{"title":"Karl Marx and the Global History of the Civil War: The Slave Movement, Working-Class Struggle, and the American State within the World Market","authors":"M. Battistini","doi":"10.1017/S0147547921000089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547921000089","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay stitches together the fragments of Marx's work on the United States that are scattered in newspaper articles, letters, notes, in some digressions in his early writings, in his economic manuscripts and in Capital (1867). The main aim is to show that what we can call a “global history of the Civil War” emerges from his pen: a history that is global not simply in a geographical sense, that is, because it expands the European space beyond the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, but also because of the general meaning it takes on in the history of capitalism. The essay highlights how the Civil War opened the Marxian issue of emancipation, his vision of class struggle and his view of the working class, to the presence of a black proletariat that interacted with the struggle of the white working classes, the latter of which until then had been the main focus of his work. It also highlights how the different and disarticulated voices of labor – slave and free, black and white – on both sides of the Atlantic effected a revolutionary shift in the Civil War: interjecting a “revolutionary turn” into what we can call the “long constitutional history” of the political conflict between North and South that changed the economic and social shape of the nation. More importantly, the essay reconstructs what can be termed the “state moment,” which was entangled with the “long constitutional history” and the “revolutionary turn” of the Civil War. As the transnational calls for emancipation from slavery and wage labor impacted the transnational processes of accumulation of industrial capital, the American state became a player in the world market: its financial and fiscal policies became socially linked to the government of industrial capital. In this sense, as the essay underlines in the conclusion, the “global history of the Civil War” that Marx effectively drafted, outlined the theoretical and political hypothesis that formed the basis of his mature reflection in the pages of Capital: the “emancipation of labour” should be thought of as a global issue, “neither a local nor a national, but a social problem.”","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"1 1","pages":"158 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56986598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek – ADDENDUM","authors":"David Leupold","doi":"10.1017/s014754792100017x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s014754792100017x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"100 1","pages":"186 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56986870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ILW volume 100 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0147547921000156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547921000156","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"131 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56986784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gender, Race, and Migrant Labor in the “Domestic Frontier” of the Panama Canal Zone","authors":"Joan Flores-Villalobos","doi":"10.1017/S014754792100003X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S014754792100003X","url":null,"abstract":"The cover of Maid in Panama depicts a West Indian higgler as a “mammy.” Her skin is an exaggerated ink-black, her body is large, her face round, and she wears a servant's uniform, including headscarf and apron. The higgler walks across an open field carrying a tray of tropical fruits on her head, with a background of palm trees, a placid river, and fluffy clouds.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"99 1","pages":"96 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S014754792100003X","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56985900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ILW volume 99 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0147547921000053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547921000053","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"99 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0147547921000053","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56986282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"And the Virus Rages on: “Contingent” and “Essential” Workers in the Time of COVID-19","authors":"A. Orleck","doi":"10.1017/s0147547920000174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547920000174","url":null,"abstract":"“It affects your nerves, your mental state, your way of thinking—because you have to be cautious in everything you do now,” Rosie said. “It's like I'm risking my life for a dollar. It's twisted.” Rosie is an Amazon worker in New York City. She made these comments during the summer of 2020 after learning that a colleague in his twenties had recently died of COVID-19.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"99 1","pages":"1 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0147547920000174","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48295495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek","authors":"David Leupold","doi":"10.1017/S0147547920000228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547920000228","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper explores the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in forging urbanization “from below” in early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this paper draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia. Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of workers including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other. Transcending a purely historical analysis, the paper ultimately turns to the urban landscape of present-day Bishkek. There it argues that while the district built by Interhelpo corresponds today to an exiled site dislocated by the hegemonic ethno-national memory regime, its materiality harbors relicts of another future capable of mobilizing alternative narratives on the city and her socialist and multi-ethnic past.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"100 1","pages":"22 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0147547920000228","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42574629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Inoculations: The Social Politics of Time, Labor, and Public Good in COVID-America”","authors":"Jennifer L. Klein","doi":"10.1017/s0147547920000265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547920000265","url":null,"abstract":"“We are becoming a 24/7 workforce.” —Fair Workweek Initiative “I Can't Breathe” —Eric Garner, George Floyd, Manuel Ellis, Derrick Scott, Byron Williams, Vincente Villela, Ngozi Mbegu, Willie Ray Banks, James Brown… On May 1, 2020, Justa Barrios, a New York City home-care worker and labor activist, passed away from COVID-19. After working twenty-four-hour shifts for fourteen years, Barrios had injuries and compounding medical issues, including asthma, stomach difficulties, and heart problems. Her doctor determined that she could no longer work twenty-four-hour shifts. Yet when the home-care agency received a letter from the doctor requesting Barrios be assigned to eight-hour shifts, the agency dropped her. Barrios fought back. She found her voice in the “Ain't I a Woman?!” Campaign; comrades described her as a “fearless leader.” Stemming from an alliance among female immigrants and US-born garment, plastics, office, and home-care workers, via workers’ centers such as the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, this organizing effort has sought to end twenty-four-hour days—and the legally permissible practice of paying for only thirteen hours—in New York state through direct action, the courts, union arbitration, and state legislation prohibiting twenty-four -hour shifts. Women such as Justa Barros, Lai Yee Chan, Mei Kum Chu, Seferina Rosario, and Sileni Martinez see the “Aint I a Woman?!” Campaign as a “new women's movement fighting for control over our time, health, respect and payment.” As a cross-racial group, members chose to invoke Sojourner Truth, who tied together the causes of slavery abolition and women's rights, emancipation from coerced labor and from patriarchy, the dignity of women's labor and the dignity of release from work. But this legislation, which would seem so obviously humane and jarringly anachronistic, has been stalled in the New York legislature and ignored by Governor Andrew Cuomo for over a year.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"99 1","pages":"30 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s0147547920000265","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41447673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foxconn, Ciudad Juárez, and the Trials of Solidarity","authors":"G. Solis","doi":"10.1017/S0147547920000204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547920000204","url":null,"abstract":"In San Jeronimo, Chihuahua, on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, a beige monolith of placid architecture hovers over the newly reconstructed US-Mexico border wall. Looking like a mix between a prison and a city built entirely of suburban Walmarts, this is in fact Foxconn's largest assembly plant at the US-Mexico Border; a shrine of sorts to over fifty-five years of low-cost export manufacturing in the region. And in 2010, it was where a decade of labor struggle was about begin. On a cold night in February 2010, around three hundred night workers at Foxconn's San Jeronimo factory on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, anxiously waited for company buses to finally deliver them home after a long shift. Soon enough however, managers filed out of the factory to inform the workers that the due to technical issues, the buses were not coming. According to worker accounts, the managers explained that the best thing these workers could do was work an extra shift, and wait for the buses to arrive later in the morning. Realizing that they were essentially being held against their will at the remote factory, and perhaps fueled by recent lay-offs on the assembly line and consistent pressure to work extra shifts, anger erupted in the crowd. By the end of the night, workers had set fire to the cafeteria, smashed the managers’ dormitory windows, and collided more than once with security guards. Days later, despite Foxconn's assurance to the press that there would be no reprisal, around 75 night-shift workers were identified and fired from the company.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"99 1","pages":"47 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0147547920000204","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56985275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Essential Labor","authors":"Véronica Gago, Liz Mason-Deese","doi":"10.1017/S0147547920000186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547920000186","url":null,"abstract":"The pandemic exposes (and leaves us exposed to) the totality of capital; its most intricate and subterranean links come to light. The extractivist push and its relation to Indigenous genocide in the Amazon, as well as its direct effect on the financialization of land in cities’ poorest neighborhoods becomes apparent. It also becomes clear how the precarization of labor manages to extend working days in a way that relaunches the silent war that Marx saw condensed in its duration. At the same time, it highlights how tasks of reproduction are directly assembled with the so-called platform economy. From August 2019 to now, the Amazon experienced its largest fire in its history, and today clearcutting continues at full pace, while the e-commerce platform with the same name is one of the companies that has most profited from the pandemic, in what continues to be a literal catastrophe.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"99 1","pages":"24 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0147547920000186","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48234777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}