Formed as an anti-communist labour international, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) nevertheless experienced internal conflict over the appropriate approach to communism. The different perspectives of the two largest affiliates, the British TUC and the American AFL-CIO, caused disharmony and ultimately near organizational paralysis until it forced a change of leadership. Caught between these rival positions, the ICFTU secretariat's relations with the AFL-CIO were initially the most strained, but as the International extended its activity in Africa, in a bid to outflank communist organization among labour, relations with the TUC also deteriorated over the correct stance on nationalism and colonialism.

Throughout the long debate on whether the workers' movement of Imperial Germany was predominantly radical or reformist in nature, little attention has been paid to attitudes at the grass-roots level. It is argued here that during the years of 1905–1906, when all Europe was witnessing turmoil and an intensification of social conflict, the German Social Democratic leadership deliberately put the radicalism of the masses to the test. The Dresden suffrage demonstrations of December 1905 were the first to end in violent clashes between participants and police. However, contrary to what has been written to date on this incident and those similar to it, the great majority of the demonstrators were not militant. But they did exhibit a remarkable readiness to engage in civil disobedience, which the Social Democrats could use to press the party's political aims.

The “Brenner Debate” launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about “agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe”. Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and “commercial change” into the equation. Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.