiguous; they did not say whether the continuance of existing cultivation was to be comulsory, but only that its extension was to be left to the option of the ryots. In 1793, however, when the ryots had had time to experience the benefits of the fixed rates of pay and their deliveries were increasing satisfactorily, the cultivation was declared to be completely optional. This caused no difficulties in Bihar.

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.