The coming of the Soviet war scare in 1927 obliged all communist parties to spring to the defence of the world's first socialist state. Kick-started by Britain's severance of diplomatic relations in May, clear emphasis was placed from the very beginning on the role the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) would play in combating a supposed British-led invasion of Soviet Russia. This article argues that the CPGB exhibited a distinctly sluggish approach to the war scare. Focus on the Russian war threat throughout 1927 was mitigated by the attention paid towards ongoing British intervention in China. Furthermore, though expected to welcome an 'imperialist' conflict as an opportunity to subvert the armed forces, thus creating a revolutionary situation, many British communists gained the Comintern's ire in refusing to adopt such a strategy. The war scare, waging in ever greater force after 1927, came to be subsumed into the wider tenets of 'class against class'. As such, this article argues that the tensions that engulfed the CPGB in the years between 1928 and 1929 over this new political doctrine included an anti-militarist dimension, with internal dissension over the war scare a key feature in the Comintern's decision to remove much of the CPGB's leadership by the end of 1929.
This article examines the survival strategies employed by the widows of railway workers in Argentina during the early twentieth century. Rather than portraying these women as passive recipients of assistance from trade unions or railway companies, this study highlights their active agency in securing financial support. Through petitions, legal claims, and persistent negotiations, widows sought compensation, pensions, or employment opportunities to sustain their households after the loss of their husbands, many of whom had died in work-related accidents. While railway companies often resisted granting compensation, widows strategically navigated bureaucratic and legal structures, sometimes leveraging union support or mobilizing collective solidarity. Their actions challenge conventional narratives of working-class women's dependence, revealing instead a landscape of struggle, resilience, and negotiation. Ultimately, this study contributes to broader discussions on gender, labour, and social protection in industrializing Latin America. It sheds new light on how widows intervened and participated in the construction of union senses and practices of solidarity advocating for their rights in a male-dominated sphere.
This essay introduces the key themes of the special issue Anti-Imperialism and the Global Left: New Appraisals, edited by Lorenzo Costaguta, Justine Cousin, Camille Fauroux, and Thomas van Gaalen. The authors review existing scholarship on left-wing anti-imperialism and detail the interventions of the five articles published in the issue. Arguing that left-wing anti-imperialism is a fruitful lens to pursue the decolonization of the history of the left, they conclude by suggesting avenues for further research.
This article examines how Corsican nationalism reshaped trade union practice through the Sindicatu di i Travagliadori Corsi (Corsican Workers' Union, STC), founded in 1984 after local activists broke with mainstream French confederations. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it traces the STC's evolving stance toward immigration and non-Corsican workers during the turbulent 1980s. The union initially pursued an openly ethnic agenda - 'Corsicanization of jobs' - that framed mainland French migration as settler colonialism and sought to reserve employment for native islanders. By the decade's end, however, the STC had reframed this demand as a call for equal opportunity for all workers living in Corsica, formally abandoning ethnic membership rules and admitting to its ranks workers from mainland France and North Africa. Despite this rhetorical shift, North African migrants remained marginal: they joined in small numbers and never reached leadership positions, highlighting persistent racial segmentation in Corsica's labour market. The case of the STC illustrates a form of 'conditional universalism', in which formal inclusion depends on alignment with nationalist goals, offering new insight into the coexistence of class solidarity and minority-nationalist politics on Europe's periphery.
In the 1970s, young activists of the Turkish revolutionary left found themselves in France as refugees, students, or workers. Amongst them, members of Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), galvanized by the intensity of the struggles in Turkey, decided to do their bit by organizing migrant workers from Turkey. So they organized the struggle of undocumented garment workers in Paris in 1980. At the end of a mobilization involving hunger strike, occupation, marches, and public demonstrations, several thousand workers obtained victory. During this episode, Devrimci Yol militants combined in a singular way the anti-imperialist discourse with an analysis of the conditions of exploitation of foreign labour in Europe. However, when the September 1980 coup d'& eacute;tat led to massive repression and arrests in Turkey, activists in France were forced to abandon their effort towards immigrant workers to concentrate on supporting their imprisoned comrades or those forced into exile. Based on archival material and interviews in Turkish and French, the study of this episode allows us to reflect on the possibilities of politics inscribed in the multiple temporalities of a transnational space between the global North and South. Moreover, it explores the tensions between anti-imperialist and immigration labour movements.
Centring Dutch leftist expressions of solidarity with two anti-colonial revolts - the 1926 Indonesian revolt and an attempted 1929 Cura & ccedil;aoan revolution - this article examines how leftists in the European metropole sold solidarity with anti-colonialism across different political arenas and organizational levels. Relating their efforts specifically to the communist-social-democratic divisions that shaped various leftist political arenas in the period studied, we posit that an expression or practice of solidarity hinges not only upon agreements over 'mutual interests' among those directly involved in said relations of solidarity. As interwar left-wing groups depended on diverse coalitions and organized on different geographical scales, their claimed 'mutual interests' with anti-colonial causes had to be legitimized, or sold, across these scales. Using newspaper and archival sources, we first argue that solidarity represented a 'flare signal' through which colonial causes invited solidarity and support from abroad. Second, we argue that expressions and practices of anti-colonial solidarity, to Dutch interwar leftists, represented a tactic to forge alliances and discredit opponents on a scale of domestic politics, and to cultivate support and status in international networks. Dutch interwar leftist positions on anti-colonial solidarity, we propose, were profoundly shaped by the efforts of leftists from both the metropole and the colony to 'sell' claims of mutual interest across scales.
The 1960s and 1970s in Spain were a period of intense social mobilization against Franco's dictatorship. The clandestine and democratic labour movement was the main political agent behind efforts to improve working conditions and to achieve a political transition towards democracy in Spain. However, within this context, domestic workers were alien to this process. The Francoist dictatorship did not consider domestic service to be a form of employment, and thus excluded maids from the labour laws and social protection measures that were reserved for workers and their families. This also meant that when the anti-Franco unions began to gain strength in mobilizing many sectors of the workforce, domestic service was not among them. However, the lack of concern from the main trade unions towards domestic workers does not mean that there were no alternatives for collective action outside the purview of traditional working-class organizations. The Young Christian Workers, a Catholic workers' organization born in Belgium in 1924 that began to take a stand in Spain from the 1960s onwards against the dictatorship and in favour of democracy and socialism, did focus on domestic workers' struggles.
Although there are relatively large bodies of interrelated literature concerning trade unions, industrial politics, workers' education and leisure in post-war Britain, little has been written about the importance of Wortley Hall (also known as 'The Workers' Stately Home' or 'Labour's Home') as a popular educational and holiday centre for the British labour movement and organized working-class. Drawing on previously unpublished archival and oral-history materials, this article is principally concerned with documenting Wortley's founding ethos as a proletarian venue and the pioneering efforts by local rank-and-file leaders to raise sufficient finances to secure the hall's future as a little 'oasis of socialism'. It also considers Wortley's wider significance apropos of post-war debates concerning adult education and how the hall related to similar institutions; the considerable increase in country house sales and enthusiasm for finding alternative uses for them in the immediate post-war years; like examples of non-profit holiday centres aimed at working-class people; how Wortley was born out of and contributed to the political culture of the labour movement in South Yorkshire; and, finally, to what extent support for the hall was the product of wider currents and tensions within the labour movement, including both the role of the Communist Party and the prevalence of post-war concerns over communist influence. The article is structured to deal with these issues via an empirical, chronological narrative approach to Wortley's early years. As such, it represents a modest contribution to the current resurgence of interest in post-war labour institutions and the British left.
Eric Heffer, who rose to the top of the Labour Party's left-wing hierarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, spent much of his early political career in the Communist Party of Great Britain and, after being expelled in 1948, in the Socialist Workers' Federation, an anti-Communist Party Marxist organization. Heffer relinquished his Marxism in the late 1950s but continued to support the hard-left section of the Labour Party and the Trotskyist Militant organization in Liverpool in the 1980s. Yet whilst much is known about his work within the Labour Party and his left-wing campaigns for the Labour Party Leadership and Deputy Leadership, little is understood about his Marxist years, beyond his own brief comments and writings. By examining both his personal papers and his extensive writings and speeches, this article attempts to reveal his experiences in Marxism and its impact on his political attitudes and actions. What it reveals is that Marxism shaped Heffer's thinking towards the need for genuine, participatory, industrial and political democracy by the working class in the creation of a socialist Britain. It was only when he realized that the bureaucratic nature of the Communist leadership, dominated by Stalinism and the use of democratic centralism, restricted freedom of expression and dissent and abandoned revolutionary change that he made a seismic move to the Labour Party to pursue his goals in a non-revolutionary manner.
During the first years of the post-war Labour government (1945–8), three groups of foreign workers were incorporated into the labour force: prisoners of war (POWs), Polish soldiers who had fought with the British, and European volunteer workers (EVWs). This article examines the responses of the trade union movement to these three groups of workers through salient examples that are indicative of wider attitudes within the trade union movement. The discussion focuses on the responses of the TUC, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the National Union of Agricultural Workers and Allied Workers (NUAW). The distinctive contribution of this piece is that it argues that the employment of foreign labour needs to be situated within four overlapping attitudinal frameworks that shaped the debate within trade unions in this period. It builds on the existing historiography of the topic through an examination of the discourse on European workers which is revealing of the generalized xenophobia and sense of cumulative grievance at the presence of foreign workers that existed during this period. This wave of prejudice eventually centred on the Poles, who became the focus of this hostility towards foreign workers in general.
In April 1949 the employment of thirty-two registered dock workers in London was terminated because they were regarded as ‘ineffective’, incapable physically of performing the job. Their redundancies were briefly resisted through strike action. This ended when the Labour government threatened to prosecute strike leaders. The episode highlighted the social construction of disability in workplaces, often seen as a pronounced feature of labour markets in periods of recession. Employers were seeking to disable impaired dockers because of fluctuating demand for labour in the Port of London. Public policy enabled this, despite the Labour government’s broader commitment to protecting working-class interests. Dockers opposed the thirty-two redundancies as a threatening precedent and also because they saw collective benefit in working alongside impaired individuals with valuable occupational knowledge. Dockers shared this understanding with other manual groups but resistance to the ineffective dismissals was also rooted in the peculiar history of the ports. Men deemed ineffective had endured a difficult employment and social environment, often for decades. Now they were denied the chief benefits of dock labour reform in the 1940s, with guaranteed income for registered men significantly higher than the statutory pensions for retired workers and compensation payments for the disabled.
The Labour Party in Britain achieved its first ever absolute parliamentary majority in the 1945 general election, at the tail end of the Second World War. Historically a socialist and internationalist party founded with the aim of providing parliamentary representation to trade unionists and the working class, Labour formed its first ever majority government in 1945 with a promise to accompany Britain's colonies toward higher living standards, social fairness, economic development, and political empowerment. As part of a multifaceted set of policies towards eventual colonial self-rule, the Labour government and Britain's Trades Union Congress aimed to foster the development of trade unions, on the British model, in all the colonies.
In parallel to the emergence and subsequent dominance of Thatcherite ideology across the realm of British politics from the mid-1970s, the UK Labour Party’s social and welfare policy agenda reacted and evolved for over two decades, a simultaneous and often futile process that occurred largely during a sustained and frustrating spell in political opposition. This convoluted policy journey therefore correlated with the party’s struggling electoral fortunes in the context of four successive general election defeats, before eventual convincing victory in 1997. This article seeks to illustrate that even before losing office in 1979, the Labour Party struggled to adapt to the advent of the New Right, facing hard structural policy-making constraints, with subsequent electoral defeats occurring amidst a more volatile public mood, changing demographics and social values, and a shifting social and economic model. In explaining how and why this happened, the article suggests that this was a critical evolutionary process for Labour, with flexible pragmatism and political necessity often eclipsing fading ideological imperatives, as the party sought electoral credibility and a route back to government. Consequently, by 1997, due to various factors, Labour’s social and welfare policies had been transformed beyond all previous recognition.
Though & Eacute;douard Doll & eacute;ans (1877-1954) was described by Malcolm Chase as Chartism's first modern historian, his writings on the subject have never been translated into English and are largely unfamiliar to current historians of the movement. This paper discusses the two editions of Doll & eacute;ans's history of Chartism, published in 1912-13 and 1949, and the uses that Doll & eacute;ans made of these materials in his wider labour histories and political journalism. It locates Doll & eacute;ans within a first phase of Chartist historiography that was international in character and resonates with current concerns with a transnational labour history. It also situates Doll & eacute;ans within distinctively French intellectual traditions as his perspectives on Chartism were shaped and reshaped in turbulent political times amidst influences that ranged from syndicalism and the Popular Front to wartime collaboration and the labour movement's Cold War polarization. Though Doll & eacute;ans was a flawed historian, he provides a notable case study in the interactions of past and present in the writing of labour history and both influenced and anticipated the concerns with activist biography of a later generation of French labour historians.
On 23 August 1931, the second Labour government split over the decision to cut unemployment benefits. The next day, a National Government, led by Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, but largely supported by Conservative and Liberal MPs, was appointed to 'save sterling' - only to decide to leave the gold standard on 21 September 1931. These events generated two narratives within and outside the Labour Party, the first highlighting Labour's betrayal of the working class, the second underlining Labour's incompetence on economic matters. The two narratives crystalized into 'myths' in the following decades, a process linked to the fact that sterling turbulences occurred while other Labour governments were in office. This work links the betrayal myth to the incompetence myth and shows how the former developed, to some extent, in relation to the latter. By adopting a long-term perspective, it demonstrates that political myths go through ebbs and flows and are compounded and/ or eclipsed by other myths. Building upon published literature, memoirs and press accounts, this work explains how the myth of betrayal, which after 1931 allowed a party demoralized and divided to coalesce around a common enemy, came to be perceived from the 1960s onwards as dysfunctional within a growing section of the Labour Party. The betrayal myth was eventually exorcized in the 1990s, through a process which also encompassed the renegotiation of the economic-incompetence myth.
The relatively new bundle of scholarship gathered under the notion of a 'global 1989' has produced an innovative field of research that highlights the necessity of a global approach towards the implosion of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet this literature has neglected the broad range of international and transnational organizations which had an indispensable role during, but also after, the Cold War. Therefore this article attempts to approach the 'global 1989' from the vantage point of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The analysis of this large trade union confederation sheds new light on post -Cold War labour internationalism, which has often been overshadowed by the developments leading up to the establishment of the ITUC in 2006. Furthermore, the article uncovers how the end of state socialism and its global reverberations engendered new fissures, debates, and tensions within the organization. While there might have been a 'rush to the East' during the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, globalization - which within the trade union landscape was accelerated by the global 1989 - became a far more pressing challenge during the 1990s.
