Abstract The two books discussed in this review essay speak to issues of projections implied in Western political thinking in the distinction between the “West” and the “East”. This includes a tradition in “Western” discourse to project features with negative connotations, such as “despotism”, onto a construed “Eastern other”, thus obliterating comparable structures of hierarchy in the “own”, and it is also linked to the heavy ideological load that concepts of “East” carry when it comes to geopolitical projections of otherness, and often enmity. In Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing , Jie-Hyun Lim undertakes a sweeping critique of the projections just mentioned and links this with a critique of nationalism as well as current mass politics. In Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism , Kolja Lindner is concerned with reconciling postcolonial perspectives with at least some of Karl Marx’s work, insofar as it has been criticized for Orientalist and modernist bias.
In July 1915 and October 1916, workers at the Bayonne, New Jersey, Standard Oil refinery went on strike, demanding better treatment and higher wages. In both cases, the workers were defeated by violence and repression. This article tells the largely forgotten story of the Bayonne strikes in the context of Progressive Era industrial relations in the United States that contributed to a specific United States version of welfare capitalism. The strikes emphasized the growth of unskilled mass production workers and highlighted the weakness of the existing labor movement, including its most radical expressions, in providing leadership to these workers. Capitalizing on this failure, Rockefeller and Standard Oil deflected the Bayonne workers' anger into company unionism and welfare capitalism, which channeled the Progressive emphasis on "industrial democracy" to strengthen capitalism and prevent worker militancy and union organization for decades. The article examines how the Rockefellers' vision of welfare capitalism differed from contemporary European counterparts, particularly to prevent social conflict by avoiding unions instead of collaborating with the union leadership.
This introduction reconceptualizes the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a pivotal arena of Cold War labour internationalism by narrating its history through the experiences of actors outside the traditional metropolitan core. It offers the first systematic synthesis of a dispersed body of scholarship on the WFTU, integrating work on communist internationalism, decolonization, gender, and trade union education into a coherent analytical framework. Methodologically, the introduction breaks new ground by adopting an actor-centred approach that foregrounds "subaltern labour leaders" from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and traces their trajectories across multiple scales, from workplaces and national centres to WFTU congresses and UN forums. Reconstructing key moments in the federation's history, it highlights a polyphony of national internationalisms within a shared communist project and shows how struggles over gender, empire, and sovereignty intersected with, but were not reducible to, East-West bloc politics. In doing so, the introduction advances a more nuanced understanding of the WFTU as both an instrument of state socialism and a generative space for alternative visions of global labour solidarity.
The article investigates the formation of an industrial workforce in S & abreve;vinesti, a major center of Romania's socialist chemical industry. Based on archival sources and oral history interviews, it examines how proletarianization was not fully realized but instead developed as a deliberately maintained dual condition. Industrial employment was combined with long-term commuting, ties to subsistence agriculture, and uneven access to urban housing. Such arrangements reflected the socialist state's efforts to expand production while managing limited infrastructure and demographic realities. By situating this case within wider debates on proletarianization under socialism, the study offers a more grounded account of class formation in Eastern Europe.
