The paper discusses historical lessons offered by the experience of two leftwing movements, the pre-1948 Palestinian Communist Party, and the post-1948 Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen). The focus of discussion is the relationship between class and nation as principles of organization.

The Palestinian Communist Party was shaped by forces that shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: British rule, Zionist ideology and settlement practices, and Arab nationalism. At intensified conflict periods it was torn apart by the pressures of competing nationalisms. By the end of the period, its factions agreed on one principle: the need to treat members of both national groups equally, whether as individuals or as groups entitled to self-determination. This position was rejected by both national movements as incompatible with their quest for control.

In the post-1948 period, Matzpen epitomized the radical critique of Zionism. It was the clearest voice speaking against the 1967 occupation and for restoration of Palestinian rights. However, it never moved beyond the political margins, and its organization failed to provide members with a sustainable mode of activism. It was replaced by a new mode, mobilizing people around specific issues instead of presenting an overall program.

The paper concludes with suggestions on how the Left may use these lessons to develop a strategy to focus on the quest for social justice and human rights.

The Durham Miners Gala is an annual event at which the associated branches of the Durham Miners Association carry their banners to a rally held in the city of Durham. The imagery displayed on those banners is representative of the class struggle to create a trade union that would represent and protect individuals and communities against the vagaries of the unbridled capitalism of the nineteenth century. In this way a tradition (and culture) was created not by social or political elites, but developed from ground level to counteract attempts to subsume them into a dominant ideology that saw them as little more than serfs.

The strength of the trade union movement in Pakistan has ebbed and flowed over the course of the country's history, but today, after roughly twenty-five years of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, the movement is arguably at its weakest point in recent memory.

Shivaji Nagar in the Deonar suburb of Mumbai is popularly known as “Bombay's Gas Chamber.” Located between one of Asia's largest garbage dumps and Mumbai's largest municipal slaughterhouse, this neighborhood is environmentally vulnerable, situated at the crossroads of clusters of heavy and petrochemical industries, and a network of the city's busiest highways. In popular, official, and scholarly narratives, this neighborhood has been constructed as a place of failure, waste, and death. The residents of Shivaji Nagar, well aware of these narratives, use the demonstration of “failure” to their advantage to stake claims of belonging to the neighborhood, and demand state assistance, albeit often with punitive consequences. They contend that in doing so, “failure” becomes not merely a judgment conferred upon the neighborhood, its residents, and their way of life, but rather a medium of exchange for and a condition of possibility of their futures, and thus elicits an additional amount of labor. The article will focus on these labors performed by the waste workers who live and work in the neighborhood.

As East Central Europe is fast approaching the end of its second decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new studies of postcommunist politics and society can increasingly benefit from a longer historical perspective. We can now replace the “history of the present” lens that was typical of much research in the highly volatile 1990s with accounts that more extensively compare the most fundamental trends emerging from the decades before and after 1989–1990. In this spirit, both books under review make substantive and historically well-informed contributions to our understanding of the politics of work and workers in Central and Eastern Europe. In The Defeat of Solidarity, David Ost develops a gripping account of the progressive and interlinked defeats of labor interests and liberal democratic politics in Poland from the 1980s up to the present day. In Constructing Unemployment, Phineas Baxandall offers a theory of the political meaning of unemployment, applied mainly to the case of Hungary from the late 1940s until the end of the 1990s.

United Students against Sweatshops (USAS) was conceived in 1997 by a handful of organizers and student interns at UNITE (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Technical Employees). With chapters at 200 universities and colleges, USAS has come a long way from its origins as an advocate for no-sweat licensing policies at campus bookstores. A founder of the Worker Rights Consortium,Founded in April, 2000, the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) is an organization of more than ninety universities, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and labor and civil rights organizations in the United States, Central America, and Asia. Its goal is to establish codes of conduct and verification procedures that guarantee fair wages and working conditions in factories manufacturing university-licensed merchandise. it is by now a broad political movement, campaigning for labor rights inside and outside the university; for economic justice; and for peace in the era of globalization. The evolution of this organization is the subject of an interview with three USAS leaders who came to the organization at different moments in its development. Topics range from international organizing to graduate student unionization. Questions of race, gender and sexual identity have preoccupied USAS since its inception. They figure prominently in the current discussion. The interview was conducted in August, 2001 and edited a few days after September 11, allowing us to include a few reflections on that day and its aftermath.

This article breaks new ground for the study of postslavery gender and social formations in modern Ghana and Africa as a whole: It examines the expansion of involuntary female domestic labor known as abaawa in what is today Ghana. The study traces the transformative institutional processes that shaped the exploitation of involuntary female labor in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. Based on a variety of primary sources, including colonial, indigenous African newspapers, Christian missionary accounts, and oral history, the article maps out the paradoxical expansion of involuntary female labor during the age of abolition in the colonial period and the postslavery phase of social and gender formations in the era of the postcolonial state. The pivotal argument is that social and gender formations that emerged as a result of abolition, social change, and economic transformation benefited more males than females. As a result, males used innovative, empowering avenues of social mobility in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. For their part, disempowered females, especially those in backwater enclaves, were consigned to abaawa labor, which has ostensibly been projected as a benign, kinship-based, and apprenticeship-bound institution. In reality, contemporary abaawa has all the exploitative vagaries of slavery and debt-bondage of the pre/colonial epoch.

The upper plateau of the Nilgiris, South India, was a grazed, grassy, and open landscape until the mid-nineteenth century when it was subject to colonial rule and commerce. However, even as it initiated and institutionalized capitalism, colonial rule also sought to selectively and legally safeguard from the material consequences of modernity and capitalism the pastoral lifestyles of the Toda graziers and the open and grassy biophysicality of their principal grazing landscape. Anointed the “Wenlock Downs” and reserved as forest in 1900, conservation policies to preserve this landscape for the amenities it afforded the English gentry significantly influenced policies to ameliorate backwardness associated with the pastoral lifestyles of the Toda. As official policy prior to the Second World War the Toda were encouraged to farm the grasslands to which they were given property rights. After the war, pastoralism gained official preference despite ostensible Toda interest in cultivation. English interests in protecting amenities trumped ameliorative interests. An historical racial standpoint, the pejorative labeling of Toda as indolent, also served strategically during the war as a rhetorical device to make a convincing case for pastoralism as an ameliorative panacea. This article is an historical sociology of bureaucratic discourse on Toda labor and landscape during and immediately preceding the Second World War.

To understand the economic character, transnational politics, and labor regime characteristic of contemporary globalization, it is useful to revisit the concept of “merchant capitalism,” a form of market exchange that dominated trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then as now, commodities proved crucial to world commerce, merchants held the whip hand over manufacturers, while workers found their remuneration and working conditions subject to competitive pressures that often debased their status. The transnational retailers who today dominate so many global supply chains therefore play many of the same roles as did the antebellum merchants of New York and Liverpool who favored free trade and formed an alliance with those who deployed unfree labor to grow the cotton and other commodities upon which the trading system of their day was built.

The Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), founded in New York in 1934, was the vanguard of American labor's anti-Nazi and antifascist activism. The JLC grew out of the Jewish labor movement in the US. In 1940–1941, it achieved the rescue of hundreds of European labor and social-democratic party leaders trapped in France by the invading German army or in Lithuania by the Soviet army. Among these persons were some of the foremost leaders of the Labour and Socialist International and of the International Federation of Trade Unions. Many others were Polish Bundists, the JLC's founders' original political family, doubly exposed to Nazi brutality by their Jewish identity and social-democratic positions. This event is the focal point from which American labor's international solidarity for the labor victims of Nazism and fascism can be observed. In addition, the connection between the JLC and the Emergency Rescue Committee whose agent, Varian Fry, rescued artists and intellectuals, is also established in the paper.

This article explores the role of women in transnational labor organizing. It examines the extent to which transnational protest, based in global cities like New York, Amsterdam, and San Francisco, grants agency to women employed in garment factories throughout the world. It analyzes how the cognitive and material spaces of sites of production are transformed through their connections with other sites—through flows, shifts, and concentrations of capital, bodies, commodities, and in this case, political activities. Throughout, it examines the ways in which women garment workers, garment factories, and sweatshops are employed, defined, and reproduced as a category in varlious contexts of transnational production and protest.

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

This article examines the social history of socialist work movements in Czechoslovakia during the first two decades of the Communist regime in the country. These movements were attempts to increase industrial productivity and to transform preexisting working-class culture. Not only did they founder on the chaotic operation of the bureaucratic planned economy and the endemic shortages it brought in train, they also foundered on the realities of labor relations in Czechoslovak enterprises. These were marked by the continuity of tensions inherited from the immediate postwar years that persisted into the Communist era, and the strength of egalitarian values among Czechoslovakia's working class.

The casualization of academic work is a deepening problem at UK universities. From the late 1990s, the number of academics working on non-permanent, non-full-time contracts has skyrocketed, even as student fees have increased at an exponential rate. This casualization has generated resistance on the lower rungs of the academic ladder. On the one hand, the union for the higher education sector, the UCU, has tried without much success to stem the tide of casualization. On the other, casual academic staff have tried to organise on their own to resist casualization at a local level.