Friedrich Engels and the Origins of German Revisionism: Another Look

The precise nature of Friedrich Engels' theoretical role following Marx's death in 1883 has remained a hotly disputed topic among historians of socialist thought. However, despite their intellectual disagreements, the exponents of various perspectives frequently share a serious interpretive deficiency: the failure to anchor their readings of crucial texts in an analysis of specific political contexts. Situating Engels' later writings—his 1890s Letters on Historical Materialism, and his 1895 Introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France —within the dramatically changed political situation in fin de siècle Germany, this essay seeks to recast the entire gestalt of the quarrel over Engels' alleged revisionism by illuminating the historical and political framework that shaped his late Marxism and its theoretical premises.     

读恩格斯《在马克思墓前的讲话》－－纪念马克思逝世120周年

马克思是革命家与科学家统一的巨人，他创立的是革命性与科学性相结合的理论。按本来面目解读而不附加其他，才能坚持和发展马克思主义，把马克思开创的伟大事业不断推向前进。     

1890–1990: Up from Fabian socialism

He is the author of Philosophy and Language:; The Mask of Politics; Philosophers and Pamphleteers;and Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of J.J. Rouseaau.He has translated and edited numerous works and served in a variety of major editorial capacities.     

Compromising liberty: Friedrich Hayek's The road to serfdom in practice

Abstract

This paper examines a rare and unstudied piece of consultancy work undertaken in 1944 by Friedrich Hayek for the British Colonial Office and for the Government of Gibraltar. Hayek's subsequent reports suggested the reorganization of the state-regulated Gibraltar housing market in line with free market principles designed to relocate the colony's working-class population into neighbouring Spain. However, rather than freeing Gibraltarians from the evils of state planning, as identified in The road to serfdom (also 1944), this proposal would have delivered them into the dictatorship of General Franco. Not only was Franco's regime brutal, but it also practised autarkic economic policies virtually identical to those which Hayek maligned in The road to serfdom. In sum, Hayek's proposals would have benefited Gibraltar's landlords at the expense of the liberty of the majority of the civilian population.     

Marx and Engels’s theory of history: making sense of the race factor

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory of history contained racist components. In Marx and Engels’s understanding, racial disparities emerged under the influence of shared natural and social conditions hardening into heredity and of the mixing of blood. They racialized skin-colour groups, ethnicities, nations and social classes, while endowing them with innate superior and inferior character traits. They regarded race as part of humanity’s natural conditions, upon which the production system rested. ‘Races’ endowed with superior qualities would boost economic development and productivity, while the less endowed ones would hold humanity back. Marxist race thinking reflected common Lamarckian and Romantic-Nationalist assumptions of the era.     

The poetics of race in 1890s Ireland: an ethnography of the Aran Islands

By the end of the nineteenth century the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland had become sites of both cultural and scientific attention. Ashley examines how an ethnographical survey of the islands, based on the scientific claims of craniometry and anthropometry, engaged with and was influenced by the romantic traditions of writing about Aran. He suggests ways in which the work of the ethnographers, Haddon and Browne, should be seen as a development of the poetics of the islands, and placed alongside the literary work of Samuel Ferguson or J. M. Synge, rather than in opposition to them.     

Tintin in Australia: The Federal Election on 24 November 2007

The Australian federal election on 24November 2007 ended more than a decade of dominance of the centre-right Coalition government of John Howard. Despite his long reign, Howard leaves surprisingly little legacy in terms of fundamental changes, indeed, the main policy changes were already laid down by the Labor governments in the 1980s and early 1990s. Apart from general discontent with the long serving government, the environment, the close alliance with the US and opposition to work-place legislation led to the Coalitions defeat in an election, in which even the PM lost his seat.     

Sub-National Election Campaigns: The Danish Local Elections of November 1989*

Electoral campaigning is studied almost without exception at the national level. This article has chosen another road, claiming that electoral campaigning can also be studied at the local election level. Campaigning before the Danish local elections of 21 November 1989 is studied. The design permits comparisons between the two levels (national/local) as well as between different units at the local level. It furthermore provides an opportunity for studying the influence of local party systems as well as local mass media on election campaigning. A substantial part of the article discusses the institutional frameworks surrounding electoral campaigning in the municipalities studied and in general. It is maintained that the electoral system, the mass media structure, and the (local) party system are important contextual factors or frameworks. Given this, it is argued that organization, past performance, and campaign focus as a mix of policy proposals and leader image are paramount in affecting the local election vote. The main conclusions are: local election campaigning differs from national election campaigning; local election campaigning matters, i.e. it has a direct effect on the vote; and the functions of local party organizations in connection with local elections and local performance make them less vulnerable to organizational decline, which most mass membership political parties are experiencing at the national level.     

Orwell and the Oligarchs: George Orwell Memorial Lecture, 26 November 2010

The unique quality of George Orwell's political journalism is to force us to examine not just the utterances of our opponents, but what we say ourselves, in particular how we deceive ourselves as well as deceiving others. What would Orwell diagnose as our major self‐deception if he were alive today? Orwell was much taken with James Burnham's 1941 bestseller The Managerial Society. He agreed with Burnham that the predominant drift in modern society was towards oligarchy, and not towards democracy as we like to flatter ourselves. Whether in business or politics, decisions today rest in fewer hands. Power is concentrated, not dispersed. As in Russia, the emerging system enables oligarchs to collar a disproportionate share of the rewards. Management becomes a self‐remunerating elite. Inequality of income increases sharply as a result. Oligarchy is a perversion of liberal capitalism and not a natural development of it. It can be reversed. The Coalition government has set out in a liberal and localist direction. It remains to be seen whether these promising signs will develop into a sustained and effective programme.     

论脑力劳动与体力劳动的统一--以黑格尔、索恩-雷特尔和马克思为线索

脑力劳动与体力劳动的统一是共产主义实现的条件之一,有必要对两者统一的可能性进行深入研究。黑格尔、索恩-雷特尔和马克思关于脑力劳动与体力劳动的统一有深入论述,且三者之间也有紧密联系。黑格尔通过深入论述主奴辩证法,认为奴隶虽然在主人脑力劳动支配下劳动,但他却能够通过绝对恐惧以及劳动陶冶事物达及对自身自为存在的真理的确认,因而黑格尔将两者的统一建立在抽象的自我意识上。索恩-雷特尔通过对马克思商品形式的分析,提出现实抽象,并进一步阐明了现实抽象向思维抽象过渡的方式,将自然知识等脑力劳动概念的起源定位到了人的劳动行为上。因而,现实抽象是脑力劳动与体力劳动统一的关键。马克思指出脑力劳动与体力劳动的分离是分工发展的结果,并认为在共产主义社会中随着分工的消灭,个人、社会、自然知识概念三个维度的脑力劳动和体力劳动的分离就会消除。与黑格尔、索恩-雷特尔相比,马克思的解决方法是微观与宏观相辩证统一、具体与普遍相辩证统一,同时是辩证唯物的,因而是可以实现的。     

Party Politics and the Organization of the Danish Welfare State, 1890–1920: The Bourgeois Roots of the Modern Welfare State

The role of the Social Democrats in the establishment of the Scandinavian welfare state has been challenged in recent years. Institutional legacies have conditioned post-war Social Democratic reforms, and the bourgeois parties have played a larger role than so far acknowledged. By exploring the origin of five core policies of the early Danish welfare state, it is shown that policy legacy theses cannot account for the pattern of policy organization. Focusing on party and class dynamics, it is demonstrated that the bourgeois parties, and in particular the Liberals, had a crucial influence on the choice of funding model and administrative structure. The distributional and administrative interests of core constituencies shaped the preferences of the bourgeois parties decisively.