For centuries, the maritime cargo passing through the port of Barcelona was handled by the men of a half-dozen guilds. Collectively, these ancient corporations enjoyed monopolistic privileges over the various types of cargo and areas of operation—in the shallow harbor, to and from the Customs House, and throughout the city and beyond. At the end of the eighteenth century, the advances of economic and political liberalism began to question, challenge, and eventually dismantle the guild structure: a process that came to fruition in the early nineteenth century with the abolition of most guilds throughout Spain. However, some of the cargo-handling guilds had been defended by the Navy against abolition until the second half of the nineteenth century, when their orderly world collapsed into competitive companies able to hire men of their choosing (former guildsmen or otherwise). In this article, we look at the harbor-based guilds and the process by which guildsmen became the unorganized workers and capitalistic directors of the new dockworker companies. We offer a vision of the transformation of the guild system into a private system for organizing the labor of maritime-cargo handling. In this account, we examine technological changes in the means of production, changes in the organization of labor, the appearance of a new capitalist class in the sub-sector, and the rise of a capitalist mode of production based on the proletarianization of cargo handling.

This article explores narratives of heterosexual romance and conjugality in Wazirpur, a neighbourhood in north west Delhi, dominated by the steel industry and populated by a largely migrant workforce. Focusing primarily on two generations of women, it considers how the relationship between romantic love and marriage is articulated, performed and imagined. The oral accounts presented here suggest a multidirectional pattern of marital mobility, which is grounded in social conventions of conjugality. Familial tensions and social fault lines appear over marital decisions, crystallizing especially when elopements or ‘court marriages’ take place. The romantic relationships and forms of courtship in Wazirpur have to discursively and spatially negotiate the tensions between social approval and individual choice. While increasingly, a considerable degree of significance is accorded to the emotional bond between the couple, parental support and the public performance of respectability remain central to marital formations. The article suggests that the intimate and the emotional are not only located in the interior of the individual but are forged by intersecting and often competing registers of social regulation.

In the interstices of Cold War rivalries and anti-colonial agitation in late 1950s Africa, African workers came into the focus of African nationalist politicians, Western leftists, colonial regimes and state socialist states alike. They were a small, but influential group, increasingly organized in trade unions and capable of bringing whole economies to a halt. European communists on both sides of the Iron Curtain saw these workers not only as part of an inceptive working class but also debated their role as a potential key force in global anti-capitalist revolution – if they had the right concepts. But how could trade union representatives, particularly those ones from Eastern Europe, actually get in touch with their African counterparts? Based on archival materials of the East German Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB), this article discusses East-West-South connections in labor education with a special emphasis on the role of Western trade union officials working for or affiliated to the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Drawing on their international experience, personal networks and linguistic skills, French and British communists established and intensified links between African trade unions and WFTU affiliates like the FDGB in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their influence facilitated and shaped these East-South connections. First, through their networks in West Africa, Western communists enabled the WFTU and the FDGB to internationalize their concepts of trade union education and integrate it into African political structures. Secondly, we examine the African Workers’ University in Conakry, an East-West-South joint venture between the West African Union Générale des Travailleurs d'Afrique Noire (UGTAN) and the WFTU, where trade unionists from the entire African continent attended courses between 1960 and 1965 and where European communists broadened their horizons while often holding on to rigid views. Thirdly, the article examines how European trade union functionaries talked about African course participants behind closed doors—building on the transcripts from a 1963 WFTU gathering on education for African trade unionists. Emphasizing their insider knowledge, French communists with experience in African trade union education called for innovative pedagogical concepts including a more practice-related education which acknowledged the heterogeneous conditions in different countries. However, they also promoted Eurocentric stage theories and saw a need to “discipline” Africans. The article concludes that the cooperation between actors from East, West and South rested on some shared assumptions, but encounters also led to reconceptualizations and realizations of ideological and practical constraints in international labor education.

This article examines the “levee camp” as a social and cultural site for reconstituting rural black workers' masculine identities in the early twentieth-century Mississippi-Arkansas Delta. The construction of the Mississippi River's levees during this period depended heavily on the labor of black mule-drivers drawn from the Delta's cotton plantations. In spite of this dependency, the levee camps' exploitative commissaries and harsh disciplinary violence quashed workers' efforts to reclaim a sense of autonomy that was increasingly denied them on the region's plantations. However, partly in response to the perceived erosion of their authority within the sharecropper family, levee workers successfully used the notorious after-hours culture of the levee camps to construct a hyper-masculine image of themselves as “rough mens” who had been to the levee camps, enjoyed the sexual attention of camp women, and were manly enough to survive the murderous violence of white bosses and other “rough mens” alike. Using a series of 1930s labor investigations as well as early Delta blues hollers and songs about the levee camps, this article shows how black workers' efforts to cultivate this hyper-masculine levee worker image ultimately proved detrimental to their class interests. Levee contractors and foremen welcomed levee camp gambling, prostitution, drinking, and fighting as ways of reducing workers' wages and maintaining labor control in the camps. Ultimately, the levee camps provide a useful example of an all-male work site where gender had important, if unintended, ramifications for workers' class position.

Since the mid-1980s, North American circus shows have imported jaw-dropping acrobatic acts from the People's Republic of China. This article examines the shifting politics of body and labor that facilitate the international recruitment of Chinese acrobats. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival materials, this study analyzes how a socialist labor hierarchy and ideas of ownership shape acrobats’ relationships with the Chinese state. Since the 1980s, these politics of labor and body have shifted in accordance with the accelerated commercialization of acrobatics, facilitating the international export of acrobats’ labor. This historical investigation sheds light on an overlooked chapter in the history of temporary foreign workers.

Tradition is understood as a subset of a central historical concern: social and cultural discontinuities in time and space. The historical study of social tradition is an important contribution to knowledge; it seeks to understand the ways in which groups (states, classes, communities, families) formalize, symbolize, and interpret the past—and how such visions shape the ways in which people interpret, accept, or resist present conditions and influence behavior in the future.

In the last month before the Haymarket Riot, Chicago's labor movement staged two grand demonstrations as it prepared to inaugurate the Eight Hour Day on May 1. The Knights of Labor and the Trade and Labor Assembly arranged the first on April 10, the International Working Peoples' Association (IWPA) and the Central Labor Union (CLU) arranged the second, two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, April 25. The two demonstrations shared a common purpose—to rally the city's labor movement around shorter hours—but they could not have been more different.

Pem Davidson Buck's book is intended to offer readers a view from under the sink (1). Initially rejecting a career for which her middle-class upbringing had prepared her, Buck moved from Pennsylvania to central Kentucky, where she and her husband became back-to-the-landers, growing and canning food and raising goats and calves, sometimes supplementing the family income by working as part-time day laborers on tobacco farms, as hod-carriers, and as plumbers. But it's not so easy to leave a middle-class liberal upbringing behind, especially down on the farm living below the poverty level. Working as a helper in the small plumbing and heating business she operated with her husband, Buck spent time lying on her back on the floors of the wealthy fixing leaks; from that perspective under the sink she looked up and saw fine furniture and other manifestations of wealth she could not afford. One thing led to another: seeing the world as if for the first time, “it appeared oppressive” (2). People, working people, that is, work extremely hard, and what do they get for their efforts? Boney fingers.

The Russian Revolution became a beacon flare for anti-capitalists across the world, including many anarchists. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists became ardent supporters of Bolshevism, and many endorsed the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here, I try to arrive at a political and historical understanding of this uncanny honeymoon, and question empirical explanations that present it as a simple misunderstanding. I firstly historicize the evolution of the concept of the workers’ dictatorship in the Spanish labor movement and assess it through the prism of the antagonism between the anarchists and socialists. I then set the reception of the Russian Revolution in the context of social ferment that emerged in Spain after 1917, which generated enormous enthusiasm and clouded theoretical differences. I finally relate the reception of the Soviet dictatorship to the intensification of class violence in these years, which rendered many anarchists hospitable to the authoritarian methods of the Bolsheviks.