The Politics Book

by DK Publishing

  JOSÉ MARTÍ

  José Martí was a Cuban journalist, poet, essayist, and revolutionary. Born in Havana, then under Spanish rule, he became active in the movement for Cuban independence with the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War against Spain in 1868. Charged with treason in 1869, he was sentenced to six years in prison. On falling ill, he was exiled to Spain, where he was allowed to continue his studies.

  On graduating in law, Martí toured the Americas, arguing the case for Latin American independence and unity. He formed the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892. During an insurrection against the Spanish in 1895, Martí was killed at the Battle of Dos Ríos on May 19 that year. Cuba finally broke free from Spain in 1898, when the US intervened during the Spanish-American War.

  Key works

  1891 Our America (essay)

  1891 Simple Verses (from which Cuba’s best-known patriotic song, Guantanamera, is adapted)

  1892 Patria newspaper

  See also: Simón Bolívar • Emiliano Zapata • Smedley D. Butler • Che Guevara • Fidel Castro

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Anarcho-communism

  FOCUS

  Political action

  BEFORE

  1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes The Social Contract, stating that “man is born free, and is everywhere in chains”.

  1840 In What is Property?, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon calls himself an anarchist.

  1881 Tsar Alexander II is assassinated in St Petersburg.

  AFTER

  1917 The Bolsheviks seize power in Russia.

  1960s Counter-culture movements in Europe and the US squat in empty buildings and form communities.

  2011 The Occupy Movement protests against economic inequality by occupying Wall Street during the global economic crisis.

  At the end of the 19th century, Tsarist Russia was a hothouse for every new social movement from fascism to radical communism. Peter Kropotkin, who spurned his privileged life as the son of a prince, was a product of his times, advocating the destruction of authority. In The Conquest of Bread (1892), Kropotkin argued that the best aspect of humanity – its ability to cooperate – could allow it to do away with all oppressive structures. He saw in the developing labour movement the possibility to overthrow oppressors – from priests to capitalists – and establish a new society based on mutual respect and cooperation. He lay down the principles of what was to become anarcho-communism: belief in a collaborative, egalitarian society, free of the state.

  "In place of the cowardly phrase, ‘Obey the law,’ our cry, is ‘Revolt against all laws!’"

  Peter Kropotkin

  Call to action

  Anarchism is a theory of action, and Kropotkin urged those who would listen to always act. Sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he denounced its authoritarianism in the subsequent civil war. Establishing a new world did not require fresh rules, but anarchists able to act courageously against all oppression. Compromise and political calculation were alien to anarchism; instead, its adherents must act with moral fervour against a corrupt world. Kropotkin, like other anarchists, helped define the “politics of the deed” – a belief that would recur in radical ideologies over the next century.

  See also: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon • Mikhail Bakunin • Henry David Thoreau • Karl Marx • Vladimir Lenin

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Feminism

  FOCUS

  Civil disobedience

  BEFORE

  1792 Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an early defence of women’s equality.

  1865 Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill campaigns successfully for parliament on a platform of women’s suffrage.

  1893 New Zealand is the first major country to grant women the vote.

  AFTER

  1990 The Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerhoden is forced to accept women’s suffrage (the other cantons had accepted it in 1971).

  2005 Women are granted the right to vote and stand for parliament in Kuwait.

  By the early 1900s, the right to vote was gaining acceptance around the world, but the right for women to do so lagged behind. New Zealand had been the first major country to grant the vote to women, in 1893, but progress in Europe and North America was achingly slow, hindered by obstinate politicians, conservative public opinion, and often vicious press campaigns. Activist Emmeline Pankhurst, with others, established the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Britain in 1903. Known as “suffragettes”, their militant action and civil disobedience soon included window-smashing, assaults, and arson. In 1913, campaigner Emily Davidson died after throwing herself under the king’s horse at the Derby race, and a hunger strike of imprisoned suffragettes was met with force-feeding.

  When Pankhurst, speaking later in 1913, said, “either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote”, she was laying claim both to the suffragettes’ moral authority to act as they saw fit in furthering a just cause, and emphasizing their apparently implacable determination to win it. However, this determination lasted only until World War I in 1914, when the WSPU dropped their campaign in order to support the war effort. Women over the age of 30 were granted the right to vote in Britain at the war’s end, with all adult women able to vote from 1928.

  Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested outside Buckingham Palace in May 1914. The WSPU strongly advocated direct action in pursuit of its goals.

  See also: Mary Wollstonecraft • John Stuart Mill • Simone de Beauvoir • Shirin Ebadi

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Zionism

  FOCUS

  A Jewish state

  BEFORE

  1783 In Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Tolerance, German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn calls for religious tolerance in a secular state.

  1843 German philosopher Bruno Bauer’s book The Jewish Question states that Jews must give up religion to achieve political emancipation.

  AFTER

  1933 Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany, promoting German nationalism and anti-Semitism.

  1942 Plans for the Final Solution of the Jewish question are discussed by Nazi leaders at the Wannsee Conference.

  1948 The state of Israel is established.

  The French Third Republic, founded at the end of a century of revolutions, promised the guarantee of equal legal rights for all its citizens. However, this constitutional equality was put severely to the test. In December 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a young artillery officer, was convicted of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment, despite clear evidence that another man had been passing the secrets, and that the evidence against Dreyfus had been fabricated. His trial was covered by a young Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, working for an Austrian newspaper.

  "We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us."

  Theodor Herzl

  Dreyfus was also Jewish, and his case exposed deep divisions in French society. His supporters, known as “Dreyfusards”, saw anti-Semitism as the central reason for the framing of an innocent man. Their campaign for Dreyfus’s release drew in intellectuals such as writer Émile Zola alongside politicians and trade unionists.

  However, for the anti-Dreyfusards, his case revealed something quite different: the need for vigilance against France’s enemies. Liberty, equality, and fraternity were true French values, but not all those who lived in France should be considered French, they claimed. Protests in Dreyfus’s defence were met by mobs chanting “Death to the Jews!”

  Anti-Semitism had a long and ugly history in Europe, where the official discrimination of Church edicts had mingled with popular prejudice, leading frequently to ethnic cleansing. Jews had been expelled from several countries, and denied full rights elsewhere. By the end of the 19th century, however, inspired by the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, many modern nation-states, includi
ng France, had formally ended state-sanctioned discrimination on the grounds of religious belief. Assimilation – the belief that minority groups could integrate fully into wider society – became an increasingly accepted ideal.

  Against assimilation

  Despite these official changes at state level, the Dreyfus case convinced Herzl that anti-Semitism was endemic in society, and that attempts to defeat it, or for Jews to assimilate, were doomed to fail. Instead, Jews would have to borrow a totally different concept from the Enlightenment – nationalism. Herzl stated that Jews were “one people”, and that the diaspora population should be united in a single Jewish state, preserving their rights as Jews in the modern world. He set about campaigning for a Jewish state, urging European powers to assist him in finding a place for it, and encouraging Jews to give funds to the cause. He believed that the new Jewish homeland would need to be outside Europe – either in Argentina or Israel.

  Herzl’s ideas spread quickly, but met with stiff resistance from those sections of Jewish society that still favoured assimilation. His Zionist movement only really gained ground in the decades after his death. The granting by the British of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine in 1917 helped pave the way, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the state of Israel was created in 1948. Alfred Dreyfus was finally pardoned in 1906.

  Creating a Jewish homeland where Jews could be united was central to their identity, according to Herzl. He believed it was the only way that Jews could avoid anti-Semitic attitudes.

  THEODOR HERZL

  Theodor Herzl was born in Pest in the Austro-Hungarian empire to strongly secular Jewish parents. He moved to Vienna aged 18 and began his studies in law. His first political activity was with the German nationalist student fraternity, Albia, from which he later resigned in protest at their anti-Semitism.

  After a brief legal career, Herzl turned to journalism, and it was while he was the Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse that he began covering the Dreyfus Affair. The virulent and widespread racism the case revealed in French society pushed Herzl to break with his earlier assimilationist beliefs. He became a skilled advocate and organizer for the Zionist cause, publishing The Jewish State in 1896 to considerable controversy. A year later, he chaired the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, seeing it as a symbolic parliament for the Zionist state. He died from a heart attack, aged 44.

  Key works

  1896 The Jewish State

  1902 The Old New Land

  See also: Johann Gottfried Herder • Marcus Garvey • Hannah Arendt • Adolf Hitler

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Socialism

  FOCUS

  Social welfare

  BEFORE

  1848 In A General View of Positivism, French philosopher Auguste Comte argues for scientific social analysis.

  1869 The English section of the Charity Organization Society is established to promote charitable work among the “deserving poor”.

  1889 Social reformer Charles Booth finds a third of London’s population lives in poverty.

  AFTER

  1911 The National Insurance Act expands UK insurance for unemployment and illness.

  1942 Economist William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services lays the foundations for the welfare state in the UK.

  By the late 19th century, with industrial capitalism firmly entrenched in Britain, public concern turned towards its consequences. Industrial towns and cities were home to swathes of people deprived of work, cut loose from society, and living in squalor.

  A Royal Commission was established in 1905 to address the problem, but in 1909 its report produced a weak set of proposals. As a member of the commission, pioneering social researcher Beatrice Webb produced a far more radical minority report, arguing for a welfare state that would provide protection against unemployment and illness. She and Sidney Webb, her husband and collaborator, opposed the view that the poor produced their own poverty. They argued that social problems could be solved by benevolent planners, administering society in the best interests of all.

  "It is urgently necessary to ‘clean up the base of society’."

  Beatrice Webb

  Planned society

  Countering those who stressed the superiority of unregulated markets, and a continuing reliance on charity and self-help for the poor, the Webbs offered a new vision of an orderly society. However, like many of their contemporaries, they were eugenicists, believing the “stock” of humanity could also be improved by this kind of benevolent planning. To Webb, the wishes of the poor, and their attempts to alleviate their own conditions, were insignificant. She believed a rational society would emerge, in which the majority would accept the wise rule of the planners.

  See also: Eduard Bernstein • Jane Addams • John Rawls • Michel Foucault

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Progressive movement

  FOCUS

  Social reform

  BEFORE

  1880s Otto von Bismarck, German Chancellor, introduces the first social insurance programmes.

  1884 Toynbee Hall is opened in Whitechapel, East London, to provide amenities to the poor. Jane Addams visits in 1887.

  AFTER

  1912 The US Children’s Bureau is established to administer the provision of child welfare.

  1931 Jane Addams becomes the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  1935 The first national system of social insurance is introduced in the US.

  The frontier marking the limit of western settlement in the United States was declared closed by the census of 1890, but not before the notion of America as a society defined by an entrepreneurial “frontier spirit” had taken root. Challenging the myth of boundless growth and opportunity, social reformers pointed instead to the poverty and the absence of meaningful opportunity faced by America’s poor and working classes. Radical change was due.

  In 1889, Jane Adams, pioneering sociologist and campaigner for women’s suffrage, established Hull House in Chicago, the first “settlement house” to provide amenities and welfare services to the city’s poor – women and children especially. Relying on donations from wealthy benefactors and on volunteer labour, Addams wanted the House to show how the different classes of society could learn the practical benefits of cooperation. She was convinced that by channelling the energies of the young into productive activity, good habits would be learned early on, and the costs of poverty in crime and disease lessened.

  Addams wrote of America lagging far behind other nations’ legislation to protect women and children in industry. She viewed direct charitable intervention with individuals as ineffective: only concerted public action, backed up by legislation, could deal with social problems. In this she helped to define social work as an activity concerned with changing society as much as individuals.

  Promoting education as key to opportunity for all, Hull House ran a kindergarten, clubs for older children, and evening classes for adults.

  See also: Beatrice Webb • Max Weber • John Rawls

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Nationalism

  FOCUS

  Fair distribution of land

  BEFORE

  1842 The Treaty of Nanjing grants Britain trade concessions with China and the port of Hong Kong.

  1901 The Boxer Rebellion against foreign rule fails, resulting in the capture of Beijing by the Eight Nation Alliance.

  AFTER

  1925–26 The First Chinese Revolution is defeated by the KMT, leading to a Communist Party retreat – the “Long March”.

  1932 Japan invades China. The KMT and the Communist Party lead the resistance.

  1949 The defeat of Japan is followed by civil war, which is won by the Communist Party.

  China had been a single state since the founding of the Qin dynasy in 222 BCE. But in the second half of the 19th century, it was carved up among the major Western powers, who pushed through the
“Unequal Treaties”. These were a series of agreements that were signed under duress by successive emperors, crippling development and impoverishing the people. The failure of the Chinese empire to defend either itself, or the people it claimed to provide for, provoked a prolonged crisis. As conditions worsened, the regime became deeply unpopular, and successive uprisings became increasingly destructive. A distinctive form of Chinese nationalism arose against this backdrop of social strife and subjugation by Western powers – and, later, by the Japanese. It stressed the need to learn from the West – transforming China into a modern society, breaking with the failures of the empire and with the perceived backwardness of the peasant rebellions. From the 1880s, Sun Yat-Sen was among those forming nationalist groups and attempting an uprising against Beijing’s rule. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he stressed the strengths of Chinese culture, fusing a respect for China’s history with an appropriation of “Western” values.

  "Our society is not free to develop and the common people do not have the means of living."

  Sun Yat-Sen

  The Three Principles

  Sun organized his thought around what became known as the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy, and “the people’s livelihood”. The last principle referred to economic development, but was understood by Sun to be development on the basis of the fair distribution of China’s resources, especially land for its peasantry – “the tillers”. A corrupt landlord system would be overthrown, alongside the corrupt emperor system it supported, clearing the way for a modern, republican, and democratic China.