The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (218 page)

 
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The process, described by
Marx
, beginning with the gathering together of commodities, then gold and silver, and finally money by which nascent capitalism created the material base (through the systematic exploitation of labour, expropriation of resources, and colonial plundering) that facilitated its dominance in the economic and political spheres.
GS 

 
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A term reflecting
Marx
and
Engels'
interest in ethnology in general and in the research of Lewis H. Morgan (1818–81) in particular. There were societies, both ancient and modern, which existed without class and state and where the social and economic relationships themselves were broadly egalitarian. Such societies guaranteed a collective right to basic resources and allowed no space for authoritarian rule. Morgan gave detailed ethnographic support to this notion of primitive communism in
Ancient Society
, 1877, and
Engels
, working with Marx's notes on Morgan, analysed the phenomena and its relationship to historical materialism in
The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State
, 1884.
JH 

 
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See
delegate
;
representation
.

 
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A general description given to the taking of legal action before an anticipated wrong doing. Remedies to prevent a threatened illegality from taking place include the use of injunction or prohibition and declaration. In English law, an injunction may take the form of either a negative or positive requirement, depending on how best to deal with the illegality. In order to obtain an injunction, the plaintiff must show he has an arguable point of law and that on the balance of convenience an injunction ought to be given.
A prohibition will prevent any further action or wrongdoing, in effect telling the offending party to proceed no further. A declaration will issue to declare rights and clarify legal doubts over any potential dispute. Once awarded a prohibition, declaration, or injunction is effective against any potential wrongdoer, within the terms of the courts' decision. Both prohibition and injunction are available under the application for judicial review procedure on a public law matter before the Divisional Court.
Administrative law
provides an explanation of the term ‘public law’, which normally refers to statutory bodies exercising public law powers.
JM 

 
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The most famous of all non-
zero-sum games
. Two prisoners are held in separate cells. The District Attorney knows that they jointly committed an armed robbery, but only if at least one of them confesses will he have the evidence to guarantee a conviction. If neither of them confesses, they will be sentenced to two years in prison for illegal possession of firearms. The sentence for armed robbery is twenty years. However, if they both plead guilty, it will be reduced to ten years. If one confesses and the other does not, the one who confesses will be set free altogether and the other sentenced to the full twenty years. The DA visits each prisoner, inviting him to confess. Should he?
The prisoners' dilemma may be expressed by the following matrix, where in each cell the number before the comma is the outcome for Row and the number after the comma is the outcome for Column. The numbers represent years in prison, and are preceded by minus signs because more years in prison are worse than fewer.
Row does not know what Column will do. But he knows that if Column does not confess he will receive -2 if he does not confess and 0 if he confesses. If Column confesses he will receive -20 if he does not confess and -10 if he confesses. Irrespective of what Column does, it is therefore a ‘sure thing’ that Row is better off if he confesses. The reasoning is symmetrical for Column. Therefore, rational prisoners will confess, even though both of them knew all along that it would be better for each if neither confessed.
The prisoners' dilemma has been generalized for repeated interactions (
supergames
) and for more than two players. With repeated interactions, it is no longer necessarily true that each player should always defect. For instance, players may agree on a tit-for-tat rule, or signal one to each other by their responses in repeated games. Tit-for-tat means ‘I will co-operate in our first encounter; thereafter, whatever you do in each round, I shall do to you in the following round’. By this or another strategy of conditional co-operation, players may arrive at an ‘evolutionarily stable’ pattern of conditional co-operation.
Prisoners' dilemma models have been applied to almost every form of human and animal interaction. Well-known examples from politics include
arms races
, incomes policy, trade bargaining in such bodies as
GATT
, and negotiations on pollution reduction. There are dangers of overuse: the situation needs to be specified carefully, and what appears to be a prisoners' dilemma may not always be so.
There have also been extensive experimental tests of prisoners' dilemma in the laboratory. One of the best-established results is that economics students are consistently more prone to arrive at the selfish, rational, and suboptimal outcome than students of any other subject.