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.

The carceral history of Rikers Island, which now houses nine of the New York City jails, begins with garbage and forced labor. The Municipal Farm on Rikers Island, operated by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, opened in 1884 and served as a “prison farm.” Penal farms were common at that time, but what was not common was the simultaneous use of the island as a landfill. Most of the landmass that now comprises Rikers was formed from the refuse of New Yorkers. As the amount of garbage grew the initially productive farm became plagued by rats and other pests—not to mention fetid smells and poor air quality. This history is felt today on the island, as there are shunts into the earth that spew sickening steam, a constant reminder of its origins.

The Working Pupils’ Association of High Schools was founded in 1960s’ Greece as an organization of working boys and girls who attended secondary evening schools after having finished their daily waged work. Acting simultaneously as a conventional union and as a collective that encouraged artistic activity, the association elaborated new meanings about the relation between work, education, and youth. The postwar period saw the rapid expansion of secondary schooling to the lower classes, which affected deeply both youth and the working class. However, significant attention has not yet been paid to pupils generally, let alone to those of the working class. Addressing this lacuna, this article suggests a new perspective on the relation between the histories of youth, class, political acculturation, and social change in the second half of the twentieth century.

In this essay, we address the educational program and experiences of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), as found in its camps, settlements, schools, and political training courses. One of the most active organized social movements in Brazil during the last thirty years, the MST combines political struggle with the organization of worker-controlled enterprises and educational opportunities for landless workers and their families. We begin with an excerpt from a report by one of us (Janaina Stronzake), which illustrates the ways in which the material conditions of an MST encampment led to a different kind of school, focused on the needs of students from the countryside.

From April 22–25, 1999, the Organization of American Historians held its ninety-second annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. The theme was “State and Society in North America: Processes of Social Power and Social Change.” More than seven hundred scholars were on the program, an impressive showing; and for Canadian historians, whose community is comparatively small, a source of envy. The participants were, of course, overwhelmingly American and US specialists, but many Canadian colleagues presented papers or attended, as did other international scholars, including Americanists based overseas. While most sessions were held at a downtown hotel, organizers made use of local cultural venues and historic sites. They scheduled a session on the Underground Railroad, for instance, at St. Lawrence Hall, site of the first meeting of the Colored Free Men in Canada and an antislavery lecture by Frederick Douglas.

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.

This article focuses on the consequences of twentieth-century developmentalism for labor practices in the Nigerien Sahel under French rule and in the postindependence period. It examines labor regime transformations at the desert's edge; the ways in which state-led developmentalism influenced labor relations; and gender disparities in the history of emancipation from slavery. Following the abolition of forced labor in 1946, the rhetoric of human investment was used to promote the “voluntary” participation of workers in colonial development initiatives. This continued under Niger's independent governments. Seyni Kountché’s dictatorship relabeled Niger “Development Society” and mobilized Nigeriens’ “voluntary” work in development projects. Concurrently, drought in the Sahel attracted unprecedented levels of international funding. In the Ader region this led to the establishment of a major antidesertification project that paid local labor on a food-for-work basis. Since most men migrated seasonally to West African cities, the majority of workers in the project's worksites were women who welcomed “project work” to avoid destitution. In the name of development, it continued to be possible to mobilize workers without remuneration beyond the cost of a meal.

This paper analyses the influence that manpower agencies have on hiring practices and employment in Kazakhstan's oil sector. While influenced by the literature on transition from planned to market economy, this article's main argument is rooted in the understanding that labor precarization is produced through transnational capitalist practices. The influx of foreign capital through the investments of transnational companies (TNCs) also transplanted into Kazakhstan's labor market their antilabor policies and practices. This welcomed the presence of a new, dedicated actor for the establishment and curation of labor relations, namely manpower agencies, especially in the oil-rich region of Atyrau. This article argues there, the rationale for the presence of manpower agencies and the absence of trade unions is directly linked to the activities of TNCs. Manpower agencies have a decisive role in making employment and labor increasingly precarious in the oil sector. Manpower agencies function as a disaggregation force in the oil industry. Their presence stimulates a race to the bottom among workers, who have no other option but to accept precarious, unsafe, and underpaid jobs. Against this backdrop, the paper also offers a peek into “industrial gossip,” gathered during fieldwork in the Atyrau region. This more anthropological side of the argument highlights how the world of manpower agencies helps TNCs thrive by creating an atomized workforce.

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)!

Ira Katznelson urges labor historians to respond to a crisis in their field by returning to political, institutional, and state-centered history. This state of affairs has come about, he and others tell us, because of the dual challenge of “new social movements” and then the decline of labor movements, the crisis of social democracy, and collapse of communist states. Labor history is in crisis, he concludes, because class no longer provides the best categories with which to describe the world and the working class is no longer the principal historical actor.

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.