I was in the Netherlands and indeed at the hospital with his wife, Manoshi, and daughter, Piya, one year ago when Arvind Das, founder-editor of Biblio, died. Just one or two months previously I had seen him at the Amsterdam launch, in the Labour History Museum, of Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism, a book of photos by Ravi Agarwal, the text of which was co-authored with his longtime friend and collaborator, that one-man industry of Indian labor studies, Jan Breman. This book had been recently featured in an issue of Biblio (Vol. 5, Nos 1–2, 2000) that also carried Arvind's review of a new Oxford Book of Work (Das 2000)!

For a century after 1870, labor unions and working-class political movements grew steadily in virtually all industrialized capitalist economies. By the late 1970s, unions enrolled 40 percent of the total labor force in Germany and New Zealand; 50 percent in Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom; over 60 percent in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway; and over 80 percent in Finland and Sweden (24). In addition, unions' political allies held important political offices in many of these countries, including control of the government in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Scandinavia.

Few nonspecialists know that Belgium was the first continental European country to benefit and suffer from the Industrial Revolution. Resulting in part from this heritage and also building on an even older tradition of textile manufacturing dating back to the High Middle Ages, Belgium is home to a number of high-quality museums and institutions showcasing and researching the age of industry and its corresponding social movements. Two such organizations are the Archive and Museum of the Socialist Workers Movement (AMSAB) and the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textiles (MIAT) in the city of Ghent. On April 27–30, 1999, these two institutions joined forces to organize an international conference on “Gender and Class in the 20th Century.” For several days, participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and Belgium gathered to listen and respond to a variety of presentations covering the whole range of issues related to the conference theme, from sexuality at the point of production to the discursive construction of poverty as female in the contemporary global age.

The paper explores the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in forging urbanization “from below” in early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this paper draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia.

Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of workers including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other.

Transcending a purely historical analysis, the paper ultimately turns to the urban landscape of present-day Bishkek. There it argues that while the district built by Interhelpo corresponds today to an exiled site dislocated by the hegemonic ethno-national memory regime, its materiality harbors relicts of another future capable of mobilizing alternative narratives on the city and her socialist and multi-ethnic past.

Over the past few decades, as restless capital has moved about the world looking for cheaper production sites, labor campaigns have looked across borders for support. In a world where threats of capital mobility and outsourcing strategies are used to push wages and working conditions ever lower, local activists have called on international allies to insist that multinationals improve the treatment of workers—especially in the developing world, where local governments often seem unwilling or unable to protect their citizens at work and where workers on their own have little leverage.

This article explores tensions within the Democratic Party's uneasy alliance of grassroots labor and blue-collar evangelicalism that collapsed in heated confrontation during California's postwar political realignment. The context in which this played out is Ham and Eggs, one of California's largest old-age welfare movements during the 1930s which, in the midst of economic reconstruction, found new (but short-lived) relevance in the late 1940s. From spring 1945 until summer 1946 Ham and Eggs rallied workers behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian Americanism in hopes of forcing new legislation on behalf of pensions for the elderly. In the process, it stirred a political storm that thrust it into a significance exceeding its original intent. At issue was the “labor question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this juncture about the extent to which New Deal liberalism's labor-friendly initiatives and progressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be extended. Caught between a labor-Left movement within the Democratic Party that looked to extend New Deal liberalism and a galvanized Christian Right, which looked to roll it back, blue-collar evangelicals affiliated with Ham and Eggs confronted a new political reality that compelled them to choose between their class and faith commitments. With reluctance they chose the latter over the former. The decision marked the beginning of blue-collar evangelicalism's shift to the Right and ultimately the formation of a broader evangelical political alliance that would prove instrumental in the rise of California's conservative Republican movement.

The arrival of Belgian rule in the late nineteenth century initiated significant changes in the labor history of Tanganyika, a province in the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well the discursive regimes used to legitimize these transformations. After the colonial conquests, unfree labor was justified by paternalistic rather than mythical discourses. Although unfree labor was less common in the postcolonial period, the state forced farmers to sell crops at low prices and build roads for no remuneration. In the Cold War context, the language and practice of developmentalism mediated the coercive practices of the independent Congolese state (known as Zaïre, 1971–1997). The floundering Zaïrian government expanded its presence in Tanganyika due to its partnership with USAID. USAID's rhetoric and practice was influenced by a “bottom up” approach to agricultural production, but the cuts to its funding in the 1980s meant it struggled to soften Mobutu's coercive administration.