A growing body of literature is challenging techno-fetishistic perspectives on digital capitalism, as well as claims of the start of a new era characterized by total automation. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the implications of digital technology for the future of labour by reading Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) through the lens of labour history. The use of digital factory and digital Taylorism as integrative tools significantly improves empirical evaluations of different digital labour environments. However, because of their high degree of abstraction, there are a number of limitations when applying these concepts to describe wildly disparate work environments. To illustrate these limits, I use examples from twentieth-century debates on technology and work autonomy, and (1) argue that a labour history perspective warns us against overgeneralizing the effects of technology on labour control and worker autonomy, and (2) broaden the discussion to larger issues of labour control before and during digitalization, incorporating new theoretical questions such as our understanding of classical Taylorism and, by extension, capitalism.

This essay engages with Daniel Laqua's book Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023) from the perspective of a historian of both humanitarianism and youth. This short reflection therefore focuses primarily on the book's engagement with the topic of humanitarianism, before discussing an understated, albeit important, cross-cutting theme of the book: the significance of youth in transnational activism. It highlights a number of features of Laqua's book, for instance the merits of adopting a broad chronological approach. At the same time, the essay also uses the space to present a number of reflections on activism, from questions about the generational appeal of particular causes to the way in which particular figures might spark activism. It ends with some thoughts about the source base used to write such histories of activism.

Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outside of its supposedly totalizing network of logistics, robotics and algorithms.

The article examines the role of children's magazines in promoting internationalism and solidarity in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Analysing the magazines ABC-Zeitung, Bummi, and Frösi, it sheds light on their contribution to the GDR's system for collecting and distributing charitable donations and to cultivating children's commitment to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The article uncovers multifaceted layers of meaning associated with internationalism and emphasizes the significance of the connection between the state-ideological and the everyday levels. Its analysis of primary sources, including articles from the children's magazines, files from the Federal Archives, and historical publications, reveals that the magazines played a crucial role in fostering international solidarity and shaping the political consciousness of young readers. The use of techniques such as suggestion, competition, and renunciation in the magazines not only evoked a sense of collective responsibility, but also positioned children as active contributors to shaping an international socialist future. The children's magazine Bummi is particularly significant in the GDR's charitable donations system as it shows the involvement of other parts of society and thus raises issues of transgenerational education through the medium of children's magazines. By shifting away from the narrative of indoctrination, this article highlights the broader understanding of internationalism in the GDR and its integration into everyday life. It therefore underscores the vital role of children's magazines not only in fostering a stance of anti-imperialist solidarity among young readers, but also in shaping the GDR's vision of an international socialist future.

Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders since 1870 is an impressive contribution to scholarly research on transnational activism. It provides a detailed and innovative study of the connections but also the divisions between individuals, groups, and organizations. Laqua's approach and analysis interrogate the connectedness, transience, ambivalence, and marginality of transnational activism. He explores the complex relationship of campaigners, campaigns, and causes that crossed national boundaries, building a rich analysis of these interactions.

This contribution engages with Activism across Borders with a particular emphasis on women, workers, and women workers. This perspective offers an analysis at the intersection of women's history and labour history. Among the themes considered are: campaigns that forged partnerships and amplified voices; women's transnational activism and national borders; and the divisions and differences among activists campaigning to improve working conditions.

This response to the comments on The Digital Factory discusses why and how the concepts of the digital factory and digital Taylorism have been applied in the book, as well as the question of the relationship between digital control and workers' resistance to algorithmic management technologies. While agreeing with the comments that point to the limitations of the concepts used, this response argues that these can be productive precisely by drawing our attention to aspects that are otherwise difficult to bring to light. In terms of the potential for workers' resistance, many collective and individual forms of such resistance remain possible in labour regimes under algorithmic management, as well as in other coexisting labour regimes.

The article analyses the solidarity campaigns organized by the Czechoslovak Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Peoples between the 1960s and 1980s. It situates the Czechoslovak solidarity towards African countries in the wider framework of the solidarity politics of the Eastern bloc and points out differences as well as similarities. Although the Czechoslovak Solidarity Committee was one of the first such committees to be founded in Eastern Europe, in the 1960s its official as well as public commitment to internationalist principles was modest compared with those of solidarity movements elsewhere in the bloc. However, the solidarity campaigns with African liberation movements intensified in the early 1970s. The campaigns in this period were marked by strong national symbolism, which drew on historical parallels between the African and Czechoslovak struggles for independence. The everyday internationalism in this case filled the public space with images of shared suffering, inferiority, and occupation, through which Czechoslovak citizens made sense of their historical role in the world. The article argues that this “nationalization” of official solidarity campaigns helped to embed the victimization narratives that survived the Velvet Revolution and that, in the 1990s, became a basis for new Czech and Slovak political identification.

Daniel Laqua's recent monograph Activism across Borders Since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe raises a number of pertinent issues for historians of human rights to reflect upon. This article takes the four analytical lenses highlighted by Laqua for assessing transnational activism and applies them to cases of human rights activism in the Cold War and post-Cold War era. In doing so, this article argues that Laqua's framework offers much scope for historians to approach the history of human rights activism with a more critical edge. It also highlights the challenge of retaining an analytical focus on an issue as emotive and complex as human rights, and how Laqua's lenses may offer a practical methodology to do this.

On 17 December 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a town in inland Tunisia, instigated the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab Revolutions – a wording that I will use here as a translation from the Arabic al-thawrât al-`arabiyya. Observers were shocked at the radical protests arising in these regions, where authoritarian regimes had crushed all serious opposition over the decades. Conflicts governed by geopolitics, in particular the ongoing Israeli–Arab and Israeli–Palestinian hostilities, and the focus on political Islam and jihadism as the only globalized locus of political protest, have arrogated any attention for societies, their transformation, and their mobilization.

This article explores the intricate relationship between transnational solidarity and citizenship in socialist Tanzania, renowned for its extensive and enduring support of liberation movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. Termed “frontline citizenship”, this unique political subjectivity, evolving in the 1960s, was shaped not only by Tanzania's geopolitical location, nationalist struggles against colonialism, and government efforts to instil attitudes of anti-colonial solidarity in the population, but also by initiatives of hosted liberation movements, Tanzanians’ embrace of global anti-imperialist currents from Cuba to China and Vietnam, and critiques of politicians in exile. The article highlights the gendered and generational aspects of the solidarity regime, scrutinizes contested material solidarities, and discusses the partial decline of the frontline citizenship discourse. It does so by investigating the role of media, the impact of the paramilitary National Service, and the dynamics of material support practices. Drawing on multi-archival research, interviews, memoirs, and secondary literature, with a focus on South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), the analysis challenges conventional views of state-sponsored solidarity, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between state initiatives and grassroots participation as well as “external” and “internal” actors. Conceiving socialist Tanzania's solidarity regime in this way contributes to a broader understanding of the intersection between anti-imperialist world-making, nationalist state-building, and everyday performances of citizenship.

This essay discusses different approaches to studying transnational activism in historical perspective. In doing so, it concludes a review dossier in which several historians have commented on aspects of Daniel Laqua's book Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023). The author responds to the preceding pieces by addressing the contributors’ questions and arguments, while also noting how their pieces have applied his book's framework to different causes (e.g. anarchism, feminism, human rights, humanitarianism, labour). Moreover, this essay raises several wider points regarding the subject under consideration. For example, it stresses that activists’ notions regarding the interconnectedness of different causes could generate fresh ruptures. The discussion highlights the amorphous nature of transnational activism, including its potential use by vastly different movements, and it situates the book within a broader, and developing, research agenda.