Trajectories of Resistance and Shifting Forms of Workers’ Activism in Iran

This article navigates ruptures and transformations in the processes of resistance performed by Iranian workers between two key events of the history of contemporary Iran: the 1979 Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement. It explores how labor activism emerged in the Islamic Republic, and illustrates how it managed to survive. Drawing from the concepts of resistance, collective awareness and counter-conduct as its theoretical basis – between Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault – the article details the changing strategies that workers adopted over time and space to cope with the absence of trade unions, monitoring activities, and repression in the workplace. It demonstrates that workers' agency was never fully blocked by the Islamic Republic. However, it tests the limits imposed by the social context to discourage activism, beyond state coercive measures and policies.

De-centering the Revolution: Class Composition in the Making and Defeat of the Bavarian Council Republic

In November 1918, the labor movement of Bavaria, Germany, overthrew the monarchist government and, in April 1919, proclaimed a Bavarian Council Republic (BCR). This article analyzes the revolution and its defeat through the lens of class composition theory, thereby suggesting some revisions to the latter. The technical composition of the Bavarian working class fostered the concept of self-management, which lay at the heart of the councils as the organizational form of the revolution. However, it also nurtured authoritarian potentials, which were more in line with-counter revolutionary positions. The article suggests that class composition theory must be expanded by the notion of social composition, taking into account struggles over reproduction and consumption: Inflation, unemployment, food shortages, and disease led to a crisis in material reproduction, which in turn led large parts of the unemployed and of the women's movement to become radical revolutionaries. The article argues to conceptualize technical and social class composition to be in a dialectical relationship with political composition. It thus emphasizes the role of ideologies of anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, both within the counter-revolution and the revolution itself. While the combination of different struggles for emancipation contributed to the early successes of the revolution, their ideological division was as an important factor in its defeat.

The Humanization of Nature and Half-Earth Socialism

Edward Jenner took the long view. His 1798 treatise on vaccination, which reported a revolutionary new method of preventing smallpox, opened with a medical philosophy of history rather than a description of symptoms or a review of existing treatments. “The deviation of Man from the state in which he was originally placed by Nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of Diseases,” he explained. By this he meant that infectious disease ultimately resulted from human and animal intermingling since the agricultural revolution, an insight anthropologists and epidemiologists have since confirmed. The majority of human pathogens are ultimately zoonoses, originating not at the dawn of the human species but in the relatively recent past. Measles likely evolved from the bovine disease rinderpest seven thousand years ago. Influenza may have started about forty-five hundred years ago with the domestication of waterfowl. Jenner's own specialty, smallpox, probably originated four thousand years ago in eastern Africa when a gerbil virus jumped to the newly domesticated camel and then to humans. The New World's Indigenous nations cultivated countless crops but practiced little animal husbandry, allowing them to live relatively free of disease before 1492. European conquest succeeded in a large part thanks to the invaders’ pathogenic armory of measles, typhus, tuberculosis, and smallpox, which decimated Indigenous populations by 90 percent over the succeeding centuries.

Sartre as prosecutor of occupational murder: notes from a People's Tribunal in a French mine (1970)

On February 4, 1970, in the Fouquières-lès-Lens coal mine in northern France, sixteen miners were killed in a gas explosion (“firedamp,” grisou in French). This was an accident like many others before it, yet with a relatively high number of fatalities. The public prosecutor concluded, as usual, that there was no case against the publicly owned mine. No investigation was to be carried out. The accident had been the work of fate, of bad luck.

A Failed Experiment: Okinawan Indents and the Postwar Torres Strait Pearlshelling Industry, 1958–1963

Throughout its European history, Australia has solved recurrent labor shortages by importing workers from overseas. Situated on shipping lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the northern Australian pearlshelling industry became a significant locus of second-wave transnational labor flows (1870–1940) and by the 1880s was dependent on indentured workers from the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Exempted from the racially discriminatory Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, indentured Asian seamen, principally Japanese, maintained the industry until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. The Torres Strait pearlshelling industry, centered on Thursday Island in Far North Queensland, resumed in 1946 amid general agreement that the Japanese must not return. Nevertheless, in 1958, 162 Okinawan pearling indents arrived on Thursday Island in a controversial attempt to restore the industry's declining fortunes. This article is intended as a contribution to the history of transnational labor movements. It consults a range of sources to document this “Okinawan experiment,” the last large-scale importation of indentured Asian labor into Australia. It examines Australian Commonwealth-state tensions in formulating and adopting national labor policy; disputes among Queensland policy makers; the social characteristics of the Okinawan cohort; and local Indigenous reactions. Also discussed are the economics of labor in the final years of the Torres Strait pearling industry. This study thus extends our knowledge of transnational labor movements and the intersection of early postwar Australian-Asian relations with Queensland Indigenous labor policy. It also foreshadows contemporary Indigenous demands for control of local marine resources.

From Guild Artisans to Entrepreneurs: The Long Path of Italian Marble Mosaic and Terrazzo Craftsmen (16th c. Venice – 20th c. New York City)

Marble mosaic and terrazzo were a very common type of stone paving in Venice, Italy, especially between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the period, migrant craftsmen from the nearby Alpine foothills area of Friuli (in northeastern Italy) virtually monopolized the Venetian marble mosaic and terrazzo trade. Thus, on February 9, 1583, the Venetian Council of Ten granted maestro (master) Sgualdo Sabadin from Friuli and his fellow Friulian workers of the arte dei terazzeri (art of terrazzo) the capacity to establish a school guild dedicated to St. Florian. The first chapters of the Mariegola de’ Terazzeri (Statutes of the Terrazzo Workers Guild), which set the rules for the guild of terrazzo workers, was completed three years later, in September 1586.From the 1830s onward, Friulian craftsmen began to export their skills and trade from Venice across Europe and later, at the turn of the twentieth century, overseas to several American cities. Prior to reaching America, mosaic and terrazzo workers left from their work places outside Italy, initially from Paris. Friulian mosaic and terrazzo workers were regarded as the “aristocracy” of the Italian American building workforce due to their highly specialized jobs: This contrasted with the bulk of Italians in the United States who were largely employed as unskilled. The New York marble mosaic- and terrazzo-paving trade was completely in the hands of the Italian craftsmen, who demonstrated a strong tendency to become entrepreneurs. They made use of their craftsmanship comparative advantages to build a successful network of firms that dominated the domestic market, in a similar fashion to what had already been occurring in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other European countries.This paper argues that immigrants can be powerful conduits for the transfer of skills and knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of studying skilled migrant artisan experiences. A closer look at ethnic migration flows reveals a variety of entrepreneurial experiences, even in groups largely considered unskilled. The Italian marble mosaic and terrazzo workers’ experience sheds new light on ethnic entrepreneurship catering for the community as a whole, it reveals a remarkable long-lasting craftsmanship experience, thus demonstrating the successful continuity in business ownership and the passing down of craftsmanship knowledge across family generations. Creativity skills and innovative productive methods adopted by firms appear as a key factor that allowed these artisans to control the trade for such a long time.

The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.