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According to George Lichtheim, the title 'Fabian Society' appears to have been suggested by Frank Podmore, a founder member:
It
was a reference to the elderly Roman commander Fabius Cunctator, famous
for his extreme caution in conducting military operations, especially
when matched against Hannibal. Some of the earliest tracts of the
Society bore a motto (composed by Podmore) which ran in part: 'For the
right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring
against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time
comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in
vain and fruitless'. Closer acquaintance with Roman history might
perhaps have induced Podmore to inquire where and when Fabius 'struck
hard': there is no record of such an occurrence. Malicious critics of
Fabianism have been known to hint that there may have been something
prophetic, or at least symbolic, in this misreading of history and that
anyone who expects Fabians to 'strike hard' for socialism or anything
else is quite likely to have to wait until Doomsday.(See also GRADUALISM; LABOUR PARTY; WEBB S&B.)
ReadingLichtheim, G., A Short History of Socialism, 1970.
Fascism. Originally, 'fascist' (from an Italian word meaning a bundle bound together) referred to the followers of Benito Mussolini, who was dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. Fascism was --- and is --- an authoritarian, nationalistic and anti-socialist political ideology that preaches the need for a strong state ruled by a single political party led by a charismatic leader. The term is often applied to other similar political movements, such as German Nazism, although they described themselves as "national socialists" and not as fascists. Racism and anti-Semitism, though it did exist, did not play a prominent role in Italian fascism. (See also DICTATORSHIP; RACISM.)
Reading
Eatwell, R., Fascism: A History, 1996.
Ford, G., Fascist Europe: the rise of racism and xenophobia, 1992.
Vincent, A., Modern Political Ideologies, 1992.
Feminism. Feminist theories of womens' oppression and inequality have been developed largely within the liberal tradition of political philosophy. Demands have usually been formulated on the basis of moral arguments relating to legal rights and justice, and ignoring the economic conditions that render such claims meaningless within the context of capitalism. 'Socialist' feminists, while recognising the importance of class, have become bogged down in reformism; in effect their demand is to be wage slaves equally with men. 'Radical' feminists attack patriarchy, not class, as the source of women's oppression.
While it is undeniable that most women experience certain forms of oppression and discrimination as a result of their gender, to suffer from sexism at all it is necessary to be a member of the working class; it is not usually a problem for female members of the capitalist class. The socialist movement, being based on a class analysis of capitalism, provides a motivation for women's liberation since socialism can only be achieved with the majority support of women and of men. (See also REFORMISM; SEXISM.) Reading
Elshtain, J.B., Public Man, Private Women: Women in Social and Political Thought, 1981.
Vincent, A., Modern Political Ideologies, 1992.
Fetishism. In capitalist society fetishism arises because the relations based on the exchange value of commodities control workers and their products. Exchange value is a direct relation between products, and indirectly, through them, between the workers. To the workers, therefore, the relations between them appear not as direct social relations but as what they really are - material relations between people and social relations between things.
In capitalist society commodities are produced primarily for exchange, for their exchange value. Therefore it is exchange value that will determine production and distribution, and the workers own products confront them as alien objects ruling over them.
In socialist society this mystical veil over social production will be lifted and in its place there will be direct social relations between people and their products. (See also ALIENATION.)
Feudal society. In his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx designated the feudal as one of the epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. As a system of society, feudalism flourished in Europe in the Middle Ages, though it existed elsewhere and at different periods. The feudal mode of production was based on the effective possession (but not legal ownership) of some of the means of production by the peasantry. Within this manorial organisation of production the lords appropriated the surplus labour of the peasants as feudal rent (in the form of rent in kind, money, labour or taxes) using political force and religious ideology as the means of control.
Reading
Holton, R.J. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, 1985.
Fitzgerald Jack
A bricklayer by trade, he took an active part in the Operative
Bricklayers’ Union, was at one time on their Executive Committee, and
on at least two occasions acted as one of their delegates to the Trades
Union Congress.
He joined the Social Democratic Federation (afterwards the Social
Democratic Party) in the ’nineties, and attended some of the classes
run by Edward Aveling, the son-in-law of Karl Marx. Along with a few
others he fought against the Reformist tendencies inside the S.D.F.,
and sought to convert that body into a fitting instrument for the
inauguration of Socialism. He urged the formation of economics and
other classes to further the education of the workers, but was jeered
at by the official group, who tried to silence him by the charge of
“impossibilism.” He, and the group that was with him, were confronted
by a solid wall of opposition, which was the more difficult to get over
because the officials held the strings, and meetings were closed to the
unauthorised. The S.D.F. was committed to a policy of compromise and
also to reformist activity through the association of its prominent
members with reactionary trades unionism and with the Twentieth Century
Press, many of whose shareholders were outside the ranks of the working
and out of sympathy with the Socialist movement.
Matters came to a head at the Burnley Conference of the S.D.F. in 1904, when Fitzgerald and another member were expelled, by means of a trick, on general charges that were shown to exist only in the imagination of prominent members of the S.D.F. of the time.
The general dissatisfaction with the reactionary policy of the Social Democratic Federation led to the secession of a number of its members, who, together with some others, formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain on the 12th June, 1904. Fitzgerald took a leading part with these in hammering out the policy of the Party.Reading:
October 1909: Review of Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism
November 1911: Review of Home Rule in a Nutshell
July 1913: Review of Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth
June 1914: Review of Labour in Irish History
August 1915: Review of Croce's Historical Materialism and the Economics of Marx
February 1918: Review of The State: Its Origin and Function
May 1918: The Centenary of Marx
August 1918: The Revolution in Russia
February 1919: The German Elections
July 1920: The Russian Dictatorship
April 1924: Passing of Lenin
July 1925: Review of Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity
Forces of production. What can be broadly understood as technology, the forces of production include materials, machinery, techniques and the work performed by human beings in the production of wealth. (See also HISTORY; RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION.)
Freedom. According to liberal political philosophy, freedom is the absence of direct physical constraint; freedom being essentially negative, it is always freedom from something. This point of view ignores poverty, unemployment and wage labour as examples of constraints and lack of freedom.
Under capitalism, however, the working class are unfree. Although individual workers may have some 'freedom' of action (to change jobs, for example), as a member of the working class you are coerced into selling your labour power, or taking on any of the roles involved in the reproduction of labour power, such as schoolchild, housewife or pensioner. Because the capitalist class own the means of life, workers cannot escape from their class position in society: they are wage slaves.
For socialists, freedom is self-determination. On the new basis of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for self-determined needs, socialism will be a society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Reading
Ryan, A., The Idea of Freedom, 1979.
Wood, A., Karl Marx, 1981.
General strike. The British general strike of 4 - 12 May 1926 was provoked by the mine-owners who, faced with a poor market for coal, demanded a cut in wages and an increase in working hours for the mineworkers. The Miners' Federation, led by A.J. Cook and others, asked the TUC to bring out all the major industries, in line with a resolution supporting the miners carried at the 1925 Congress. The Conservative government, with Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, had prepared for the strike by recruiting special constables and setting up the strikebreaking Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. During the strike millions of workers came out in support of the miners. The government monopolised the means of propaganda, however, and the BBC suppressed news that might have embarrassed the government. Director General of the BBC, John Reith (knighted for his services the following year), wrote in his diary after the strike:
They
want to be able to say that they did not commandeer us, but they know
that they can trust us not to be really impartial. (Quoted in On Television, by Stuart Hood.)
After nine days the General Council of the TUC called off the general
strike, betraying every resolution upon which the strike call was
issued and without a single concession being gained. The miners were
left alone to fight the mine-owners backed by the government with the
tacit approval of the TUC and the Parliamentary Labour Party led by
Ramsey MacDonald. The miners stayed out until August before being
forced by starvation to accept the mine-owners' terms of reduced wages
(below 1914 level) and an increase in the working day by one hour. The main lesson of the general strike, and of other attempts at using the same tactic in other countries is that it cannot be used to get socialism. To get socialism requires a class conscious working class democratically capturing state power to prevent that power being used against them. In 1926, the very facts that the government were in power, that millions of workers had supported them and other capitalist political parties (including the Labour Party) less than two years before at the general election, showed that socialism was not on the political agenda. Workers who would not vote for socialism will not strike for it. (See also STRIKES; SYNDICALISM.)
Reading
Symons, J., The General Strike, 1987.
Government. The government of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole capitalist class. Socialism will be a system of society without government but with democratic administration by the whole community. (See also STATE.)
Gradualism. Reformist political action which, those who advocate it hope, will gradually transform capitalism into 'socialism', without the need for class conscious workers' political action. In Britain the leading gradualist thinkers were in the Fabian Society, formed in 1884; but nowadays there are numerous left-wing organisations fulfilling a similar role. Gradualism was adopted by the Labour Party and has always been explicitly anti-Marxist. (See also FABIAN SOCIETY; REFORMISM.)
Reading
Lichtheim, G., A Short History of Socialism, 1970.
Gramsci, Antonio (1891-1937). Born in Sardinia, Gramsci won a scholarship in 1911 to the University of Turin. As a student there the Hegelian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, influenced him. In 1913 he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and, under the influence of the writings of Georges Sorel, became a syndicalist. Bowled over by the Russian revolution, Gramsci helped to found the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921 and became its general secretary (and a Member of Parliament) in 1924. He was arrested in 1926 and remained a prisoner of the fascists until his death in 1937. But while a prisoner he set out his theories in the Prison Notebooks, published posthumously. For Gramsci, 'organic intellectuals' had a key role to play in social transformation. They would arise from within the working class and had an organisational function, articulating the cultural politics that would allow the working class to establish its hegemony. In Gramsci's version of Leninism, the 'war of movement' typified by the Russian revolution was appropriate for similarly underdeveloped countries; but in the more advanced capitalist societies a 'war of position' would allow the revolutionary party, via its intellectuals and alternative hegemony, to lead the working class to 'socialism'.
Gramsci's theories have proved to be very popular within the Bolshevik and latter-day post-modernist left, since they appear to put some distance between Leninism and Stalinism. But Gramsci himself never repudiated Stalinism in practice. (See also LENINISM.)
Reading
Femia, J.V., Gramsci's Political Thought, 1981.
Greens. In Britain the Green Party (formerly the Ecology Party) explains the cause of the environmental crisis, varyingly, on technology, 'overpopulation', human greed and consumerism. Some Greens even blame capitalism. The Greens are a 'broad church' and so lack a coherent and consistent political thought. But they generally see the solution to the environmental crisis in the election of a Green government committed to reforming the present growth-orientated industrial economy into a decentralised, democratically-run and ecologically-sustainable economy. While awaiting the election of such a government the Green Party concentrates, like Greenpeace and other conservationist organisations, on advocating reform measures to try to protect nature and the environment.
We are up against a well-entrenched economic and social system based on class and property and governed by coercive economic laws. Reforms, however well meaning or determined, can never solve the environmental crisis - the most they can do is to palliate some aspect of it on a precarious temporary basis. They can certainly never turn capitalism into a democratic, ecological society. (See also ECOLOGY; OVERPOPULATION; REFORMISM.)
Reading
Dobson, A., Green Political Thought, 1990.
Pepper, D., Eco-socialism, 1993.
Hardie, James Keir (1856 - 1915). Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, the son of a ship's carpenter.
Self-educated, Hardie worked in the pits from the age of 10 and became a miners' leader before he was 20. He was the founding Chairman of the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, and was elected as an Independent Labour MP for West Ham in 1892. Hardie formed the Independent Labour Party (independent, that is, from the Liberal Party and the 'Lib-Lab' MPs) in 1893, and played a leading part in the creation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, which became the Labour Party in 1906. He lost his seat at West Ham in 1895 but became an MP for Merthyr Tydfil from 1900 until his death in 1915. Hardie became the first Chairman and Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1906.
Hardie mouthed socialist phrases but in practice pursued the interests of capital. And this included support for capitalism's wars. After initially opposing the Great War of 1914-1918 he changed his mind. Hardie told his electorate in Merthyr:
A
nation at war must be united especially when its existence is at stake
. . . With the boom of the enemy's guns within earshot, the lads
who
have gone forth by sea and land to fight their country's battles must
not be disheartened by any discordant note at home. (Merthyr Pioneer,
15th August 1914.) May I once again revert for the moment to the ILP
pamphlets? None of them clamour for immediately stopping the war. That
would be foolish in the extreme, until at least the Germans have been
driven back across their own frontier, a consummation which, I fear,
carries us forward through a long and dismal vista . . . I have
never
said or written anything to dissuade our young men from enlisting; I
know too well all there is at stake . . . If I can get the
recruiting
figures for Merthyr week by week, which I find a very difficult job, I
hope by another week to be able to prove that whereas our Rink meeting
gave a stimulus to recruiting, those meetings at the Drill Hall at
which the Liberal member or the Liberal candidate spoke, had the
exactly opposite effect. (Merthyr
Pioneer, 28th November, 1914.) (See also LABOUR PARTY.)
ReadingMorgan, K., Keir Hardie, 1975.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831). Born in Stuttgart, the son of a revenue officer. From 1818 until his death Hegel was Professor of Philosophy at Berlin University. Hegel was a liberal who approved of constitutional monarchy and was not the state-worshipper he is often accused of being, though some of his followers did interpret his philosophy as a justification for the autocratic Prussian monarchy. His written works, such as his main work on politics, Philosophy of Right (1821), are notoriously obscure. Hegel's philosophy is a form of idealism, according to which all that really exists are ideas. He interpreted politics, history, law, morality, religion and so on, in terms of the development of ideas; he sought the original idea of a particular subject and then examined how it had developed logically (that is, dialectically) throughout history.
As a student at Berlin after Hegel's death, Marx had come under his influence, especially when Marx was briefly involved with the Young Hegelians, a group of left wing philosophers who used a modified version of Hegel's philosophy as a radical critique of politics and religion. Marx publicly made his break with Hegelian philosophy in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, published in 1844. Marx then went on to argue that the explanation of social development lay not in the development of ideas but in the development of the material conditions of life. In 1845 Marx and Engels collaborated to produce The German Ideology, which sets out the basic principles of this materialist conception of history.
But despite Marx's criticisms of Hegelian philosophy many commentators on Marx insist on emphasising his intellectual debt to Hegel, to the extent almost of claiming that Hegel's philosophy stood 'right side up' is a necessary and sufficient condition for explaining Marx's method. This absurdity reaches its height in Lenin's claim that you cannot properly understand Marx's Capital unless you have first fully grasped the arguments of Hegel's Science of Logic. Moreover, there is the controversial issue of the dialectic that is associated, all too comprehensively, with Hegel and Marx. Of course Hegel had some influence on Marx, and a modified version of the dialectic did play a part in Marx's method for investigating social development (see 1873 Afterword to Capital). Seen in the context of the whole body of Marx's writings, however, this can be seen in proper perspective with all the other influences on Marx. A case can be made out for Aristotle having at least as much influence on Marx, because Aristotle's legacy dominated so much philosophy then (Hegel's included). Overall, then, it can be said that many commentators overrate the intellectual debt Marx owed to Hegel, and that Marx's work can be understood and assessed in its own right. The same can be said for Engels, even though he was much more influenced by Hegel, from his days as a Young Hegelian onwards. (See also DIALECTIC; ENGELS; MARX; MARXISM.)
Reading
McLellan, D., Marx Before Marxism, 1980.
Plant, R., Hegel, 1983.
History. The history of societies since the break up of primitive communism has been one of class struggles. These struggles between the exploiting class and the exploited class have been over the distribution of the social product, the organisation of work, working conditions and the results of production. Socialists view these struggles in the context of the development of the forces and relations of production, and analyse social development with a view to taking informed political action. (See also CLASS STRUGGLE; FORCES OF PRODUCTION; RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION.)
Reading
Carr, E.H., What is History? 1961.
Graham, K., Karl Marx, Our Contemporary, 1992.
Rigby, S.H., Marxism and History, 1998.
Human nature. Socialists make a distinction between human nature and human behaviour. That people are able to think and act is a fact of biological and social development (human nature), but how they think and act is the result of social conditions (human behaviour). Human nature changes, if at all, over vast periods of time; human behaviour changes according to changing social conditions. Capitalism being essentially competitive and predatory, produces vicious, competitive ways of thinking and acting. But we humans are able to change our society and adapt our behaviour, and there is no reason why our rational desire for human well being and happiness should not allow us to establish and run a society based on co-operation. (See also ALIENATION; NEEDS.)
Reading
Benthall, J. (ed.), Human Nature, 1974.
Hyndman, Henry Mayers (1842-1921). An Eton educated capitalist. Hyndman played a leading role in the setting up of the Democratic Federation in 1881, which was an association of radical-liberal clubs. Later that same year he claimed to be converted to Marxism after reading Capital. Afterwards he wrote and published his own interpretation of Marxism, England for All, without mentioning Marx by name. Hyndman's biographer, Tsuzuki, suggests that this work is:
.
. . a text-book of English 'Tory Democracy' rather than of continental
Social Democracy.
It was Hyndman's hostility towards liberalism rather than his supposed
Marxism that led the Democratic Federation to become the Social
Democratic Federation in 1884. Nevertheless, this organisation did much
to popularise Marxism in Britain, and included in its membership
Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax, Tom Mann, John Burns and William Morris. By December 1884 a group led by William Morris and Eleanor Marx, fed up with Hyndman's arrogance, seceded from the SDF to form the Socialist League. A second revolt led to the formation in 1903 of the Socialist Labour Party. Another revolt against Hyndman's opportunism led to the creation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. (See also IMPOSSIBILISM; SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY; SOCIALIST PARTY.)
Reading
Tsuzuki, C., H.M. Hyndman and British Socialism, 1961.
Idealism. Any philosophical theory according to which the material world is created by, or is dependent upon, ideas or the mind.
Idealism is a form of ideology that distorts our understanding of the everyday world we experience. Mind, or the collection of ideas, is a social product. Without society there is no mind. The ideas of a given epoch are the product of social conditions of that epoch. As these conditions change so do the ideas. That is why moral outlooks have undergone such fundamental changes over the centuries. As materialists, socialists do not deny the causal efficacy of ideas; indeed, we are engaged in a battle of ideas to establish socialism. But, without practical action, ideas alone will not bring about the desired change. (See also HEGEL; IDEOLOGY; MATERIALISM.)
Ideology. The socialist concept of ideology refers to general claims about the nature of a society's superstructure and, more specifically, a distortion of thought that stems from, and conceals contradictions within, capitalist society.
In capitalism profits take priority over needs, so that people starve while food rots, people go homeless while buildings are empty, people remain unemployed while needs are unmet, and so on. Because people are unable to solve these contradictions within capitalism they tend to project them in ideological forms of consciousness, that is to say, in ideas which effectively conceal or misrepresent the existence and character of these contradictions. Accordingly, profit-taking is held to be justified as risk-taking for the capitalists, so that starvation, homelessness, unemployment and the rest are the price paid for 'good economics'. By concealing contradictions ideology contributes to their reproduction and therefore serves the interests of the capitalist class.
Marx criticised capitalist economics because it is an ideology that stems from, and conceals, the social relations of production beneath the surface appearance of commodity exchange in the market. The free and equal exchange of values in the market conceals the unfree and unequal nature of wage labour in its social relation to capital. This, however, can only be revealed by Marx's scientific method. Marx believed that it was the role of scientific socialism to penetrate the surface of social phenomena and reveal their inner workings. (See also CONTRADICTION; IDEALISM; SCIENCE.)
Reading
McLellan, D., Ideology, 1986.
Eagleton, T., Ideology, 1991.
Imperialism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a growing tendency towards the formation of trusts and combines associated with what came to be known as imperialism. J.A. Hobson, a liberal, tried to account for this development in Imperialism (1902). He claimed that monopolistic industries restricted output in the home market, in order to raise prices and profits, and therefore have to seek foreign outlets for investments and markets. For this purpose, he alleged, they get governments to colonise foreign territories. R. Hilferding, a German Social Democrat, further developed this line of argument in Finance Capital (1910). He gave a detailed account of the supposedly unstoppable growth of monopoly in industry and banking, but carried it much further, crediting the banks with dominating industry and the cartels and dividing up world markets among themselves. V.I. Lenin made use of the work by Hobson and Hilferding for his own Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). According to Lenin, imperialism had five essential characteristics: (1) the concentration of production and capital, leading to the domination of the world economy by big monopolies; (2) the merging of bank and industrial capital and the consequent rise of a financial oligarchy; (3) the especially important role of the export of capital; (4) the division of the world among monopolistic associations of international capitalists; (5) the completion of the territorial division of the world among the great imperialist powers. Lenin thought that these factors would make wars increasingly inevitable.
Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin all failed to allow for the sectional divisions of interest in the capitalist class throughout the world. Some capitalists have an interest in exports (and most of Britain's exports are now to 'developed' countries); while some capitalists have an interest in imports (and Britain is now a net importer of goods). And while monopolies can charge monopoly prices and get monopoly profits, the rest of the capitalists object to being held to ransom. For this reason many national governments and supra-national organisations (such as the European Union) have legislated or directly intervened to control monopolies. (See also LENINISM.)
Reading
Brewer, A., Marxist Theories of Imperialism, 1990.
Warren, B., Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism, 1980.
Impossibilism. 'Possibilism' and 'impossibilism' were terms used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to refer to different wings of the Social Democratic parties. 'Impossibilists' were those Social Democrats who struggled solely to achieve the goal of socialism, while 'possibilists' were those Social Democrats who concentrated their efforts on reforming capitalism. Eventually the impossibilists either split away from the Social Democratic parties or abandoned impossibilism as the price for remaining a Social Democrat. Impossibilists from the Social Democratic Federation formed the Socialist League in 1884, the Socialist Labour Party in 1903, and the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. (See also SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY; SOCIALIST PARTY.)
Reading
Rubel, M. and Crump, J. Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1987.
Inflation. A continuous increase in the general level of prices. Inflation is the result of the action of governments printing and putting into circulation hundreds of millions of pounds of additional paper money, that is, an excess issue of currency.
There are other factors affecting prices. During periods of good trade prices rise and during periods of bad trade they fall. And a monopoly can charge a higher than normal price. Furthermore, the required amount of currency rises with the growth of population, production and trade, and falls with monetary developments such as the growth of the banking system, the use of cheques and credit cards. But a persistent increase in the cost of living is the sole responsibility of governments when they issue more currency than is needed for economic transactions to take place.
Wage increases cannot cause inflation. For unless market conditions change in their favour, employers cannot raise prices further simply because they have had to pay higher wages. If employers could recoup wage increases by raising prices, there would be no point in their resisting wage claims. (See also KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS; MONETARISM.)
Interest. The price of money. Those capitalist enterprises that borrow money capital to finance production pay to the lenders a portion of the surplus value produced as interest. (See also BANKS; SURPLUS VALUE.)
Internationals. The First International (The International Working Men's Association, 1864 - 1876) was an international federation of working class organisations. Founded in London, Marx and Engels were actively involved and Marx drew up its Inaugural Address and Rules. At the Hague Congress of 1872 there was a clash between Marx and the anarchist Bakunin, which led to Bakunin being expelled and the transfer of the seat of the General Council to New York. The First International was dissolved at a conference in Philadelphia in 1876.
The Second International (1889 - 1914) was founded in Paris but was dominated by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Unlike its predecessor, this International claimed to be Marxist in outlook. However, its early Congresses were especially concerned with Eduard Bernstein's 'revisionism', which was opposed by the SPD's leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky. Delegates were sent from the Socialist Party of Great Britain, soon after its formation, to the Amsterdam Congress in August 1904; and after seeing the reformism rampant, the SPGB refused to have anything more to do with it. In 1908 the British Labour Party was admitted. Although at Stuttgart (1907) and at Copenhagen (1910) the International had passed resolutions demanding joint action to prevent war, the various national parties (excluding the Russian, Serbian and Hungarian parties) of the International failed to respond in 1914. After its collapse in the First World War the Second International was revived in the 1920s as a loose association of Labour and Social Democratic parties, and still functions as the 'Socialist International'.
The Russian Communist Party established the Third International (1919 - 1943), also called the Communist International or Comintern. Based in Moscow, the Comintern controlled the Communist parties that had sprung up round the world. In 1931 the Comintern issued an instruction that it was necessary to stop distinguishing 'between fascism and bourgeois democracy, and between the parliamentary form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and its open fascist form'. It was partly because the Communists in Germany followed this instruction that Hitler was able to rise to power. The Comintern was dissolved in 1943 to appease Stalin's Western allies.
The Fourth International (1938 - ) was set up by Trotsky and his followers in opposition to the Second and Third Internationals. Trotsky predicted the rapid demise of these latter organisations, along with Social Democracy and Stalinism. Because of the failure of these and other predictions of Trotsky, the Fourth International has been subject to serious infighting and splits. (See also BAKUNIN; COMMUNIST PARTY; KAUTSKY; REVISIONISM; TROTSKYISM.)
Reading
Braunthal, J., History of the Internationals, 1966 - 1980.
Ireland. Very briefly, there are four factors at the root of the 'The Troubles' : (1) The origins of sectarianism in the Ulster Plantation of the seventeenth century, undertaken by the English government, which resulted in the native Gaels (who were Catholics) being dispossessed of their lands by the incoming planters who were largely (but not exclusively) Protestant. (2) The rise of nationalism in the late eighteenth century onwards, where different sides in the class struggle made use of religious and nationalist ideology to further their perceived economic interests. (3) Partition creating an independent south and Northern Ireland in 1922, caused by an imbalance of economic development between north and south. (4) The civil rights movements in Ulster in the 1960s, demanding greater equality for Catholics whom were discriminated against in jobs, housing and education, and the political violence that ensued.
The IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein, have campaigned to get the 'British' out of Ireland, while the Ulster Unionists and the Loyalist paramilitaries have fought to present themselves as more 'British' than the British. But it is the workers who have done the fighting and dying on both sides and none of this is worth the shedding of a single drop of their blood. Workers have no country. With an understanding of their class position in society, north and south, Catholic and Protestant, workers can unite to create a world fit for human beings to live in peace. (See also NATIONALISM.)
Joint-stock companies. Most large-scale capitalist enterprises outside the state sector are joint-stock companies. The ownership of invested capital as stocks and shares entitles the owners to an unearned income of a proportion of distributed profits in the form of dividends.
Justice. A central concept in liberal political philosophy in which people get what they deserve. For socialists, as for Marx, this and associated concepts (such as 'rights') are not so much wrong or false as irrelevant for our purposes. Marxian socialists operate within a different frame of reference, employing different concepts and asking different questions. To the liberal who is appalled by our lack of concern for 'justice', we might equally ask why there is no central role for the class struggle in liberal politics. Our core concepts are not only different but also mutually exclusive. Nor would a socialist society have to be underpinned by some conception of 'social justice' or 'distributive justice'. From each according to ability, to each according to need, is a practical arrangement for meeting self-defined needs. Justice or desert, therefore, doesn't come into it as far as socialists are concerned. (See also EQUALITY.)
Reading
Wood, A., Karl Marx, 1981.