From 1919 to 1923, Barcelona experienced unprecedented levels of social conflict. The growth of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had awakened the spectre of social revolution among the city's conservative classes, and a broad constellation of reactionary forces lined up against it, the Sindicatos Libres (free trade unions) being the most formidable among them. Created in 1919 by Catholic workers, the Sindicatos Libres were able to capitalize on the exhaustion that had set in among certain working-class groups who had grown wary of reckless strike action. Using violence to fight back against the CNT, the Libres could claim 175,000 members by mid-1922. They mobilized the religious, corporatist, and regionalist sentiments harboured by sectors of the city's workforce and, by adopting a modern repertoire of action, they bypassed the traditional aversion to mass mobilization that had characterized the Catholic labour movement and Spanish conservative parties until then. In many ways, the ideology and tactics of the Libres adumbrated fascism, but their success was short-lived. In late 1922, an upswing in strike action and an abatement of state repression allowed the CNT to recover at the expense of the Libres. This article explores the rise and fall of an organization the study of which has been neglected, situating it in a European context of political polarization whereby the traditional right attempted to modernize its tactics and adapt them to a rising challenge from the revolutionary left. It will also serve as a window through which to examine the complex relationship between workers’ trade union affiliations and their political and cultural identity.

Based on the author’s experience as one of the German translators of The Making, this article lays out its protracted and contradictory reception in Germany. When E.P. Thompson’s magnum opus was published fifty years ago, German scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain failed to take note of it for several years. The relatively muted reception in West Germany during the 1970s was marked by its dismissal as theory-lacking and “subjectivist”. Examining the contrasting contexts of postwar Britain, with its popular anti-fascist experience, and post-fascist West Germany helps to understand why Thompson’s “empirical idiom” of class history failed to strike a chord at the time with leading representatives of the new generation of “progressive” social historians in Germany and a broader reading public. It was only with the arrival of Alltagsgeschichte, feminist history, and, more generally, the cultural turn in humanities that The Making and its German translation became a canonical point of reference both in working-class history and the wider humanities. A brief epilogue discusses its lasting potential for a historical understanding of today’s processes of post-Cold War class formation and human rights struggles.

The article examines the debates at the Asian Socialist Conference's (ASC) inaugural gathering in Rangoon in January 1953, using a variety of sources, including the minutes of the conference meetings found in the Swedish Social Democratic Party archives. The focus is on the efforts of Asian socialists to define Asian socialism in terms of three broad subjects: international politics; domestic politics; and economic politics. Throughout, particular attention is accorded to the role played by understandings of European socialism. The argument is threefold: that socialism was central to the ASC project, prompting efforts to define Asian socialism; that these efforts invariably raised the fraught question of Asian socialism's relationship with European socialism; and that the stakes involved in Rangoon were not limited to Asian socialism, but also involved socialism's potential as a global movement.

Published in 1969, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s Captain Swing remains the sole national account of the so-called “Swing riots” that diffused throughout most of rural southern, central, and eastern England in the autumn and winter of 1830. Whilst much revisionist work has been published since, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s contention that Swing’s brutal judicial repression effectively ended the protests has remained essentially unchallenged. Through an archival re-examination of the resort to protest between the 1830 trials and December 1833, this paper contends that the received understanding that Swing was crushed is too simplistic. In some locales, Swing maintained its momentum, in others it revived. Swing also morphed into different forms, both real and phantasmagorical. But the intensity of protests did decline. By the autumn of 1833, protests were less frequent, now representing a fractured, isolated spatiality instead of a coherent protest campaign.

The period 1870–1880 represents an important phase in the history of social movements in Russia. Within that decade ideas and groups merged whose influence can be discerned in the events that preceded and those that followed the upheaval of 1917.

Among those groups one of the more interesting was the so-called Lavrists, or vperedovtzy, named after the publication “Vpered” (Forward), founded and edited by Peter Lavrov (1823–1900) and first published in Zurich, Switzerland, where volumes I and II were brought out in 1873 And 1874 respectively, and then in London, where volumes III, IV And V (the last-named not under the editorship of lavrov) as well as a bimonthly edition of “Vpered” were published during 1874–1877. In addition, the printing office of “Vpered” also produced several books and pamphlets.

Ende 1910 machte man sich in Wien Gedanken darüber, wie sich die Sozialdemokratie auf den dreißigsten Todestag von Karl Marx vorbereiten solle. Gustav Eckstein berichtete Karl Kautsky am 27. Dezember:

Für Freitag Abend bin ich zu einer „Marxisten-Konferenz” geladen, bei der die Situation besprochen werden soll, die sich aus der Freigabe von Marx' Schriften ergeben wird. Braun teilte mir mit, daß geplant sei, entweder eine internationale Aktion oder wenigstens eine der deutschen Marxisten zur Neuherausgabe von Marx' Schriften einzuleiten: und da Hilferding und ich jetzt gerade hier sind, soll Freitag eine Konferenz darüber stattfinden, an der Goldendach, Renner, Max Adler, Braun, Bauer, Hilferding u. ich teilnehmen sollen. Natürlich erwähnte ich nichts von Dietz' Plan und werde davon auch ohne Ihre Einwilligung nichts erwähnen.

This article will argue that scholars concerned with the nexus between socialism and nationalism have overlooked the work of Eric Hobsbawm, the foremost present-day Marxist historian and a key theorist of modern nationalism. The article will repair that neglect by providing the first systematic analysis of Hobsbawm's encounter with the national question. It will contend that Hobsbawm's work is a key site for those interested in exploring the clash between class-consciousness and national identity, and that his historical and political writing provides a unique window on the nexus between nationalism and socialism in the last half of the twentieth century. The article will also suggest that Hobsbawm's changing conception of the relationship between nationalism and socialism is crucial to an understanding of the shifts his politics have undergone in the last three decades or so.

This article argues that World War II played a very important, and generally underestimated role in the rise of Brazilian populism. It starts with an overview of recent trends in the debates on the use of the concept of populism in Brazil, with particular attention to works that stress the years from 1941 to 1945 as a critical juncture. Secondly, it explores the connections between war effort, changes in labor regulations, and workers’ political participation in different contexts. Finally, it summarizes how the economic and social effects produced by the involvement of Brazil in the War led to profound and accelerated changes in the nature of the regime of Getúlio Vargas and in the role of workers in Brazilian politics.

In common with many other countries, Australia has had, since 1920, a Communist Party, which is an obvious and continuing symbol of international reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Naturally enough the formation of this Communist Party and its subsequent history has attracted a degree of attention from historians and scholars of Communist movements and Australian politics. The impact of the Profintern, on the other hand, has been completely neglected. Even at the international level no full-scale study of the Profintern and its related trade-union organisations is yet available, and though one scholar has noticed that in Australia “the history of communism in the unions is […] separate from CPA political history”, the bases of this separation have been left relatively unexplored. This article seeks to examine Moscow's links with the Australian trade-union movement via the Profintern in the period 1920–35. It would seem that these links overshadowed the CPA as a “Communist” influence in the Australian context, at least for the first decade of the Comintern's existence. The separation of CPA history from the wider influence of Communism in the unions is discernible almost from the very start.

Havana's status as a colonial port shaped both its infrastructure needs and the patterns of labor recruitment and coercion used to build it. The port city's initial economic and political orientation was maritime, with capital and labor invested largely in defense and shipbuilding. By the nineteenth century, Cuba had become a plantation colony based on African enslavement, exporting increasing quantities of sugar to Europe and North America. Because the island was relatively underpopulated, workers for infrastructure projects and plantations had to be imported through global circuits of coerced labor, such as the transatlantic slave trade, the transportation of prisoners, and, in the 1800s, indentured workers from Europe, Mexico, or Asia. Cuban elites and colonial officials in charge of transportation projects experimented with different mixes of workers, who labored on the roads and railways under various degrees of coercion, but always within the socio-economic and cultural framework of a society based on the enslavement of people considered racially distinct. Thus, the indenture of white workers became a crucial supplement to other forms of labor coercion in the building of rail lines in the 1830s, but Cuban elites determined that these workers’ whiteness was too great a risk to the racial hierarchy of the Cuban labor market and therefore sought more racially distinct contract workers after 1840.

In many histories of Native Americans it seems that the original inhabitants of the Americas have become obscured in the national mythology of colonization. People who do not fit into the liberal capitalist notion of individualism and economic development simply vanish from the annals of history. Even histories focused specifically on Native Americans cover relatively little of Indian responses to capitalist development. Yet, in the Pacific north-west, the story is not written so simply; Native Americans responded creatively and eagerly to new economic systems through participation in wage labor and the development of business ventures. This response allowed indigenous people in the region to prosper while protecting culture and tradition.

Georges Lefebvre concluded his Preface to the 1957 edition of Buonarroti's famous history of Babeuf's conspiracy with a sort of challenge to historians, saying that the final word on it still remains to be said. Whether Lefebvre's summons to further research on the subject has been a cause of new studies cannot be answered. All that can be said is that historians have continued to lift the veil on some hitherto obscure aspects of this conspiracy. Evidence of this trend was produced at the International Colloquium of Stockholm on August 21, 1960, to commemorate Babeuf's birthday.1 What appeared to be comparatively new was the emphasis on the impact of Babouvism outside of France. This was shown in three papers, two on Germany and one on the Austrian Tyrol. The two on Germany2 dwell on the reporting of the movement in the German press. We are told that alongside the generally turgid and hostile accounts there were analyses of Babouvist ideas in Minerva, the review of Hamburg, drawn from Le Tribun du peuple and the dossiers of the Babouvist trial. This review ran as many as ten articles on Babeuf and Drouet, who was boosted into prominence because of his official standing. The third paper3 suggests the probability of Babouvist infiltration among the insurgent Tirolese peasants early in the nineteenth century. It has also been shown elsewhere that Babeuf's organization served as a model, both in structure and methods, for the Italian underground, Società dei Raggi, that reached out from Piedmont to Romagna with the object of uniting the peninsula.4