The essay argues that the idea of the United States as a classless society was never a faithful representation of the U.S. socioeconomic reality, but constituted a myth elaborated since the 1830s by the first generation of U.S. economists to oppose the insubordination of Northern white workers, their mobilization through strikes, their politicization of class, and their critique of wage labor. It was precisely to counter the workers’ discourse, the essay maintains, that the first U.S. economists, most importantly Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), developed an ideological representation of U.S. society as a classless structure devoid of fixed boundaries, in which industrious individuals could improve their condition through labor and in which social positions reflected a scale of talents and merits. By studying the early writings of Carey, but also of Theodore Sedgwick (1780–1839), Francis Wayland (1796–1865), Henry Vethake (1791–1866), Alonzo Potter (1800–1865), and Francis Lieber (1800–1872), the essay shows how economists used the myth of the classless society to scientifically legitimize the coming of capitalism to the United States, as well as to delegitimize class conflict. This anti-labor reaction, the essay argues, marked the very emergence of political economy in the United States as a science aimed at justifying the order of society through a mystified representation of its power relations, while the myth of the classless society would persist as a fundamental ideological pillar in the legitimation and naturalization of American capitalism.

In the history of the left, the conjuncture 1914–1917 is the “bifurcation point” per definition. Leaving an enduring mark on the labor movement, it also shaped subsequent historiographies. For the pro-Bolshevik left, 1914 epitomized the betrayal of a group of reformist leaders. Conversely, anti-communist social democrats regarded the Second International as an uncomfortable political heritage. Despite irreconcilable disputes, both traditions shared a lack of interest in defending the period 1889–1914, let alone delving into its history. The real take-off of Second International historiography came later and coincided with the outset of the Cold War, experiencing a “golden age” in the 1960s and 1970s. Studies of socialism lost momentum from the 1980s onwards, but the last 15 years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Second International and even a popular reappraisal of Karl Kautsky. Linking historiography to wider social and political phenomena, this article reflects on this new interest in the Second International in both activist and academic circles. The first section summarizes the historical significance of the International and examines how the crisis of 1914 became a crucial “bifurcation point” with significant political and historiographical impact. The second section explores recent trends in scholarly research on the subject. The third section provides an analysis of the vindication of Karl Kautsky among radicals and socialists in the United States over the past 10 years. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments and reflects on the contribution this analysis can make to a discussion about the “long cycle” of socialism.

This paper explores how the years after World War II in Western Europe were an extreme case of working-class power. An initial theoretical discussion claims that while class can best be understood as a social category, at the same time politics in the broadest sense—and hence class-based movements—can shape social structure. This was the case in the in the post-World War II period when the working class dominated West European societies: especially perhaps in Britain, the “weight” of the working class shaped the nation. Trade union organization and state power ensured collective rights and were the basis for autonomous consumption; class identity was a source of pride. The end of this period saw trade union density continuing to increase. In the USA as well as in Western Europe, the power of management in the workplace was challenged. Especially in Western Europe, there was widespread radicalization of working-class youth. This was the last offensive of the working-class movement. However, power in the workplace remained essentially a veto-power. In the USA, oppositional politics became ethnic politics and even before de-industrialisation the white working class began to abandon its traditional politics. Nonetheless, in Western Europe the long shadow of the working-class movement ensured the partial survival of social rights long after the traditional social basis of the movement had withered away.

The article analyzes a period when public officials withdrew children from the labor market and assigned them to the school system. While existing research delves into the reasons behind this process, focusing on sociopolitical reforms, economic factors and changing concepts of childhood, there is limited understanding of how working-class families responded. The article aims to fill the gap by examining the social impact on families when their children were barred from factory work by political-administrative authorities, shedding light on class formation and political subjectivation. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s book Proletarian Nights the article specifically investigates the Swiss canton of Aargau, where the clash between industrial child labor and liberal school reforms around 1830 provides a unique perspective. The conflict prompted the mobilization of proletarian families, compelling them to organize, unite politically and collectively advocate for their children to rejoin the labor market.

This review article surveys recent books that explore black women’s integral role in the labor history of Latin America and the Caribbean. As emancipated Latin American and Caribbean black women transitioned away from slave labor, they faced intense, enduring racial and gender discrimination in the labor market. Despite these hostile conditions, these black women tirelessly resisted and rebelled against oppression. Moving beyond the framework of black women as mere contributors to social, political, and economic systems, the reviewed books’ authors center black women as historically inextricable from these foundational elements that sustain the region.

The global turn has contributed to a revitalization of labor history. Historians have become increasingly attentive to the varied forms of labor commodification that existed under capitalism. Many historians have welcomed this approach which challenges the universalism of “free” wage labor. Critics, however, have warned that global labor history risks re-inscribing the power of capital at the expense of local specificities, particularly in terms of the plurality of labor’s worlds and its (dis)connections with capital. This is not a new debate within African studies. Since the 1980s, historians of Africa have questioned the privileging of wage labor at the expense of other forms of labor and the focus on (post)colonial workplace relations to the exclusion of other relational power structures which shaped the behavior of African men and women. This article takes up these debates by focusing on different forms of labor connected to the gold mining industry in colonial Ghana. The article argues that African men and women involved in the mining sector, including mineworkers, petty traders, and sex workers, responded to their experience of commodification in ways that were about more than just their status as abstract sellers of labor power. What emerges from this analysis is a more nuanced understanding of the strategies and aspirations of African labor which was connected to the mining sector. That is to say, where colonial officials saw working patterns that were purportedly symptomatic of the “lazy” and “ill-disciplined” character of African labor, this article demonstrates otherwise. The behavior of African labor associated with the mining sector was indicative of choices that were made in accordance with individual and collective needs connected to issues of class, gender, and generation, which, in turn, were “entangled” with capitalist market imperatives but not necessarily determined by them.

This introduction sets out the context for the special feature on gender and deindustrialization. It briefly outlines the development of research in this field and the contribution made by the articles included in this issue, before pointing to some directions for future research.

This study delves into the intricate relationship between warfare and social rights during the Second French Republic. As recent scholarship suggests that the emergence of social rights in the 18th century involved a transition from Christian charity principles to secular obligations, primarily influenced by proponents of free markets, this research uncovers a distinct path during the July Monarchy. Here, socialists framed social rights using a unique language centered on warfare, which was overtly at odds with the prevailing free-market discourse. This transformation led to the concept of “guerre industrielle” or industrial warfare, portraying industrial workers as modern soldiers in the international economic competition among nations. Such a narrative significantly molded the political demands of the emerging French working class, focusing on securing decent employment and extending to workers the social provisions already granted to the military. These demands gained substantial momentum during the tumultuous 1848 Revolution, fueling a call for comprehensive societal transformation, emphasizing cooperative production and mutual assistance. Nevertheless, the rejection of these radical ideas was primarily attributed to the reluctance of moderate republicans to embrace the profound societal changes implied by such demands. By delving into the intricacies of this relationship, the article offers fresh insights into the development of social rights before the emergence of the Welfare State and their impact on the construction of tools of socioeconomic governance during the last two centuries.

This contribution takes stock of the growing research on deindustrialization from a gender perspective. Much of the work in deindustrialization studies is rooted in local studies, within single national contexts. This article provides a perspective that cuts across case studies and national historiographies. It reviews findings on the implications of deindustrialization for working-class masculinities and considers the extent to which research has privileged a focus on white masculinity in crisis (a theme which is more present in some national contexts than others). The article goes on to show how a more complex and nuanced understanding of gender, class, and race is emerging. It highlights women workers’ experience of deindustrialization and considers the ways in which deindustrialization is associated with a restructuring of gender relations. Acknowledging some of the limitations of the current state of research, the article points to a number of potential avenues for further enquiry.

The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War II forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilized nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilized throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced laborers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible. This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.

Over the last half-decade, worker-led struggles have spread across US cafes, warehouses, universities, media outlets, and beyond. Reviving the bottom-up spirit that enabled unions to make their big breakthrough in the 1930s, recent worker-to-worker initiatives have shown how this can be done in our sprawled out, economically decentralized conditions. Building off the best traditions of left trade unionism, and leaning on the novel affordances of digital tools, they’ve pioneered new forms of organizing that can extend widely enough to confront the systemic ills plaguing working people.

Significant advances in the study of the historic labor movement have entailed new work on the intersection between political parties, trade unions and subjects such as ‘race’, colonialism, sexuality, masculinity, and the reception of scientific ideas. The intersections between the labor movement and the politics of health, however, have been neglected to date both in labor studies and in social studies of health care and provision. This article builds on my on-going research into the dynamics of the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) labor movement in the form of anarchism and syndicalism and explores, specifically, the reception of ideas on health and the attainment of healthy working conditions and lifestyles as a central aim of these working-class movements. This study examines, among other aspects, the reception of ideas on nutrition, medical care, the provision of hospitals, the responsibility of medical professionals, sexual health, the consumption of alcohol and the provision of quality housing for workers within a framework that critiqued capitalism and the state and the relations they fostered.

A further dimension is incorporated into this study. This is the colonial dynamic at play between Portugal and its colonies, in this case Mozambique. What were the relations between the Portuguese syndicalist movement and the emerging trade union movement in Mozambique? To what degree did concerns in Portugal over issues of health find resonance in this African colony's labor movement? To what degree was the largely white labor movement in Mozambique attuned to local knowledge on health and racial issues surrounding health? What specific aspects of health and medicine were broached in the colony and how did these interact with an anticolonial critique and discourses and practices of ‘tropical medicine’?

This study, through a detailed analysis of a range of libertarian periodicals in Portugal and Mozambique during the movement’s period of maximum influence provides responses to these questions and makes a contribution to transnational research on labour movements through the interconnecting linguistic and class dynamics of the Lusophone world.

When do labor movements come to support universal welfare policies? This article examines this question through a comparative account of the British and American labor movements at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on newspaper and meeting records from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), the Cigarmakers International Union (CMIU), and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (BLF) from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, it considers why, given a common tradition of exclusive benefits, the two movements diverged on the question of universal state health and pension schemes at the turn of the century—with the British labor movement abandoning its voluntarist orientation and the AFL preserving it.

Complementing existing sociological accounts that emphasize state and party structure, sectoral composition, pace and quality of industrial change, and the demographic makeup of labor movements, this article builds on approaches from the sociology of organizations in centering the importance of organizational arenas in shaping trade union strategies and aims. In particular, it investigates the role of friendly and fraternal societies in structuring trade union interests over this period. The article demonstrates how changes within the friendly and fraternal society movement shaped the contextual significance and strategic value of benefit provision in each trade union over time. In doing so, it opens the way for a deeper reflection on the importance of organizational reasoning in shaping trade union organizing and the trajectory of welfare institutions.

The relation between wage growth and the reconstruction of the labor movement in Spain, during the developmentalist Francoist regime (1957-1975), has been controversial. Applying the power resources theory in order to explain wage growth, this paper argues that the rise of the labor share was the result of the increased bargaining power of workers in spite of repressive policies of the Francoist government. The action of new trade unionism mobilized the following power resources. First, the structural power increased as a consequence of techno-economics transformations of Fordism and a generational change of the labor force. Second, the associational power increased due to new organizational forms, with more democratic modes of collective action and combining clandestine and legal actions, and the reappearance of collective bargaining with the Law of Collective Bargaining Agreements of 1958. These political opportunities opened up the possibility to the new trade unionist of developing the strategy of entryism that served as the driving force for worker mobilization.

Consequently, the new trade unionists could mobilize their power resources in the three spheres, exchange, production, and politics, as a strategy by accelerating collaborative action, establishing a discursive and cultural framework, and allowing the articulation of the different trade union actions. In this way, internal solidarity was favored when a collective agreement was negotiated at the company or sector level (and not an individual contract, as it has been to date), due to the links with the social activities characteristic of the paternalistic management of labor relations and the presence of anti-Francoist organizations, the “network embeddedness” was strengthened. In turn, the successes in the consequence of wage increases and solidarity with other workers who were suffering repression increased the narrative resources that frame union actions. All this made it possible to counterbalance in part for the restrictions imposed by the dictatorship, which weakened the structural power of workers in the political sphere.

The main contribution to the existing knowledge on the issue consists in explaining the apparent paradox between the wage policy of the Francoist government (oriented towards wage restriction) and the increase in labor share. This also serves to understand how labor markets and the wage-setting mechanism worked from a historical point of view. As a corollary, the previous analysis implies that the most important factor was the ability to mobilize workers successfully. The union strategy that combined democratic instruments of representation (assemblies) with clandestine and legal actions served as a catalyst for other productive and social changes. This reflects the primacy of the action of social actors for the worker mobilization theory.

The War of the Pacific (1879–1883) between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia marked a turning point in the political and socio-economic development of the Atacama Desert. Formerly part of Bolivia, this area came under the control and jurisdiction of Chile in 1884. This shift in sovereignty substantially altered the tri-national geopolitics, forcing the local Bolivian population to flee. The newly annexed region's rich mineral resources became subject to a mining colonization process. In 1912, the Guggenheim family founded The Chile Exploration Company and began the industrialization of the Chuquicamata copper mine. Located in the heart of the Atacama Desert, this was the world's largest copper mine during the twentieth century. Although the local Bolivian population had fled the Atacama Desert following the war, many returned to work in the Guggenheim mine almost thirty years later. Between 1912 and 1925, 239 Bolivians labeled as foreigners and “Indians” were employed in diverse production stages or subsidiary services. Bureaucratic migratory documents and newspaper archives allow us to quantify and characterize Bolivian migration to Chuquicamata. We argue that an ethnic-labor subsidiarity emerged, a historical process resulting from ethnic discrimination, expressed in the disposition and physical costs of mining work and low wages. While the war altered the mining territory of Atacama, ethnic-labor subsidiarity of the Bolivian workforce sustained the expansion of U.S. capitalism in the Chuquicamata copper mine.

A considerable proportion of the research conducted within the developing field of deindustrialisation studies has focused on the loss of work in industrial closures, and on the attachments that long-serving workers feel to their former workplace. This article focuses instead on the phenomenon of constrained mobility which often occurs as companies restructure and workers are offered a choice between redundancy or relocation to another site. Steven High (2003) has examined the ‘transplanted identities’ of male workers who had moved repeatedly as plants downsized and closed across the American rust belt, highlighting a group who styled themselves as the ‘I-75 gypsies’ (after the interstate highway that runs through Michigan and Ohio). Forging a new identity articulated in terms of mobility rather than place, these men constructed a new version of heroic working-class masculinity as they moved from site to site. This article draws on a case study of the Moulinex domestic appliance company in north western France to examine how such mobility has been experienced by women workers in a region beyond the industrial heartlands. In doing so, it considers the particular relationship to place that was constructed as companies like Moulinex established factories in rural regions of France after the Second World War and the implications of this for work-based identities. The article highlights the intersecting effects of age and gender, the significance of the gendered division of labour for women's experiences of mobility, and the extent to which identities were reshaped as women moved to stay in work.

Starting from the early 1930s, structural changes in the Bulgarian tobacco industry, prompted by the advent of the world economic crisis and German economic expansionism into Southeastern Europe, led to a deep restructuring of the labor processes, known in the terminology of the time as rationalization, in the Bulgarian tobacco industry. The introduction of the tonga rationalization technology had a deskilling and deeply gendered effect on the industry, making a significant number of skilled male workers redundant, disproportionately decreasing average male wages and leading, in turn, to a further feminization of an already majority-female workforce.

The introduction of the new system provoked a strong response from the organized labor movement, which used a variety of tactics to fight against the new technology: from strikes to petitions to tripartite negotiations. Organized labor's reaction was deeply gendered, an aspect that only becomes truly visible if, in addition to gender and skill, we employ the analytical lens of scale. By following trade union policies on the local, national, and international levels, the article goes beyond the carefully crafted gender-neutral language in official documents to reveal tensions between the conservative attitudes of rank-and-file activists and the official trade union agenda. This is especially evident in communist labor politics, where Bulgarian trade union policies on the local and national levels provoked an intervention on the part of the Profintern between 1930 and 1931. The movement's internal contradictions resulted in a polyvalent, ambiguous, and non-linear trade union policy formed through the clash of and negotiations between local activists’ conservative notions of gendered work and family roles and the radical gender program of international communism.

In Charleston, Maine, a town of about 1,500 near the center of the state, there is an orchard with 750 apple trees and a farm where a variety of produce is grown.1 This bucolic setting is on the grounds of the Mountain View Correctional Facility, a 374-bed minimum- and medium-security state prison.2 Incarcerated people tend to the apple trees and vegetables, and every year they cultivate 100,000 pounds of produce that wind up on their prison cafeteria, or chow hall, trays.3 Writing for the New York Times in 2021, Patricia Leigh Brown highlighted how Mountain View's prison food service manager Mark McBrine, who also happened to be “an organic farmer with dirt under his fingernails,” was “making the prison a pioneer in a nascent farm-to-prison table movement.”4 According to multiple media outlets that have reported on Mountain View's food system, it is a model to be emulated—both an antidote to dreary prison food and a cost-saver for the state of Maine.5

A survey of recent works of labor and environment reveal the centrality of hybridity to analyses of human and nonhuman natures. These are most apparent in analyses of labor, technology, and nature. While ways of knowing nature amongst the powerful have been oriented toward the ever-greater domination of workers and nonhuman nature, interspecies entanglements and solidarity erupt through the marginal, overlooked spaces. Taken together, the books included in this review suggest a way toward finding alternative, more just futures for living alongside nonhuman nature.