Both Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth (2008) and Peter Linebaugh in The Magna Carta Manifesto (2009) want to put the commons and communism—understood as a form of society in which private property has been replaced by property in common—“back on the agenda.” They even insist that just such a social and economic order “grounded in the common” is “already in process” and that communism is thus more relevant and possible than ever. To a certain extent, they are right. We need a functioning commons if human society is to remain viable. But we also need a functioning commercial economy capable of feeding the billions that human society has and most likely will continue to produce.

On November 13, 1924, the first public announcements of white scion Leonard Kip Rhinelander's secret marriage to a working-class “colored” woman, Alice Jones, exploded across the front pages of New York newspapers. Although Rhinelander, a wealthy white socialite, ignored family orders and stayed with his wife through the first week or so of the scandal, few were surprised when he ultimately left her and filed an annulment suit. While New York did not outlaw interracial marriages, Leonard's suit reflected the extent of public sentiment against such marriages. Claiming he had not known Alice was black and would not have married her if he had, Leonard, acutely aware of his class station, nonetheless based his request to dissolve the marriage on prohibitions against interracial unions. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that the jury of twelve white married men refused the Rhinelander heir his annulment and upheld the marriage, there-by accepting Alice's version of events and actions.

The late Guyanese historian and political activist Walter Rodney began his posthumously published A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881–1905 (1981) by analyzing the “physical environment and class interests” in coastal Guyana. Writing against narratives that privileged the roles played by European capital and technology, Rodney argued that working people made large contributions to the “humanization” of the Guyanese environment. He noted that a powerful planter class placed severe constraints on working people who were “in no position to control the available technology or to initiate environmental intervention.” Political power was important, but Rodney noted that the environment played “a determining role in limiting the activities of all sections of the population [original emphasis].” Writing an “intelligible narrative” of Guyana's history then, was “impossible” without an understanding of Guyana's environment.

A distinction has generally been made between the producer and the consumer … we have been led to suppose that the producer and the consumer were totally separate individuals, with separate and distinct interests, when in reality all producers are consumers.

The essay focuses on two points: First, Eley and Nield's emphasis on micropolitics, discourse, and diverse forms of affinity is stimulating and essential but inadequate to the task of understanding when and how the category of working class is useful. Such a task also requires nuanced analysis of interactions on a large scale and at long distance, of control of material resources, and of centralizing institutions. Second, their identity-centered vision of politics is too constraining to make clear the multiple forms of political imagination, connection, and mobilization or to figure out the extent as well as the limits of power.

The cash-indemnity health insurance system that emerged in the United States after 1945 represented but one trajectory among many. The late 1930s and early 1940s marked a period of innovation and creative experimentation in voluntarist health care programs. Spurred by the Social Security Act of 1935 and the New Deal's legitimization of the politics of security, unions, consumers, employers, and doctors began developing a range of health care programs that enabled patients to pool the risks and costs of sickness and injury, thus bringing medical care within the reach of more people. Employers and private insurers, too, acceded to the pervasive ideology of security. Invoking the New Deal language of security, life insurance companies competed with community and nonprofit organizations to meet a burgeoning market—the market for prepaid health services. While organized labor advocated noninsurance models, commercial insurance companies, aligning with large employers, dramatically expanded their reach during the 1940s, bringing in large groups of subscribers. By the time substantive collective bargaining over health benefits commenced between unions and management in 1950, commercial group health insurance had become well entrenched in many workplaces, and, as a result of this growth, had undercut the competitive and political conditions that enabled other, more equitable, communal-based health insurance alternatives to thrive.

Paid household labor has fertilized the development of national economies, while also nourishing the capitalist labor systems that has allowed globalization to thrive. However, this transnational sector has remained historically invisible, devalued, and unprotected from national and international legislative frameworks. In 2010, the International Labor Organization (ILO) finally embraced this challenge through two years of negotiations on the world's first international convention to assure “Decent Work for Domestic Workers.” These tripartite debates set the stage for the largest inclusion of “actual workers” in policy making. The debates also mobilized the world's first international domestic workers’ movement. This report from the field highlights a distinct process whereby workers themselves played a pivotal role in the creation of international labor policy. According to International Domestic Workers Federation president Myrtle Witbooi, this “new beginning” set “a benchmark for decent work and social equality.”

In late August 1930, two white American workers from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit were tried for attacking a black American laborer at one of the Soviet Union's prized giants of socialist industry, the Stalingrad Traktorostroi. Soviet trade-union authorities and all-union editors used the near month-long campaign to bring the two assailants to “proletarian justice,” in order to cultivate the image that workers in the USSR valued American technical and industrial knowledge in the construction of the new socialist society, but vehemently rejected American racism. They reinforced this image in publications by juxtaposing visual depictions of Soviet citizens' acceptance of black Americans as equals against those which portrayed the lynching of black workers in the United States.

Contract work in India, though legally regulated by a 1970 Act, is widespread and mostly unrecognized. With the implementation of neoliberal policies in India since the 1990s, contract work has become the norm. There are now few spaces in which contract workers can get redress through the legal system. Using oral history narratives of contract workers' participation in a labor movement, this article shows how narratives of contention differ in the rendering of agency, success, and future, between one group of contract workers employed in the 1970s in a state-owned mine and another employed in the 1990s in an industrial area owned by private and foreign capital. The evidence for the article is ethnographic, collected in Chhattisgarh region in central India. This article suggests that these workers' narratives show the transformation in practices of citizenship, resistance, and militancy in India over time. Such differences are essential in understanding phenomena like the resurgence of the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh.

In a 1982 review article, Theda Skocpol asks the question, “What makes peasants revolutionary?” She analyzes the conclusions of authors who endeavor to explain what leads peasants—a stereotypically powerless group—to engage in collective action that challenges the economic or political status quo. The above example suggests a useful paraphrase of the question: was Stathoula's case exceptional, and if not, what made a Greek working-class woman during the 1940s revolutionary?

This note reflects on the August 2012 miners' strike at Marikana, South Africa in light of a century long history of violence associated with worker actions in that country and elsewhere in the Global South. It suggests that the breakaway union's allegedly ‘illegal’ strike fits within a long tradition of radical worker activism in South Africa, which is best understood in light of anticolonial efforts to short-circuit the chronologies of imperial power. The Marikana strike, like anticolonial rebellions during the early twentieth century and, critically, white worker struggles following First World War, was an effort to speed up the process by which the value of workers’ lives and labor might be made equivalent to those in power.

This keynote address, delivered in December 2015 at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Association General Conference in Lima, Peru, refutes the standard trope of labor movement decline and provides evidence for the global rise and feminization of labor movements worldwide. Trade union women’s commitment to emancipatory, democratic worker education helped spur these changes. The origins and effects of two historical examples are detailed: the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers held in the United States annually from 1921 to 1938 and the first International Women’s Summer School of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) held in France in 1953. The latter experiment, attended by women labor leaders from 25 countries, energized the Women’s Committee of the ICFTU. It led to the adoption of “The Charter of Rights of Working Women” by the ICFTU in 1965 and helped make possible the election of Sharan Burrow and other women to top office in the International Trade Union Confederation. The address concludes with a discussion of what the history of trade union women’s education teaches about strengthening future labor movements.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Liberia was in the unusual position of being a colony with no metropole. Without military or financial support, the settlers’ control over their territory remained weak. Surrounding European empires preyed on this weakness, and Americo-Liberian rule was often at risk from coalitions of European forces and indigenous African resistance. From the early twentieth century, the political elite took on the concept of “development” as a central part of government policy in an attempt to gain political and economic control of the hinterland areas and stave off European incursions. This policy involved the extension and reinforcement of labor policies and practices that had developed through the nineteenth century as means to incorporate settlers and indigenous people into Liberian society. When these plans failed, huge swathes of territory were turned over to foreign commercial interests in an attempt to bolster Liberian claims to sovereignty. And after the Second World War, new policies of “community development” introduced by international agencies again tried to solve Liberia's “land and labor” problem through resettlement. At each stage developmentalist rationales were deployed in order to facilitate greater government control over the Liberian interior territory.

This essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the sepoy.

French Socialists currently appear less and less convinced of the relevance of rejecting today's consumption-oriented society and turn increasingly to more center-left models in order to refound their party. (Refoundation is one of the most frequently used terms within the party.) Therefore, it is instructive to go back to the eighteenth-century roots of socialism and note the way many of its founding theorists promoted the establishment of truly social communities set in a perfectly harmonious relationship to the natural environment.

As the intellectual debate was not confined within French borders at the time of the Enlightenment, this study will create a dialogue between those who argued that luxury was absolutely essential in a modern society (Mandeville, and later Malthus, whose views are echoed in the voices of contemporary right-wing politicians) and those who, on the contrary, advocated a return to a voluntary state of nature, which implied the rejection of material accumulation and social inequality (such as Rousseau and later William Godwin, whose concerns are nowadays echoed by the defenders of décroissance). This article also explores the most utopian propositions coming from objecteurs de croissance, individuals who side with the far left while adding their concern for the environment and emphasis on humane values.

Guatemala was already a disaster when a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake hit the country on February 4, 1976. Economic development based on low-wage large-scale capitalist agriculture for export and low wage industrial growth had not improved life for the majority of Guatemalans, who were and are among the poorest people in Latin America. To make matters worse and to protect wealth from the growing protests of the poor, national political power rested on legal and extra-legal state violence. Between the time when the Unites States engineered a coup against the reformist government in Guatemala in 1954 and February 4, 1976, state violence had taken the lives of 25,000 Guatemalans, a figure slightly larger than the approximately 21,000 killed in the 39 seconds of the 3 AM earthquake.

This essay considers the biomedical framing of labor in tropical Australia from the late-nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. This entails critical inquiry into racialized estimates of labor capacity or fitness, as well as skeptical examination of medical assumptions of risk and danger. Racial theories and medical conjectures have constituted flexible analytic toolkits that might adjust, adapt, and justify a variety of exploitative labor practices in Australia’s tropical north. Debates about coolie or indentured labor were never simply economic calculations: They also concerned notions of races and their proper places, and expressed particular moral sensibilities and medical fears. Thus labor history becomes entangled with histories of racial formation and of science and medicine

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

For a few years after its foundation in 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) attempted, energetically prompted by the Comintern, to work in solidarity with anticolonial movements in the British Empire. But after the Nazi victory in Germany the Comintern's principal concern was to defend the Soviet Union and the liberal democracies against the threat of fascism. British communists criticized the British Government for failing to defend the Empire against the threat from its imperial rivals. After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 they vigorously supported the British war effort, including the defense of Empire. This was not though simply a manifestation of chauvinism. British communists believed that imperialism was suffering a strategic defeat by “progressive” forces and that colonial freedom would follow the defeat of fascism. These chimerical notions were greatly strengthened by the allies' promises of postwar peace, prosperity and international cooperation. In the last year or so of war British communists were clearly worried that these promises would not be redeemed, but nevertheless supported British reassertion of power in such places as Greece, Burma and Malaya. For the great majority of British communists, these were secondary matters when seen in the context of Labour's election victory of 1945 and its promised program of social-imperialist reform.