scholarly journals The “Globalization” of Labor and Working-Class History and its Consequences

2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 136-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
North America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Healthy State ◽  
The World ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
New Type

Labor historians from Europe and North America frequently assert that their discipline is not in a healthy state. Such a picture is a distortion, however, for the world does not stop at the equator: in various regions of Latin America, Africa and Asia the historiography of workers and labor movements has made great strides in the last twenty to thirty years. Labor history's “globalization” calls for a new type of historiography, which transcends old-style labor history from North America and Europe by incorporating its findings in a new globally-orientated approach. This article discusses some of the main issues involved: problems of a general theoretical nature, of conceptualization, multidisciplinarity, and sources. The article also identifies a few research desiderata.

Engaged History

1994 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 81-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stein
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
The World ◽  
State Of Affairs

Ira Katznelson urges labor historians to respond to a crisis in their field by returning to political, institutional, and state-centered history. This state of affairs has come about, he and others tell us, because of the dual challenge of “new social movements” and then the decline of labor movements, the crisis of social democracy, and collapse of communist states. Labor history is in crisis, he concludes, because class no longer provides the best categories with which to describe the world and the working class is no longer the principal historical actor.

Labor Movements in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico M. Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Labor

The history of Latin America cannot be understood without analyzing the role played by labor movements in organizing formal and informal workers across urban and rural contexts.This chapter analyzes the history of labor movements in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. After debating the distinction between “working class” and “popular sectors,” the chapter proposes that labor movements encompass more than trade unions. The history of labor movements is analyzed through the dynamics of globalization, incorporation waves, revolutions, authoritarian breakdowns, and democratization. Taking a relational approach, these macro-dynamics are studied in connection with the main revolutionary and reformist strategic disputes of the Latin American labor movements.

The Politics of Proletarianization: A Review Article

1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Michael Hanagan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Political Conditions

The process of proletarianization and its role in the shaping of working class consciousness has captured the attention of French social historians over the last ten years. Until recently, works on French labor history generally neglected the formation of the working class to concentrate on the origins of national working-class parties or trade unions; thus, general histories of the political ‘workers’ movement' abound, to the detriment of occupational or regional studies. As early as 1971, Rolande Trempé's thèse asserted that the transition from godfearing peasant to socialistic proletarian had only just begun when a man put down his hoe and took up a pickaxe. In Les mineurs de Carmaux, Trempé showed the evolving social and political conditions which led coalminers in southwestern France to espouse trade unionism and socialism. The recently published thése of Yves Lequin, Les ouvriers de la region lyonnaise, provides another benchmark in the study of nineteenth-century working class history. Lequin reveals that, for the pre-1914 period in the Lyonnais region of France, the dynamics of proletarianization were more important in promoting worker militancy than its end result, the appearance of an industrial proletariat.

Where Do New Ideas (About Class) Come From?

2000 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 53-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
American Labor

In my comment I raise two main questions about the Eley/Nield essay. First, I express some doubts about whether the issues discussed in their essay can be unproblematically transposed to historiographical debates in areas beyond Western Europe and North America. Certain themes, such as the need to reemphasize the political, are hardly pressing given the continual emphasis on politics and the state in Latin American labor history. Closely related to this, I question whether the state of gender studies within labor history can be used, in the way these authors seem to be doing, as a barometer of the sophistication and vitality of labor and working-class history. Despite recognizing the tremendous contribution of gendered approaches to labor history, I express doubts about its ability to help us rethink the category of class, and even express some concern that it might occlude careful consideration of class identities. Instead, pointing to two pathbreaking works in Latin American labor history, I argue that the types of questions we ask about class, and primarily about class, can provide the key to innovative scholarship about workers even if questions such as gender or ethnicity go unexamined. Finally, I point out that class will only be a vital category of analysis if it is recognized not simply as “useful,” but as forming a basis for genuinely creative and innovative historical studies.

The Class Struggle, the Proletariat, and the Developing Nations

1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Taborsky
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Third World ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Developing Nations ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third World

The concepts of class struggle and the leadership of the proletariat figure high among the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology and strategy that Soviet theoreticians deem applicable to the developing areas of the world. “A new contingent of the world proletariat — young working class movement of the newly free, independent and colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America — has entered the world arena,” asserted the 1961 Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is this newly emerging proletariat that hopefully is expected to convert the nationaldemocratic revolutions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into genuine socialist revolutions of the Marxist-Leninist variety. Hence, the advancement of the working class and the promotion of class struggle have become major concerns of Soviet strategy and tactics in the Third World.

scholarly journals Super-exploitation: precarity and the proletarian condition through the perspective of Marxist theory of dependency

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Felix ◽  
Adrián Sotelo Valencia
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
The World ◽  
Transformation Processes

<p>In this article we analyse the issue of increasing precarity in the world of work in light of the Brazilian Ruy Mauro Marini’s theses and the concept of super-exploitation. Forged in the domain of a Marxist theory of dependency, the concept was originally formulated to designate specific regimes within Latin American social formations. In this respect, first we review certain global trends in the world of work and transformation processes in dependent countries’ regimes of super-exploitation, going on then to examine the issue’s contemporary emergence as a phenomenon in central capitalist countries. Finally, we discuss the category’s validity, as well as its implications for understanding new morphologies of the working class both in Latin America and across the world.</p>

Why the Global Labor Movement is in Crisis

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Marcel van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
The World

Abstract One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that the world working class continues to grow, while at the same time many labor movements are experiencing a crisis. How can we explain this paradox? The global simultaneity of the crisis suggests that the failure of individual organizational leaderships is not the main cause, but that more general factors play an important role. The article argues and attemps to partly explain why the first wave of founding workers‘ organizations (mainly in the North, from the 1860s until the 1920s) was not repeated elsewhere after World War ii; and why many movements in the North declined since the 1980s.

Is Liberalism Really the Answer?

1994 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
Mary Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
The Law

I read the first pages of Ira Katznelson's provocative essay with enthusiasm and sympathy. While acknowledging that much interesting and valuable work is being done in the field of working-class history, he accurately pointed to a crisis that is at once political, theoretical, and methodological. He rightly urged us to refuse the currently fashionable alternatives: structure/agency, materialism/discourse, reality/signification, economy/culture.He wisely warned against any easy elision or conflation of these alternatives, favoring instead an exploration of their contradictions and disjunctures. But as I read on to his diagnosis of the ills besetting the field I became uneasy, fearing that while he had recognized some symptoms, he had ignored other, very prominent ones. And when I read his prescription —a labor history that centered on state-focused politics, institutions, and the law—I feared the patient might never recover.

scholarly journals “Mind Forg’d Manacles” and Recent Pathways to “New” Labor Histories

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Survey Article ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Global Study ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of

AbstractSince the 1990s, labor history has been presented as “in crisis”. This negative evaluation is an overstatement. It has nevertheless prodded historians, often productively, to rethink the basic orientations of working-class history. This survey article explores three recent pathways to a “new” labor history: the turn to transnational and global study; the “new” history of capitalism; and the study of slavery as unfree labor. These new approaches to labor history highlight an old dilemma: how the structured determinations of laboring life are balanced alongside dimensions of human agency in understanding the complex experience of the working-class past. It is argued that we need to consider both structureandagency in the researching and writing of labor history. If an older “new” labor history accented agency, new pathways to labor history too often seem constrained by “mind forg’d manacles” that limit understandings of workers’ past lives by emphasizing structure and determination.

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