Be
Beard, Mary (1876-1958)
Mary Ritter Beard was born in Indianapolis on 5 August 1876, the third of six children and the elder of two daughters of Narcissa (Lockwood) and Eli Foster Ritter. At sixteen she left home to attend De Pauw University in Asbury, Indiana, where she studied political science, languages, and literature. She graduated in 1897 and taught high school German until 1900 when she married Charles Austin Beard, whom she had met at De Pauw. Mary Beard accompanied her husband to Oxford, and both were active politically as well as academically. Charles helped organize Ruskin Hall, the "free university" aimed at workingmen, and Mary became involved with the British women's suffrage movement. They returned to New York in 1902. Their daughter Miriam was born in 1903. The following year the Beards enrolled at Columbia University, but Mary quit soon after to take care of their child and volunteer for progressive causes.
Following the birth of her son William in 1907, Mary Beard became an organizer for the National Women's Trade Union League. From 1910 to 1912 she edited the suffragist periodical The Woman Voter, and after that worked with the Wage Earner's League. She was a member of the militant faction of the suffrage movement led by Alice Paul from 1913 to 1919, and she worked on several progressive causes. During this period, Charles taught at Columbia University, but he resigned in 1917 in protest of the firing of anti-war faculty. Charles helped establish the New School for Social Research (later joined by refugees from the Franfurt School) and both Beards helped found the Workers Education Bureau, but by the early 1920, the Beards generally worked outside of academic institutions.
Following her resignation from the National Woman's Party in 1917, Mary Beard devoted her skills and efforts to writing and lecturing, rather than public political activity. Her first book, Woman's Work in Municipalities (1915) and her second, A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920), focused on social reform and the working class. With Charles, she co-authored The Rise of American Civilization (1927), a groundbreaking text that integrated political, economic, social, and cultural histories with a progressive vision of America's past and distinctive national character. The two collaborated on several books that would become some of the most enduringly significant American history texts, but by herself, Mary pioneered the field of women's history. She was appalled by the omission of women from the historical record, and she wrote about and promoted the recognition of women's achievements in the present day and the past, in the U.S. and internationally. She authored and edited Understanding Women (1931), America Through Women's Eyes (1933), A Changing Political Economy as It Affects Women (1934), and Women as Force in History (1946), among others.
Rather than concentrating on grievances and questions of the subjugation of women, Beard's work promoted women's contributions to the formation of society and brought to light a long-neglected past. To this end in the early 1930s, she collaborated with Hungarian pacifist feminist Rosika Schwimmer to organize the World Center for Women's Archives (WCWA). Beard quoted French historian Fustel de Coulanges for the motto of the WCWA: "No documents, no history," and she envisioned an archive of women's papers and organizational records that would provide a foundation for women's history as an academic field as well as serve as a public good. Beard and Schwimmer raised funds, founded a board of directors, and collected documents from their network of women activists. The WCWA was headquartered in New York but collected on an international level. It was a well-publicized effort, and though the collection specialized in material from the pacifist movement, Beard worked to realize a broader conception for a collection representing the range of women's activities. Factionalism among WCWA supporters, shaky financial support, and an increasingly militaristic atmosphere in the U.S. and abroad forced the dissolution of the WCWA in the early 1940s.
This development was very discouraging to Beard, but fortunately, the WCWA generated momentum for developing institutions of women's history. Beard worked closely with Smith College archivist Margaret Grierson to create the Sophia Smith Collection, one of the world's largest women's history manuscript collections, founded in 1942, and she worked with Harvard historians to create the eventual Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. These two institutions received many of the WCWA documents, as did several smaller collections. Together, they carried on the WCWA mission, at least partly due to Beard's influence.
Neither of the Beards avoided controversy in their writings or public stands. Though both were well-respected historians, they increasingly drew criticism for their pacifist and progressive politics in the years surrounding World War II. Charles Beard died in 1948, and Mary Ritter Beard died on 14 August 1958. Both Beards have had enduring reputations as incisive historians, and they are recognized for their pioneering work in social history. Mary Beard especially has been celebrated for her work to promote women's history.
See Mary Beard Archive.
Bebel, August (1840-1913)
A worker and Marxist revolutionary, Bebel co-founded German Social Democracy with Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869. Bebel had trained as a cabinet maker, and in 1863, at the time of the founding of Lassalle’s German Workers’ Association, he found "socialism and communism" "totally unfamiliar concepts, double-duth words". Bebel was a member of the Reichstag from 1867. Sentenced with Liebknecht to two years imprisonment for "treason" (opposition to Franco-German War) in 1872. After the GSD merged with the Lassalleans in Gotha in 1875, Bebel remained the unquestioned leader. His fiery parliamentary speeches – from 1868 he was continuously a member first of the North German and later the German Reichstag – are part of the history of German social democracy, as are also his books, above all his autobiography From My Life and Woman and Socialism
See the August Bebel Archive.
Becker, Hermann Heinrich (1820-1885)
Cologne writer and communist.
Becker, Johann Philipp (1809-1886)
German revolutionary in the 1830s and 1840s and friend of Karl Marx and Engels. Later resided in Switzerland. Prominent in the First International.
Beesly, Edward Spencer (1831-1915)
Professor of history and political economy at University College, London. A follower of August Comte. Beesly was chairman at the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London (September 28, 1864) at which the International Workingmen’s Association was founded. March 1867 he published an article in the Fortnightly Review supporting the activities of the "new model" trade unions.
Begum Roquia (c. 1880-1932)
Begum Roquia, also known as Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, Begum R. S. Hussain or Begum Rokeya, was a pioneer of women’s liberation movement in the South Asian subcontinent.
She was a prolific author, relentless activist for gender equality, and the founder of the Anjuman e Khateen e Islam (Islamic Women’s Association) during the colonial era.
Begum Roquia was born in the Rangpur district of northern Bangladesh during the British occupation of the South Asian subcontinent.
Her family was an aristrocratic Muslim family (Ashraf). The medium of education at home was the combination of both Arabic and Persian languages As per cultural standards of the day, her family was against teaching Bangla which according to them was a tool of preaching ‘Hindu communalism’. But Roquia eventually learned both English and Bangla with the help of her elder brother Ibraheem.
At the age of 16, she married Urdu speaking Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hussain who was a civil sevant under British administration.
Sakhawat Hussain also was a progressive supporter of the women’s education movement. He encouraged his wife Begum Roquia to begin writing and to accumulate money to use in the founding of a school primarily for Muslim girls.
Begum Roquia set up the Sakhawat Memorial High School in 1909, naming it in tribute of her husband who died earlier the same year.
Begum Roquia wrote extensively on the struggle for women’s rights and education and maintained active involvement in her girls’ school until her death.
She remains a revered and celebrated figure in the history of Bangladesh.
Related link:Wikipedia.
Bell, Thomas (1882-1944)
Thomas Bell was born in Glasgow in 1882, the son of a stone mason. In 1900 he joined the Independent Labour Party but became dissatisfied with its attitude to trade unions and industrial workers. From the ILP he joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. But his continuing views on unions and workers led him, and those who thought like him, to be denounced by SDF leadership as “Impossibilists” and the entire group was expelled at the 1903 SDF conference.
Bell, along with others such as Willie Gallagher and Arthur MacManus, joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which was established in 1903 after their expulsion from the SDF. This organisation was also Marxist but was small; it was an overwhelmingly Scottish grouping, although there were also were small groups in Sheffield and Derby. This British SLP also had close links with the Socialist Labor Party of America led by Daniel de Leon.
Bell soon became one of the SLP’s most prominent members, in the process steering it away from the grip of ‘de Leonism’. The SLP’s journal was called the The Socialist and in 1919 Tom Bell became its editor. Under his editorship, its circulation rose to 8,000 in 1920.
Bell was also one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee and shop steward’s movement during the First World War. He was also President of the Scottish Ironmoulders’ and leader of the 1920 moulders’ strike, which was successful in obtaining a wage rise for the whole of the engineering industry. He was also active on trade union affairs in Merseyside and Manchester. Bell was a close associate of James Connolly and was Chairman of Manchester Labour College and Plebs League.
He played an important role in the establishment of the Communist Party in 1920, as one of three SLP delegates (Arthur MacManus and William Paul) to the Communist Unity Committee and Convention. He and his fellow SLP delegates’ support for the establishment of the CPGB led to them being expelled from the SLP.
Bell was a Communist Party Executive member from 1920-1929 and initially National Organiser. During the political show trial of the British Communist Party leadership in 1925, Bell was sentenced under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 to six months in Wandsworth jail, along with Arthur MacManus, J. T. Murphy, J. R. Campbell, Robin Page Arnot, Tom Wintringham, Eric Cant. Five others got sentences of 12 months: Albert Inkpin, Willie Gallagher, Harry Pollitt, William Rust and Wal Hannington. (Bell was in the cell next door to Gallagher in Wandsworth jail).
Despite finding himself a little sidelined by the ‘bolshevisation’ measures of the late 1920s and early 1930s, he remained a member of the Party with some influence until his death in 1944.
From Graham Stevenson.
Further Reading: Thomas Bell Archive.
Bellamy, Edward (1850-1898)
American author, famous for his utopian novel set in the year 2000, Looking Backward, published in 1888.
Born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, he attended Union College, but did not graduate; studied law, but left and worked briefly in as a journalist in New York and Massachusetts before devoting himself to literature.
His books include Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880), Miss Ludington’s Sister (1884) and The Duke of Stockbridge. His feeling of injustice in the economic system lead him to write Looking Backward: 2000–1887, which influenced many intellectuals, and Marxist of the day. “Bellamy Clubs” sprang up all over the US to discuss the book’s ideas. A short story The Parable of the Water-Tank from the book Equality (1897), was popular with a number of early American socialists.
Bellamy died at his childhood home in Chicopee Falls at the age of 48 from tuberculosis.
See Utopianism Subject Archive, including Looking Backward from 2000–1887.
Belli, Mihri (1915-...)
The founder of the thesis of "National Democratic Revolution".
He studied economics in the USA. He became there a marxist and joined the African-American and Workers movements. He turned back to Turkey in 1940 and joined the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). He organised the Union of the Progressive Youth. In 1944 he was arrested and sentenced to prison for two years. In 1946 he went to Greece to join the Greece Civil War as a guerilla. He was wounded and stayed at the hospitals in Bulgaria and Soviet Union. He entered to Turkey in 1950 and arrested, stayed in prison for seven years. After the military putsch in 1960 he wrote some articles at the periodicals "Türk Solu" and "Aydinlik Sosyalist Dergi". He escaped from Turkey after the fascist putsch in 1971 and joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation. After the Amnesty Law in 1974 he returned back to Turkey and founded Labourer Party of Turkey (TEP). After the fascist military putsch in 1980 went to Middle-East again, then to Sweden. Turned back to Turkey in 1992 and joined the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP).
Belinsky, Vissarion (1811-1848)
Russian literary critic who supported socially critical writers.
Ben Bella, Ahmed (1916-)
Born in Maghnia, Algeria, in 1916. He served in the French Army during the Second World War. After the war he became involved in the independence movement and in 1949 became leader of Organisation Speciale, the paramilitary wing of the Party of the Algerian People.
Ben Bella was captured in 1952 but he escaped to Egypt where he founded the National Liberation Front (FLN). Under the leadership of Ben Bella the FLN fought a long war of independence from France.
In 1962 Algeria gained its independence and Ben Bella became the country’s first prime minister and in 1963 was elected president. Ben Bella attempted to establish a system similar to the one led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.
However Ben Bella was deposed in 1965 in a military coup led by General Houari Boumedienne and was kept under house arrest until 1979. He spent the next ten years in exile but in 1990 he returned to live in Algeria.
Benjamin, Walter (1892 - 1940)
German Marxist literary critic. Born into a prosperous Jewish family, Benjamin studied philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich, and Bern. He settled in Berlin in 1920 and worked thereafter as a literary critic and translator. His half-hearted pursuit of an academic career was cut short when the University of Frankfurt rejected his brilliant but unconventional doctoral thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Benjamin eventually settled in Paris after leaving Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power. He continued to write essays and reviews for literary journals, but when Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940 he fled south with the hope of escaping to the US via Spain. Informed by the chief of police at the Franco-Spanish border that he would be turned over to the Gestapo, Benjamin committed suicide.
The posthumous publication of Benjamin’s prolific output won him a growing reputation in the later 20th century. The essays containing his philosophical reflections on literature are written in a dense and concentrated style that contains a strong poetic strain. He mixes social criticism and linguistic analysis with historical nostalgia while communicating an underlying sense of pathos and pessimism. The metaphysical quality of his early critical thought gave way to a Marxist inclination in the 1930s. Benjamin’s pronounced intellectual independence and originality are evident in the extended essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the essays collected in Illuminations.
The approach to art of the USSR under Stalin was typified, first, by the persecution of all those who expressed any independent thought, and, second, by the adoption of Socialist Realism - the view that art is dedicated to the "realistic" representation of - simplistic, optimistic - "proletarian values" and proletarian life. Subsequent Marxist thinking about art has been largely influenced by Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács however. Both were exponents of Marxist humanism who saw the important contribution of Marxist theory to aesthetics in the analysis of the condition of labour and in the critique of the alienated and "reified" consciousness of man under capitalism. Benjamin’s collection of essays The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) attempts to describe the changed experience of art in the modern world and sees the rise of Fascism and mass society as the culmination of a process of debasement, whereby art ceases to be a means of instruction and becomes instead a mere gratification, a matter of taste alone. "Communism responds by politicising art" - that is, by making art into the instrument by which the false consciousness of the mass man is to be overthrown.
See the Walter Benjamin Archive.
Benjedid, Chadli (1929- )
President of Algeria (1979-92), born in Sebaa. He joined the National Liberation Front shortly after the Algerian revolution began in 1954 and rose through the ranks of the guerrilla forces; by the early 1960s he was on the staff of Colonel (later president) Houari Boumedienne, and he played a decisive role in the latter’s overthrow of President Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965. Subsequently serving in the Revolutionary Council and as acting minister of defense (1978), he was elected president in February 1979 and reelected in 1984 and 1988. When his democratization program threatened to bring Muslim fundamentalists to power, he was forced to resign in January 1992 by a military-dominated junta.
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)
Idealist. Writer on law and ethics; a barrister from 1772. Made a study of the theory of law and developed the idea that laws should be socially beneficial and not merely a reflection of the status quo. Popularised the Utilitarian theory that all actions are right when they promote the ’greatest happiness of the greatest number’. In 1808 he met James Mill and with him formed a group that propagated Utilitarian ideas among the radical bourgeoisie and intellectuals.
Beria, Lavrenti (1899-1953)
Georgian. Organised Bolshevik group in Baku in 1917; 1921-31 directed GPU in Georgia. First Sec. Georgian CP from 1931; leader of NKVD from 1938 until Stalin’s death. Responsible for countless murders on his own initiative as well as on Stalin’s orders; summarily shot shortly after Stalin’s death.
Berkeley, George (1685 - 1753)
Bishop Berkeley came to the defence of religion against Locke’s Empiricism, but did so by turning the empiricist theory "against itself".
“It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by the help of memory or imagination ... That neither our thoughts nor passions nor ideas forms by the imagination exist without mind is what everybody will allow ... and to me it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the senses, however blended or combined together cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them”.
“It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing among men that houses, mountains, rivers and in a word, all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding ... For what are the aforementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? And what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it plainly repugnant that anyone of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived”. [from Of the Principles of Human Understanding]
In other words, he said to the empiricists: ‘You know that sensations exist, but you know not of anything beyond; you are acting only upon senses’. Berkeley proved that empiricism leads to subjective idealism. In order to explain the existence of knowledge at all, Berkeley invented a special new sense which is able to sense "notions", thus leading back to religion.
Berkeley’s subjective idealist attack on materialism, purporting to show that the assertion that something exists outside the mind of the individual human being is absurd, useless and unprovable, was in fact a great service to the development of materialism. This can be said because Berkeley drew to its "logical conclusion" the development of empiricism.
Bacon asserted, as a materialist, that we had to use our eyes, ears and hands and go out to Nature to discover truth. Hobbes and Locke developed Bacon’s "empiricism" in the narrow sense, by reducing the investigation of Nature to experience to sense perception, equating sense perception with ideas, and ultimately equating the rational faculty as a whole with the action of the external world on the senses, with sense perception.
Berkeley shows that this line of development leads to knowledge only of phenomena, in the form of sensations, not the essence of things existing outside of and independently of our perception of us. Perception has become, not people’s connection with Nature, but a barrier sealing us off from Nature absolutely. The logical conclusion of empiricism is subjective idealism.
Berkeley avoids outright "solipsism" by adding to his thesis, that the God can perceive sensations independently of us, thus allowing "things" to exist while we are not actually looking at them. This unconvincing objective idealist "correction" to his otherwise consistent subjective idealism grew more significant in the course of his development.
Nevertheless, Berkeley’s insane conclusions are generally accepted as the last word on the question of matter for the French, British and Maerican traditions of idealist philosophy for a long time afterwards.
In order to develop further, materialism had to find an answer to Berkeley’s challenge.
Berman, Marshall
Completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1968. Currently Professor of Political Science at CUNY, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism and is on the editorial board of Dissent and is a regular contributor to The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bennington Review, New Left Review, New Politics and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. His main works are The Politics of Authenticity, All That is Solid Melts in Air, One Hundred Years of Spectacle and Adventures in Marxism. In Adventures in Marxism Berman tells of how while a student at Columbia University in 1959, the chance discovery of the 1844 Manuscripts proved a revelation and inspiration, and became the foundation for all his future work.
Bernal J D (John Desmond Bernal) (1901-1971)
Irish-born scientist and communist.
He was educated at Bedford School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied both mathematics and science for a B. A. degree in 1922; which he followed by another year of natural sciences. He taught himself the theory of space groups, including the quaternion method; this became the mathematical basis of later work on crystal structure. After graduating he started research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite.
He joined the Communist Party in 1923, but left in 1933. In 1939, he published The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest text on the sociology of science. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.
He is known also as joint inventor of the Mulberry Harbour. After helping orchestrate D-Day, he landed on Normandy the day after D-Day. He is also famous for having firstly proposed in 1929 the so-called Bernal sphere, a type of space habitat intended as a long-term home for permanent residents.
See J D Bernal Archive.
Bernstein, Edward (1850-1932)
German Social Democrat; left Germany during the anti-Socialist laws and edited Sozial Demokrat in Switzerland. Expelled from there in 1888, where he lived in London till 1900. He was a friend of Engels in Engels’ last years and was named his literary executor. Reichstag Deputy 1902-1906, 1912-1918, 1920-1928. A pacifist-centrist during World War I. Founder of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USID) 1916, but returned to the Social Democractic Party in 1919. Chief exponent of revisionism and reformism for over twenty five years, beginning 1896. Editor and author of Evolutionary Socialism, 1899 among other works. In this work he developed a theory of the gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism; coined the famous aphorism: "The movement is everything, the final goal nothing"; believing that revolution was not necessary.
See the Eduard Bernstein Archive.
Berzin, Jan Karlovich (1890-1935)
Jan Karlovich Berzin (real name: Peter Kyuzis) was the son of poor Latvian parents, born in Madona, 1890. At the age of nineteen he was arrested by the Tsarist police for involvement in an assassination plot (a plan to throw a hand grenade at the chief of the Okhrana in the Bolshoi had failed), was sentenced to death and then pardoned because of his youth. Berzin joined the Bolsheviks after the split with the Mensheviks and it is said that Berzin had had occasion to save Lenin’s life. He spent some time in prison but surfaced again in 1917 as a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party. Berzin was elected to the Central Committee and participated in the storming of the Winter Palace.
Berzin was the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in Soviet Latvia in the spring of 1919, when the military success of the White armies led him to take command of the Latvian Rifle Division. His first act of command was shooting the previous commander in front of the petrified Rifle Division. The legend of this execution followed Berzin ever after, enhancing his reputation as an officer in the GPU.
In 1935, Berzin was arrested as a German spy and strangled with piano wire.