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International Labor and Working-Class History
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.182

Number of Followers: 15

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ISSN (Print) 0147-5479 - ISSN (Online) 1471-6445
Published by Cambridge University Press

[353 journals]

ILW volume 100 Cover and Front matter
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  Pages: 1 - 4
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000144
ILW volume 100 Cover and Back matter
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  Pages: 1 - 2
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000156
De-centering the Revolution: Class Composition in the Making and Defeat of
the Bavarian Council Republic
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  Authors: Schaupp; Simon
  Pages: 1 - 21
  Abstract: In November 1918, the labor movement of Bavaria, Germany, overthrew the monarchist government and, in April 1919, proclaimed a Bavarian Council Republic (BCR). This article analyzes the revolution and its defeat through the lens of class composition theory, thereby suggesting some revisions to the latter. The technical composition of the Bavarian working class fostered the concept of self-management, which lay at the heart of the councils as the organizational form of the revolution. However, it also nurtured authoritarian potentials, which were more in line with-counter revolutionary positions. The article suggests that class composition theory must be expanded by the notion of social composition, taking into account struggles over reproduction and consumption: Inflation, unemployment, food shortages, and disease led to a crisis in material reproduction, which in turn led large parts of the unemployed and of the women's movement to become radical revolutionaries. The article argues to conceptualize technical and social class composition to be in a dialectical relationship with political composition. It thus emphasizes the role of ideologies of anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, both within the counter-revolution and the revolution itself. While the combination of different struggles for emancipation contributed to the early successes of the revolution, their ideological division was as an important factor in its defeat.
  PubDate: 2021-09-01
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547920000149
From Guild Artisans to Entrepreneurs: The Long Path of Italian Marble
Mosaic and Terrazzo Craftsmen (16th c. Venice – 20th c. New York City)
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  Authors: Grossutti; Javier P.
  Pages: 60 - 86
  Abstract: Marble mosaic and terrazzo were a very common type of stone paving in Venice, Italy, especially between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the period, migrant craftsmen from the nearby Alpine foothills area of Friuli (in northeastern Italy) virtually monopolized the Venetian marble mosaic and terrazzo trade. Thus, on February 9, 1583, the Venetian Council of Ten granted maestro (master) Sgualdo Sabadin from Friuli and his fellow Friulian workers of the arte dei terazzeri (art of terrazzo) the capacity to establish a school guild dedicated to St. Florian. The first chapters of the Mariegola de’ Terazzeri (Statutes of the Terrazzo Workers Guild), which set the rules for the guild of terrazzo workers, was completed three years later, in September 1586.From the 1830s onward, Friulian craftsmen began to export their skills and trade from Venice across Europe and later, at the turn of the twentieth century, overseas to several American cities. Prior to reaching America, mosaic and terrazzo workers left from their work places outside Italy, initially from Paris. Friulian mosaic and terrazzo workers were regarded as the “aristocracy” of the Italian American building workforce due to their highly specialized jobs: This contrasted with the bulk of Italians in the United States who were largely employed as unskilled. The New York marble mosaic- and terrazzo-paving trade was completely in the hands of the Italian craftsmen, who demonstrated a strong tendency to become entrepreneurs. They made use of their craftsmanship comparative advantages to build a successful network of firms that dominated the domestic market, in a similar fashion to what had already been occurring in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other European countries.This paper argues that immigrants can be powerful conduits for the transfer of skills and knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of studying skilled migrant artisan experiences. A closer look at ethnic migration flows reveals a variety of entrepreneurial experiences, even in groups largely considered unskilled. The Italian marble mosaic and terrazzo workers’ experience sheds new light on ethnic entrepreneurship catering for the community as a whole, it reveals a remarkable long-lasting craftsmanship experience, thus demonstrating the successful continuity in business ownership and the passing down of craftsmanship knowledge across family generations. Creativity skills and innovative productive methods adopted by firms appear as a key factor that allowed these artisans to control the trade for such a long time.
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547920000253
Working-Class Women, Gender, and Union Politics in Turkey, 1965–1980
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  Authors: Satı; Büşra
  Pages: 87 - 108
  Abstract: This paper focuses on the ideology and discourses of Tekstil İṣçileri Sendikası (the Textile Workers’ Union, Tekstil) in Turkey to highlight some of the specific visions of the organized labor for an emancipatory gender politics during the 1970s. This history of intersection between gender and working-class organizing has been overlooked by the Left scholarship on the one hand and liberal feminist scholarship on the other. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by highlighting gender and class concurrently throughout the history of the transformation of gender politics in labor organizations. The history of the simultaneous development of gender-related policies in Tekstil/DİSK and TEKSİF/Türk-İṣ reveals an unexplored aspect of the contentious dynamic between rival labor organizations. Between 1975–1980, the politics of gender became another pillar in trade union competition. Following the transnational influences in this transformation, this paper highlights a forgotten period of labor organizing and locates it within the history of labor and women's movements at the national and global scale.
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000119
The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history'
Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the
“red” Follonsby miners’ banner
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  Authors: Mates; Lewis
  Pages: 109 - 135
  Abstract: The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000107
The Ten Hours Movement and the Working-Class Family in Mid-Nineteenth
Century Britain
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  Authors: Creighton; Colin
  Pages: 136 - 157
  Abstract: The Ten Hours Movement of the 1830s and 1840s in Britain was the first large-scale working-class struggle to challenge the impact of industrial capitalism upon working-class family life. Yet its discourse on family has been relatively neglected by historians of the movement. This article examines the nature of the movement's critique, the vision of family life that it tried to realize, and the challenge that this posed to the emerging bourgeois order and, on this basis, to reconsider its contribution to the gender ordering of working-class family life.
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000090
Karl Marx and the Global History of the Civil War: The Slave Movement,
Working-Class Struggle, and the American State within the World Market
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  Authors: Battistini; Matteo
  Pages: 158 - 185
  Abstract: This essay stitches together the fragments of Marx's work on the United States that are scattered in newspaper articles, letters, notes, in some digressions in his early writings, in his economic manuscripts and in Capital (1867). The main aim is to show that what we can call a “global history of the Civil War” emerges from his pen: a history that is global not simply in a geographical sense, that is, because it expands the European space beyond the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, but also because of the general meaning it takes on in the history of capitalism. The essay highlights how the Civil War opened the Marxian issue of emancipation, his vision of class struggle and his view of the working class, to the presence of a black proletariat that interacted with the struggle of the white working classes, the latter of which until then had been the main focus of his work. It also highlights how the different and disarticulated voices of labor – slave and free, black and white – on both sides of the Atlantic effected a revolutionary shift in the Civil War: interjecting a “revolutionary turn” into what we can call the “long constitutional history” of the political conflict between North and South that changed the economic and social shape of the nation. More importantly, the essay reconstructs what can be termed the “state moment,” which was entangled with the “long constitutional history” and the “revolutionary turn” of the Civil War. As the transnational calls for emancipation from slavery and wage labor impacted the transnational processes of accumulation of industrial capital, the American state became a player in the world market: its financial and fiscal policies became socially linked to the government of industrial capital. In this sense, as the essay underlines in the conclusion, the “global history of the Civil War” that Marx effectively drafted, outlined the theoretical and political hypothesis that formed the basis of his mature reflection in the pages of Capital: the “emancipation of labour” should be thought of as a global issue, “neither a local nor a national, but a social problem.”
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000089
‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the
Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity
in early-Soviet Bishkek – ADDENDUM
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  Authors: Leupold; David
  Pages: 186 - 186
  PubDate: 2021-11-29
  DOI: 10.1017/S014754792100017X
‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the
Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity
in early-Soviet Bishkek
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  Authors: Leupold; David
  Pages: 22 - 59
  Abstract: The paper explores the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in forging urbanization “from below” in early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this paper draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia.Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of workers including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other.Transcending a purely historical analysis, the paper ultimately turns to the urban landscape of present-day Bishkek. There it argues that while the district built by Interhelpo corresponds today to an exiled site dislocated by the hegemonic ethno-national memory regime, its materiality harbors relicts of another future capable of mobilizing alternative narratives on the city and her socialist and multi-ethnic past.
  PubDate: 2020-11-23
  DOI: 10.1017/S0147547920000228