Anti Militarism From The Workers Point Of View

For historians of the international labour movement, the decades before 1914 were the golden age of Marxist thought. In this flowering of socialist thinking, Britain seemingly had no part, and the question has been asked instead: ‘Why was there was no Marxism in Britain?’ The selections in this volume confirm that Marxist ideas in Britain were not always pitched at the highest theoretical level. There are also examples of the reductionism to which leading exponents were sometimes prone. Nevertheless, there is also a richness and outspokenness across wide and varied themes that belies the caricature of arid economic determinism. Marxists believed they carried on the tradition of home-grown movements of struggle such as Chartism. They also identified with the new spirit of internationism whose ideas and personalities filled the pages of their periodicals. Behind such well-known names as William Morris, James Connolly and Tom Mann, a wider movement of contrarians remains to be discovered.

This first volume will showcase the richness and diversity of the Owenite movement, which spanned decades (from Owen’s first published books in 1813-16 to the late 1840s), political allegiances, genders and continents. This volume therefore calls for a variety of sources not easily available elsewhere - including books, pamphlets, correspondence and newspaper articles - and a variety of often overlapping voices - from Chartists to early co-operators, secularists, non-British Owenites and proponents of women’s rights. The sheer range of Owenite ventures (intentional communities, co-operatives, labour exchanges and experiments in popular education) will be covered, thus blending social and political history. The attempt to map the Owenite movement will eventually lead to the identification of its shared, core principles and values: internationalism, co-operation, concepts of political change, and above all, the ideal of community.

Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russia’s foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality.

This volume provides a unique view of the movement for peace during the First World War, with authors from across Europe and the United States, each providing a distinctive cultural analysis of peace movements during the Great War. As Europe began its descent into the madness that became the First World War, people in every nation worked to maintain peace. Once the armies began to march across borders, activists and politicians alike worked to bring an end to the hostilities. This volume explores what peace meant to the different people, societies, nationalities, and governments involved in the First World War. It offers a wide variety of observations, including Italian socialists and their fight for peace, women in Britain pushing for peace, and French soldiers refusing to fight in an effort to bring about peace.

A lively, first hand account of the ideas and activities of women and men in anti-war, anti-militarist and peace movements. The author looks at the tensions and divergences in and between organizations, and their potential for cohering into a powerful worldwide counter-hegemonic movement for violence reduction.

One of the great classics of anti-militarism--originally published in 1907 and immediately banned.