The Action Française was the most notorious reactionary movement in twentieth-century France. From the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of the Vichy Regime it carried on its campaign against “the principles of 789”, which many Frenchmen (and other Western Europeans) mistakenly blamed for the “evils” of modern industrial society. But it represented neither the frustrated lower-middle classes that were attracted to fascism, nor the genteel bien-pensants who pined for the good old days” under Louis XVI or Charles X. Its leaders were café intellectuals who flaunted their newly acquired devotion to the monarchy and the church. They were professional nativists clamoring or a return to the traditional virtues of a golden age that never insisted. Their utopia was a highly intellectualized daydream invented by charles Maurras.

Since 1954 no question has so well succeeded in exacerbating the once rather staid proceedings of the International Labor Conference of the International Labor Organization as the problem of the status and rights of employer delegates from those countries which may be designated as “the states with fully socialized economies”. While David A. Morse, Director-General of the International Labor Office, was certainly correct in pointing out that “The ILO has always been confronted with political issues of one kind or another and [that] many of them have related to the representation of employers and workers within the Organization”, there is hardly any parallel in the history of the International Labor Organization for the fury of the debate over employer delegates from Communist countries which was unleashed when the Soviet Union rejoined the ILO in 1954.

The purpose of this article is to examine the development of a branch of the British Labour Party by contrasting its activities before and after 1918. In so doing, it is hoped to illustrate the nature and extent of the influence of the Independent Labour Party (the I.L.P.), with especial reference to the position of the I.L.P. within the local branch of the Labour Party.

The aim of this paper is to trace two processes, interconnected in a large measure, in the labour relations of the British shipping industry from 1911 to 1929. One is the gradual transformation of the policy of the Sailors' and Firemen's Union under Havelock Wilson from aggressive militancy to one of accommodation to the shipowners' point of view. The other process to be considered is the rise and fall of four rival organisations: the Cooks' and Stewards' Union, the British Seafarers' Union, the Amalgamated Marine Workers' Union, and finally the seamen's section of the Transport and General Workers' Union.

The internal conflicts of the socialist movement before 1914 grew out of the antagonism between orthodox Marxists and reformist Socialists, or were at least closely related to that antagonism, as for instance the conflict between the labor unions and the party leadership in Germany in 1905–6. This running battle of pre-war days, which set the scene for the splitting of the movement during the first World War, reached its most spectacular expression in Germany in Bebel's attack on the Revisionists at the Dresden party convention of 1903. But the conflict unfolded first in France, and it was in France rather than in Germany that the fundamental issues were posited most clearly. In 1882, nine years before Georg von Vollmar in his “Eldorado” addresses in Munich started the revolt of the German Revisionists and fourteen years before Eduard Bernstein in his “Evolutionary Socialism” published the first comprehensive exposition of Revisionist ideas, Paul Brousse broke with the Marxist leaders, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, whom he forced out of the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France, thus transforming the latter into a Possibilist party, whereas the expelled Marxists formed the Parti ouvrier. Even the debates at Dresden – and subsequently at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam – developed from a French issue – namely, the acceptance of a position in a liberal cabinet by the French reformist, Alexandre Millerand.

At the turn of the century, the authoritative political theorist Henri Michel had this to say of the characteristic approach in France to all problems, and in particular to political problems. “We are infatuated with isms, it is part of the national temperament. It is significant that a large number of our fellow-citizens like them so much, that every time they are presented with a new one, they greedily seize upon it, without asking themselves whether it can be accomodated alongside the one with which they were previously enamoured.”; The accuracy of this observation has not substantially diminished over the last half-century, the parties left of centre being particularly addicted to doctrinaire formulations of their political philosophies and programmes and to the consequent verbal fetishism and pompous dogmatism. The rise of Socialism in the late nineteenth century overshadowed the contemporary crystallisation of Radical attitudes and aims into the doctrine of Solidarism. Solidarism, however, played a major part in galvanising and rallying the protagonists of state intervention and voluntary association; uniting them in the task of building, by a series of piecemeal reforms inspired by a simple principle and a multiplicity of imperative needs what has come to be known as the “Welfare State”. Despite the doctrinal fragility of Solidarism, its practical programme was inspired by and was appropriate to the social and political needs of a society in transition from individualist and non-interventionist liberalism to associationist and statist socialism, just as liberal economism had secured the transition from corporativism and mercantilism to private enterprise, laisser faire and laisser passer. To-day it is Gaullism that dominates the political scene, but the tenacious Radical tradition of the Third and Fourth Republics may yet reassert itself, transforming in retrospect the tidal wave of to-day into a ripple, as it has so frequently done during the last eighty years of France's tormented history.

The prestige of the landlord class, which had stood so high in the long period of prosperity of the mid-Victorian years, fell to its lowest point in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From the early 1880's landowners were attacked by politicians and land reformers in Parliament, in the Press and in a welter of literature on various aspects of the land question. At the same time there was a revival in the membership and activities of land organisations many of which had been started in the land agitation of the early 1870's only to go down before the onset of the Great Depression. The main cause of the widespread feelings of hostility towards landowners was economic: the instability of trade and employment and the effects of falling profit margins on the outlook and standards of expenditure of businessmen. The conflict of economic interests between landlords, businessmen and workers was expressed in the language of class war. Radicals of the Liberal Party took advantage of the increased support given to them by the business and professional classes to renew their campaign against the landowning aristocracy. They carped at the wealth of landowners and pointed to the burden of rents and royalties which lay on the enterprise of farmers and mineowners. They contrasted the relatively fixed incomes of landowners with the falling rate of return on industrial investments. Turning away from moderate reforms designed to improve the transfer and development of estates, they pronounced that the chief burden on the land was not the law but the landlord himself.

“The organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom”, de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “is the great political problem of the time.” Nowhere was the problem more urgent than in England, whose industrial towns were soon to be torn by intense class conflict. Yet England resolved the tensions of the 1830's and 1840's, and went on to build a tough and supple political democracy in a massively undemocratic society.

Jusqu'ici, nous n'avons envisagé que l'analyse faite par les Webb des structures internes de l'Union soviétique. L'étude du régime communiste russe dans ses relations avec le monde extérieur forme cependant une partie également importante, et non moins significative, de «Soviet Communism».

In the middle of September Howell wrote to James Stansfeld: “I understand that Mr. Glyn is much pleased with our reports: Mr. Stanhope has also spoken highly of them. We shall be glad if Mr. Glyn and yourself will write to Mr. Morley on this subject if you feel satisfied with our preliminary work”.

Der Briefwechsel Rodbertus-Lassalle umfasst die ganze Zeit der Arbeiteragitation. Er beginnt mit dem 25. Dezember 1862, nachdem Lassalle schon mit dem Komitee der Leipziger in Verbindung getreten war, und endigt erst kurz vor seinem Tode mit einem Brief vom 14. Juni 1864.

Le séjour de Karl Marx à Paris au lendemain de la Révolution de Février est bien connu. Expulsé par les autorités belges le 4 mars 1848, Marx, s'empressant d'accepter l'invitation de Ferdinand Flocon, s'établit à Paris avec sa famille. Ce séjour ne devait pas être de longue durée: au cours de la première quinzaine d'avril, Marx est parti pour Cologne où son rôle révolutionnaire d'éditeur de la Neue Rheinische Zeitung est notoire. Pendant cet interméde français Marx fonda la section parisienne de la Ligue des Communistes dont il devint le secrétaire; il dirigeait l'opposition des communistes allemands de Paris aux desseins de Born et Herwegh qui organisaient une légion allemande révolutionnaire.

In Asia Minor in the Second Century B.C., an ephemeral revolutionary regime held sway which has been variously hailed as the first volley of Marxism or the last stand of Cloudcuckooland. Since Aristonicus did not hesitate to openly proclaim class warfare against the bourgeoisie of Pergamum, even restrained scholars label his City of the Sun as a “proletarian state”. Ironically, though he challenged the majesty of Rome, Aristonicus won the support of Blossius of Cumae, the Stoic adviser of Tiberius Gracchus and the ideologue of the Roman reformers, who would perish in the debacle of the Pergamene revolution.

„Mein Freund, Joh. Phil. Becker zu Biel, steht im Begriff gleich mir, ein Bürgerrecht im Kanton Bern nachzusuchen. Könnten Sie ihm dabei behilflich sein, so bitte ich Sie, es zu thun. Ich kenne keinen tüchtigeren Mann, an ihm wird der Kanton einen thätigen, kräftigen und hochherzigen Bürger gewinnen. Nach meiner Überzeugung wiegen alle Deutsche, die seit 3 Jahren Bürger in Bern geworden, diesen einen nicht auf.”

Die beiden nachstehend mitgeteilten Briefe fand ich, kurz nach der Herausgabe der Hess'schen Korrespondenz, in der “Heine-Sammlung” der Landes- und Stadtbibliothek Düsseldorf, derem Leiter, Herrn Dr. Eberhard Galley, ich für die Genehmigung der Veröffentlichung und mehrere nützliche Hinweise zu Dank verpflichtet bin. Der Inhalt des Briefes vom 19. Oktober 1837 zeigt deutlich, dass er der erste ist, den Hess an Heine richtete. Dieser Brief, in dem Hess ein ungeschminktes Bild seiner eigenen Persönlichkeit entwirft, ist psychologisch einer der interessantesten, die er je geschrieben hat.

In an earlier article in these pages I examined the origins of the price-control legislation of the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, suggesting that it ought, most properly, to be regarded not as a revolutionary innovation, but rather as the re-emergence in a new environment of an old and well-established tradition of popular action to fix fair market prices, and thus maintain living standards, by riot and demonstration. At the same time, and in passing, I indicated briefly that a similar tradition existed in 18th-century England, if anything more strongly marked and more widespread than in France itself. The present article will be concerned with a discussion of the significance of this English tradition.