The Russian Revolution became a beacon flare for anti-capitalists across the world, including many anarchists. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists became ardent supporters of Bolshevism, and many endorsed the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here, I try to arrive at a political and historical understanding of this uncanny honeymoon, and question empirical explanations that present it as a simple misunderstanding. I firstly historicize the evolution of the concept of the workers’ dictatorship in the Spanish labor movement and assess it through the prism of the antagonism between the anarchists and socialists. I then set the reception of the Russian Revolution in the context of social ferment that emerged in Spain after 1917, which generated enormous enthusiasm and clouded theoretical differences. I finally relate the reception of the Soviet dictatorship to the intensification of class violence in these years, which rendered many anarchists hospitable to the authoritarian methods of the Bolsheviks.

This article examines the collapse of the citrus industry in València, Spain during the last years of World War I. In it, I argue that the strikes represent a key moment in the proletarianization of the region's agricultural working classes. By 1914, citrus had become one of Spain's most profitable exports, and prior to the 1917 crash, the landed and monied interests in control of the industry had enforced the notion of inter-class cooperation, which broke down under the economic stress of the War. In the wake of the collapse and the strikes that followed, workers began to organize in earnest and began to work towards improving working conditions and establishing fairer work contracts.

This article examines the legal construction of domestic labor as an unskilled and undervalued occupation in postrevolutionary Mexico, a milieu that was otherwise renowned for an extraordinary expansion of workers’ rights. Based on the writing of legal scholars and legal disputes between domestic workers and their employers that reached Mexico's Supreme Court, the article discusses how a discourse that framed domestic labor as an occupation confined within the protective bounds of the household became an enduring legal formula to justify and reinforce the exclusion of domestics from labor protections recognized for other workers. In so doing, it shows how Supreme Court jurisprudence ultimately redefined the criteria for delimiting this large occupational category based on what was understood as its particular spatialization (the indoor household space) and its distinctive temporalization (guided by family needs instead of production demands). Designating workers who fit these criteria as “simple domestics,” the Court erased any professional specialization among them, marginalizing this overwhelmingly female workforce from other service workers, such as doormen and private drivers, who had previously been considered “domestic.”

Cooks exploited the leverage offered by the publication of information about the prevailing insalubrity in restaurant kitchens when Paris was at the center of global attention during the World Fairs of 1889 and 1900. They framed the issue of workers’ health in connection with consumer safety and gastronomic reputation. Their movement succeeded in securing the law of July 11, 1903 with its encompassing, indeed ecological and ergonomic (rather than toxicological) perception of health risks on the job. Its principles benefitted a great majority of workers and employees. The chronicle of labor's contribution to the identification and regulation of health and safety issues on the job refutes claims about the indifference of the French working-class movement with regard to workers’ health. Attention to the cooks’ workplace experience, their politics, and the elaboration of labor legislation is an antidote to the tendency of narrating state- and institution-building as the history of providential individuals with big ideas.

It is thought that workers under capitalism enjoy the freedom of changing employment at will, but studies show that unfree labor has historically existed alongside capitalist development. One explanation for the use of unfree labor under capitalism highlights the functional needs of production. However, the baoshengong, a form of bonded labor that was used in cotton mills in Shanghai from 1927 to 1937, problematizes this approach. Though the baoshengong system was not an efficient mode of labor control, it was put in place. Rejecting the functionalist account, I show that capitalist unfree labor is not necessarily spurred by production requirements. As the Shanghai case will demonstrate, unfree labor was used when the power dynamics in the larger socio-political context outside the immediate abode of production—namely, the conflict and collaboration between different forms of domination such as gang, patriarchal, capitalist, and state powers—superseded the functional considerations of the capitalists.

Understandings of class have often been highly racialized and gendered. This article examines the efforts of white workers’ organizations in Southern Africa during the 1940s to forge such a class identity across the region and disseminate it among the international labor movement. For these organizations, the “real” working class was composed of white men who worked in mines, factories, and on the railways, something pertinent to contemporary understandings of class.

The focus of these efforts was the Southern African Labour Congress, which brought together white trade unions and labor parties and sought to secure a place for them in the postwar world. These organizations embodied the politics of “white laborism,” an ideology which fused political radicalism and white domination, and they enjoyed some success in gaining acceptance in the international labor movement. Although most labor histories of the region have adopted a national framework, this article offers an integrated regional labor history.

The Conservative Party has long faced concerns that in regard to the great British miners’ strike of 1984–1985, senior Tories had, in fact, planned the confrontation as early as 1977, when still on the opposition benches. Historian John Savile pointed to the existence of the Ridley Report—a Conservative think-tank paper produced in 1977, which appeared to include a detailed blueprint on how to provoke, and secondly win, a battle against Britain's powerful miners’ union. After Margaret Thatcher's second election victory, and her first landslide, in 1983, the Prime Minister populated the Downing Street Policy Unit with private-sector allies who looked to implement aspects of the report. Some of these allies had clear economic incentives in running down British coal. Nevertheless, the Policy Unit members were instrumental in determining government policy concerning all aspects of the strike, including preparation, policing, the law courts, financial concerns and the portrayal of the strike in the media. The campaign by Thatcher's Policy Unit resulted in a shattering blow for Britain's trade union movement from which it has yet to recover—just as the Ridley Report had predicted.

The history of socialism has, without a doubt, been met with renewed interest in France in recent years. Several publishers have republished nineteenth-century texts (by Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Marx, Jaurès, etc.) and, particularly in the fields of history, philosophy, and political science there have been a series of scholarly research projects following various approaches (including the history of the diversity of Europe's socialist movements). All this is testament to a renewal of scholarly approaches, moving away from the more ideological approaches that had previously been predominant. The fact that this renewed interest comes twenty years after the disappearance of “actually-existing socialism” shows how far approaches have changed from the studies that were being published thirty years ago.

“Work means everything to us,” James Livingston writes in the introduction to his recent book, No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea. The meaning of work, what Livingston calls the work ethic, is our problem. “And we've believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives—at any rate, we're pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.” The time for this mode of thinking, we learn, has passed. “These beliefs are no longer plausible,” Livingston says. “In fact, they've become ridiculous, because there's not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won't pay the bills.”