Studies of anti-Jewish representations in the Greek press of the 1910s-1930s have focused on right-wing dailies, assuming that class-based universalism precluded similar attitudes within the labor press. This article argues that socialist universalism did not eliminate the production of Jewish Otherness but relocated it. Building on scholarship on Western European socialist newspapers and using a transnational approach centered on human mobility, it shows how Rizospastis (1918-1924), the Greek socialist organ, could simultaneously embrace and marginalize Jewish actors, depending on changing definitions of belonging. This negotiation predates the Socialist Labor Party (SEKE)and emerges from efforts after the 1915 elections to bridge the political cultures of Old and New Greece. The participation of Salonikian Jewish socialists, led by Abraham Benaroya, exposed tensions within this project, challenging notions of Greekness while raising questions of national cohesion. Analysis of Rizospastis traces these shifting boundaries. In 1918, Benaroya appeared as a foreign agitator, an alien within the national body. Between 1919 and 1921, he was recast as a unifying symbol of worker solidarity, embodying a temporary reconciliation between national and international identities. Following the ideological shifts of 1922-1924 and the Bolshevization of the movement, this inclusiveness collapsed: Benaroya's expulsion in 1924 marked a shift from ethnic to ideological exclusion, as conformity to the Comintern line replaced national belonging as the criterion of inclusion. Rizospastis thus served both as a forum of cross-border solidarity and a site where dissent was displaced, showing that class solidarity did not eliminate Otherness; it merely relocated it.
Abstract This article examines the transnational trajectories of two women activists of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), Mina Puccinelli (born Wilhelmine Müeller) and Elisabeth Dmitrieff (born Elizaveta Koucheleva), to explore how political mobility shaped women’s participation, organizational practices, and political agency within the internationalist movement. Of German and Russian origin, both moved across national and political spaces within the IWA, the Paris Commune, and wider revolutionary struggles. Dmitrieff became embedded in IWA structures: her involvement in the Russian section and the Geneva women’s section brought experience and contacts leading to official mandates to London and Paris, where she acted in connection with the General Council and helped organize the Union des Femmes during the Commune. Puccinelli moved fluidly between milieus, relying on personal contacts, public interventions, and her reputation as a revolutionary and military figure across Garibaldian, internationalist, republican, and revolutionary networks in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Spain. The comparison shows that mobility was both a resource and a constraint: it enabled them to circulate information, contacts, and repertoires across settings, while making their authority dependent on unstable networks and exposing them to scrutiny over credibility, gender, and legitimacy. Situating them within the IWA, a decentralized plurality of sections and correspondence networks, the article presents two modalities of intervention: organizational mediation and personalized mobilization. Drawing on IWA archives, newspapers, police records, and correspondence, it addresses the uneven evidence, particularly for Puccinelli, and highlights the possibilities and limits of women’s engagement and the gendered construction of their authority and memory.
Abstract Something is happening with labor and AI. Whether or not what is happening is actually historically novel, many claims about AI and its effects assert its novelty and claim something about this novelty will cause profound economic, sociopolitical, or even species-level crises. The special feature on AI and labor in this issue of ILWCH offers resources to digest those claims and to make counterclaims. The issue aims to provide more useful depictions of what is happening and what it means and to open up new directions for research.
Abstract This article aims to analyze the connections—still largely unexplored by historians—between cooperation, feminism, and internationalism in the 1860s. To this end, it examines the cooperative activism of two French feminist activists who were members of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA): André Léo and Marguerite Victoire Tinayre. I argue that their championing of worker cooperation—at once bound up with and in tension with their feminist and internationalist struggles—was rooted in a shared project of popular education, which both regarded as essential to the future of socialism. To demonstrate this, I draw mainly on the cooperative and socialist press, as well as the novels of Tinayre and Léo and archival material that sheds light on the functioning of cooperatives. First, I examine how the two feminists viewed consumer cooperatives as educational—a position that aligned with arguments made at IWA congresses. I then show that their campaign to bring the consumer cooperative model to women—both educational in intent and feminist in its political objectives—aimed to restore female workers’ sense of agency. Finally, I examine what appears to be an enigmatic decision: why Tinayre and Léo declined to encourage women’s participation in producers’ cooperatives—despite the renewed interest these were attracting in the pre-Commune period, particularly within the Geneva and Paris sections of the IWA.
Abstract This article investigates the relationship between members of the American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association and the women’s rights movement. The International in the United States supported the formation of women workers’ sections. Its members also tended to privately support women’s suffrage, but did not want its inclusion in the International’s platform. In the United States, the question of what women workers should be organized toward was refracted through the struggles over voting rights and political power ushered in by Reconstruction. What distinguished this question in the United States was the entanglement and disentanglement of the abolitionist, feminist, and labor movements, particularly with regard to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Drawing on the papers of the North American branch of the International Workingmen’s Association as well as the minutes of labor and women’s rights conventions, this article shows that the split in the International over women’s suffrage was fundamentally over the question of political power. First, this article examines the split between former abolitionists and the women’s rights movement, which led suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony toward organized labor. The second part follows the split over Section 12’s rise and fall within the International, culminating in Victoria Woodhull's candidacy for president of the United States. The article then moves toward the ruling of The Hague Congress of the International against Section 12 in the third part. Finally, it concludes with Section 26 in Philadelphia’s attempt to enfranchise women in the state constitution of Pennsylvania.
