In 1944, more than eight million foreign forced laborers were employed in the German war economy inside the Reich. This essay investigates the origins, character, and effects of the employment of foreigners on the German war economy. The principle characteristic of this employment of foreigners was the contradiction between the economic interest in exploiting as many foreigners as possible and the ideological principles of National Socialism, which sought to protect the Volk from mixing with “foreign blood.” From this contradiction there developed a rigidly hierarchical racist system for the treatment of forced laborers. Without the use of foreign labor, the agricultural and industrial production of Germany would have collapsed in 1942 at the latest. The German war economy therefore had no choice but to depend on the employment of millions of forced laborers. The second part of this essay traces the history of the refusal to offer compensation to the former forced laborers from 1945 to 1999. Two factors are most important in explaining this refusal. First, the German government tried to represent forced labor as an atypical Nazi injustice and thus to avoid compensation. Second, the West, above all the United States, opposed allowing any payments to the states of the eastern bloc during the Cold War. With the reunification of Germany and the Two-Plus-Four Accord, these efforts and interests collapsed.

This paper examines the official discourses that shaped the parameters of everyday life and the reactions of socialist citizens to them in Hungary's first socialist city, Sztálinváros, during the 1950s. Concentrating especially on the regulation of working-class leisure, it argues that the authorities sought to frame social conflict in terms of a struggle between the civilized and the backward, the rural and the urban. In so doing it provides an insight into the nature of early state socialism as a project of cultural transformation.

This paper reflects on the ways in which public labor history and more populist forms of public history have intersected and/or diverged in Australia since the 1970s. By comparing various labor heritage programs and public history interpretation strategies at four redeveloped industrial heritage sites, it examines how both approaches have conceived and represented workers' history and the relationship between past and present, industrialization and deindustrialization. Drawing on the concepts of “nostalgia” and “nostophobia,” the paper suggests that in Australia, labor history/heritage and public history are fundamentally at odds as a result of different political and economic imperatives and the recognition given to workers' collective traditions.

This paper aims to examine the complicated processes and dynamics of rural migrant workers' occupation choice in post-Mao China among a specific migrant population, the bangbang (porters or carriers) in the city of Chongqing in southwest China. By employing ethnographic data from my year-long anthropological field research among bangbang and following the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this paper explores the question of whether neoliberalism alone deliberately and vehemently transforms these laborers into self-reliant subjects. It argues that for rural migrants, the discourse on ziyou (freedom), as promoted by the state, plays a significant role in facilitating the migrants' subject formation, transforming them into self-reliant and enterprising laborers even as it makes them vulnerable to fierce exploitation. At the same time, bangbang turn this neoliberal rationality around and use it in their struggle for the security and aid refused to them by the state because it externalizes the “technologies of the self.” Bangbang internalize neoliberal techniques of governance that are framed as ziyou (freedom), not from social responsibility or patriotism but from disappointment with and distrust of the state.

Mobility and wage labor are two key variables that help to explain some of the complexities of the labor history of colonial Eritrea. Focusing on the initial period of Italian colonization, between the 1880s and 1920s, this article analyzes the relationship between the two above-mentioned variables. Based on previously unexplored archival sources and documents, the authors conclude that wage labor did contribute to the mobility of workers throughout the region (and not vice versa). In the period under consideration, Eritrea did not become a settler colony, despite Italy's initial efforts to import a national labor force. Instead, through a mix of capital investments in construction and transport, and increasing military recruitment, the Italian regime contributed significantly to an increase in free wage labor in the region. Within a year of Italy's 1911 invasion of Libya, it needed to reinforce its colonial army. From 1912 onward, in return for wages, tens of thousands of Eritreans entered the Italian colonial army to fight on the Libyan front. This military employment left voids in the local labor market, which were filled by people from neighboring countries, particularly Ethiopians and Yemenis. A relationship thus developed and continued between mobility and wage labor.

This article focuses on the various examples of anarchist violence, from terrorist action in the 1890s to anonymous bombs of the first decade of the twentieth century; from the tyranny of the Star pistol in the 1920s to the uprisings and revolutionary terror of the Second Republic and the Civil War. What follows is a story that is contradictory, heroic, and menacing.

At a moment when labor history risks becoming an elegy for dashed hopes, I wish to tell a cautionary tale of missed opportunities and to counsel an alteration in intellectual focus. Not just a profound shift in the political climate, East and West, but a sustained assault on the operational premises of our craft from within has raised issues more challenging than those encompassed by the usual range of inquiries devoted to improving methods, incorporating neglected topics, and critiquing extant literatures.Not surprisingly, there has been a burst of historiographical stock-takings of late. When fields are in trouble, their practitioners are tempted to become planners. I fully agree with William Sewell's orienting judgment (in one of the most thoughtful of these recent considerations) that labor history cannot be judged to be in a state of scholarly crisis, even if the field has lost its unitary theoretical grounding. After all, assessed by the standards of the craft of history, more excellent work is being done now than ever before. Read as an empirical genre, irrespective of trends in the world or normative commitments, labor history has never been better, more diverse, or asrichly textured. Impressively, it is the site of important epistemological debates. Further, labor history has extended its domain to include subjects such as drink, crime, leisure, sexuality, and the family it once either ignored or relegated to the periphery of its concerns. Like Sewell, however, I am struck by labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose. Engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas.

Street vendors in Mexico and day laborers in the United States, both groups of informal workers who labor in public space, face formidable structural obstacles to securing their rights as workers. Despite their apparent vulnerability, these informal workers have built perhaps the most powerful informal worker organizations in their countries. In this article, we explore and explain to the extent possible the sources, forms, and limits of this unexpected power. We explore organizational and strategic commonalities as well as differences and seek to explain both.

This article analyzes the origins and impact of one of the most powerful antiunion weapons used by American employers during the past four decades: the right to use and threaten to use permanent replacement workers during economic strikes. It examines the policy debate over replacements in the 1930s and 1940s, the increasing use of permanent replacements in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of a powerful and sophisticated “strike management industry,” and the unsuccessful efforts of organized labor and its political allies to amend the National Labor Relations Act to outlaw permanent replacements. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship between the “striker replacement doctrine” and declining strike levels in the postwar decades.

Was internationalism a grand failure? Was it practiced even bt those who proclaimed it? Beyond the international congresses with their affirmations of working-class solidarity, the meaning of internationalism seems to unravel. Marx called for international solidarity precisely because socialist activists operated, conceptually and practically, within a world of nationstates. Modern nationalism and the internationalism of workers's movements at best can be considered “twins, developing side by side in an uneasy relationship since 1830s”. While an international economy and division of labor surely existed before World War I, workers' internationalism seemed more a rhetorical response to modern nationalism than a pragmatic response to an international economy.

In its morning edition of April 22, 1900, Diario de la Marina examined figures released from the 1899 census, nothing what it considered to be its most important feature: One-third of population was colored. The columnist elaborated that this situation represented an obvious “danger” for “the white race” living in the island and claimed that the only way to avert a future catastrophe was to further stimulate white immigration to Cuba.

The paper discusses historical lessons offered by the experience of two leftwing movements, the pre-1948 Palestinian Communist Party, and the post-1948 Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen). The focus of discussion is the relationship between class and nation as principles of organization.

The Palestinian Communist Party was shaped by forces that shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: British rule, Zionist ideology and settlement practices, and Arab nationalism. At intensified conflict periods it was torn apart by the pressures of competing nationalisms. By the end of the period, its factions agreed on one principle: the need to treat members of both national groups equally, whether as individuals or as groups entitled to self-determination. This position was rejected by both national movements as incompatible with their quest for control.

In the post-1948 period, Matzpen epitomized the radical critique of Zionism. It was the clearest voice speaking against the 1967 occupation and for restoration of Palestinian rights. However, it never moved beyond the political margins, and its organization failed to provide members with a sustainable mode of activism. It was replaced by a new mode, mobilizing people around specific issues instead of presenting an overall program.

The paper concludes with suggestions on how the Left may use these lessons to develop a strategy to focus on the quest for social justice and human rights.

This article explores how the prolonged and erosive deindustrialization in China's struggling state-owned enterprises (SOE), an inevitable result of the neoliberal shift in industrialization policy from socialist import-substitution industrialization to globalized export-oriented industrialization, has changed workers’ perceptions of themselves and their work. Based on in-depth interviews with workers and participant observation in one enterprise—Nanfang Steel—this study describes how what it means to be a worker has changed over two generations of SOE workers. The “glorious” identity of the worker, promoted by the state during the Maoist era, and emphatically proclaimed by elder workers despite its internal limitations and contradictions, has been dismantled by the neoliberal reform and has instead metamorphosed into a newly developed and “stigma-laden” cultural identity created by contemporary hegemonic discourse and then bitterly internalized by currently employed younger workers.

This essay aims to describe changes in socioeconomic conditions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that resulted, on the one hand, from a transformation of concepts about property and, on the other hand, as a result of the emergence of a consumer society under an avowedly socialist regime. This project turned out to be far more complicated than foreseen, so that this essay should be viewed as a sketch of work in progress. If I merely had subscribed to the canons of conventional communist sociology, such changes as occurred could be traced to the abolition of the old class structures.Kurt Lungwitz, Über die Klassenstruktur in der DDR. Eine sozialökonomisch-statistische Untersuchung (Berlin, GDR, 1962). However, by the 1970s and 1980s new processes of sociocultural differentiation cast doubt on this analysis even in the GDR.Manfred Lötzsch and Joachim Freitag, “Sozialstruktur und soziale Mobilität,” in Jahrbuch für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Berlin 1981); and Artur Meier, “Abschied von der sozialistischen Ständegesellschaft,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 16–17 (1990):3–14. Moreover, in recent analyses we are faced with contradictory assessments: Some treat the changing class structure as resulting in homogen-ization, equalization, or leveling; others see it as reproducing old social differences, albeit from a different type of socioeconomic base. Unlike the former bourgeois elite, which was formed in relationship to capital, the new socialist elite or nomenklatura was constituted by its access to political power through which it in turn obtained resources and privileges.

The Durham Miners Gala is an annual event at which the associated branches of the Durham Miners Association carry their banners to a rally held in the city of Durham. The imagery displayed on those banners is representative of the class struggle to create a trade union that would represent and protect individuals and communities against the vagaries of the unbridled capitalism of the nineteenth century. In this way a tradition (and culture) was created not by social or political elites, but developed from ground level to counteract attempts to subsume them into a dominant ideology that saw them as little more than serfs.