This Special Issue brings together scholars working in a variety of contexts to explore the concepts of solidarity and socialist internationalism as a mass phenomenon. While recent scholarship has begun to document linkages between the socialist and (post)colonial world during the Cold War, most of this work has eschewed a focus on the mass, social experience of internationalism, instead emphasizing the transformative role played by small groups of mobile elites. But if the direct experience of socialist internationalism was limited to a privileged few, how then was it experienced by the majority, for whom actual travel outside of their state was a distant possibility? This issue explores how socialist internationalism and its attendant practices of solidarity functioned within and between socialist societies. Where it does take border-transcending groups as its subject, it explores the socio-historical, everyday implications of this transnational story. For much of the Cold War, state and party-led practices of internationalism were a central component of everyday life, but little is known about these practices as they manifested on the ground. To shed light on this, this Special Issue explores how depictions of solidarity manifested in mass culture; how everyday practices emerged out of socialist internationalism and anti-imperialism; and how institutions that sought to bridge gaps between societies through solidarity emerged and then transformed or disappeared after 1989.

Narratives about indigenous labour in the pearl fisheries of the Caribbean, widely disseminated across the Atlantic world since the sixteenth century by Castilian chroniclers, have significantly shaped historiography. These accounts have reinforced a singular narrative about labour within pearl fisheries that overlooks this work's spatial and temporal changes in sea depths. This article examines and reconstructs the labour practices of workers in the pearl fisheries on the islands of Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche, as well as the coast of Cabo de la Vela and Riohacha, highlighting their temporal and spatial transformations. Additionally, it analyses the coexistence of various forms of coerced labour within this context.

While scholarship on “women's liberation” under historically existing socialism focuses on heroic women making inroads into male-dominated domains, this article explores a previously overlooked group of women in socialist China. Known as jiashu in Chinese, these women are the female dependents (wives, mothers, and in-laws) of both male and female employees in a workplace. Specifically, it centers on the experiences of the jiashu of textile workers in the city of Zhengzhou from 1949 to 1962. It argues that, despite being portrayed as “parasitizing” off formal workers, jiashu performed a wide range of work, both paid and unpaid, inside and outside the household. Similar to their counterparts under capitalism and other state-socialist regimes, these Chinese women's unpaid domestic work sustained the daily and generational reproduction of the labor force and was thus essential to industrial accumulation. Moreover, jiashu also worked on the shopfloor and in collectivized service facilities as paid laborers. Such remunerated work also subsidized accumulation, and the resistance from these women contributed to the eventual collapse of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This research advances the field in two ways. First, it expands theories about the relationship between women's work, social reproduction, and capital accumulation to include work that is both reproductive in nature and remunerated – a previously understudied form of labor. Second, while existing literature focuses on structural analysis and explains why women's work is functional to accumulation, this study gives equal attention to women's agency, showing how interactions between the two shaped historical trajectories.

This article investigates the solidarity campaigns supporting refugees from the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) in post-war Czechoslovakia and the emerging German Democratic Republic. Framed as an important bridge between the interwar and later Cold War forms of socialist internationalism, this case sheds light on its transitory character, revealing the narrative shift from anti-fascist to anti-imperialist contexts and the increasingly institutionalized and ritualized solidarity. Thus, not only was practising solidarity already an integral part of post-war socialist regimes, but it also served a variety of functions, contributing to the legitimization and identity of the Eastern bloc. Based on archival documents and press, the article uncovers the deployment of analogical institutional structures employed by both states, thus opening up the sphere of interaction with their citizens, mobilized to become involved in various ways. The two countries, however, departed from different positions, dealing with opposing legacies of the wartime experience, which influenced the motivations employed in their campaigns. Entangled in discourses of guilt, heroism, and victimhood, yet aligned under the proclaimed values of socialist brotherhood and anti-fascism, building internationalist solidarity in both countries worked alongside and even boosted attempts to overcome the obstacle of the Nazi past, both internally and in their mutual relationship. This article thus contributes to a better understanding of how internationalist solidarity functioned as a platform to build bridges – not only towards the “South”, but also within the Eastern bloc.

This article examines the removal of children from factories and their integration into the school system in the early nineteenth century, using decommodification as a conceptual framework. The Swiss canton of Aargau serves as a case study – a region where the textile industry flourished and a liberal government came to power after the July Revolution, subsequently enforcing compulsory education. Through a nuanced exploration of diverse sources, the article argues that decommodification was a deeply contentious process marked by conflicts between working-class families, factory owners, the state, and the church. Simultaneously, these conflicts unleashed dynamic forces that coded working-class childhood in terms of age and gender. It is this transformational power that underscores the interpretative potential of decommodification as a constructive process of Vergesellschaftung (sociation). Beyond simply freeing children from labour obligations, the prohibition of factory work reintegrated them intricately into the social fabric of the economy.

The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed across the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, women's place was at home, not in factories. On an economic note, concerns arose over women's lower wages displacing men from jobs. This research delves into a case study of a workers’ claim aimed against women. It aims to illuminate the interplay of social demands and gender dynamics in labour history and business operations. Using as a case study a strike among male workers at the Amatller chocolate factory in May 1890, it seeks insights into gender complexities and women's challenges when joining the workforce. Male factory workers sought better conditions but directed their frustrations at women, influenced by prevailing social discourse. Women joined the factory, but portraying them as victors would be an oversimplification. Their presence was restricted, confined to manual tasks, with few opportunities for advancement.

In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, “People Will Always Need Coal”, to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to “be a miner”. This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions between the material realities of masculinity, class, and culture within Britain's coalfields in the period 1975–1983. A critical reading of the film is complemented by archival research and oral testimony drawn from interviews with 96 former miners and their families. At a time when the industry was positioning itself as an employer with a long-term future, mining was presented on screen as a modern masculine occupation that was far removed from the dominant imagery of coal for much of the twentieth century. The National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) victories in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the drafting of a Government Plan for Coal, and rising living standards, created a short period of optimism before the cataclysmic closures of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when masculinity in the coalfields was being reproduced, modified, contested, and subverted. The years 1975–1983 offer valuable insight into such masculinity and the ways it was mediated and challenged through work, the domestic sphere, leisure, and popular culture.

The Soviet campaign in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Vietnam War saturated Soviet public culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the longest solidarity action in Soviet history and the first to reach mass television audiences. This article examines the production and reception of a televised documentary film about the Vietnam War made by Konstantin Simonov – a celebrity writer who played a crucial role in Soviet culture during World War II, and then, in the post-war period, in the struggle to come to terms with terrible truths about Stalinism and the chaos and trauma that war had rendered. Simonov's film presented the Vietnam War in lyrical rather than analytical terms, calling upon viewers to draw connections between the suffering of the Vietnamese and the Soviet wartime experience and to enact their solidarity with the Vietnamese in terms of feeling. The film proposes a solidarity of pain and an understanding of war and wartime suffering as elemental and overwhelming. In dozens of letters to Simonov, we find an understanding and appreciation of this vision, which decentres Vietnam and instead sends viewers on a journey back to Soviet history and trauma.

Focusing on the winter quartering of Kurdish nomadic tribes among peasant villages, this article discusses the patterns of Kurdish nomadism and nomad–peasant relations in the Ottoman sanjaks of Muş, Bayezid, and Van during the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the political structure of these regions and the requirements of animal husbandry among the nomads not only created a distinct pattern of nomadism among the Kurdish tribes, but also led to the polarization of relations between nomads and peasants. Moreover, the article observes how nomad–settled, tribe–peasant relations in these regions evolved as a result of the gradual sedentarization of the pastoral nomads and related changes in their subsistence economies starting from the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, this article provides a background for a better understanding of the intercommunal tensions and conflicts over land in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By tracing mentions of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary “Plan”, and his disciples (the “Spencean Philanthropists”) in digitized collections of English-language Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and US-American newspapers in the 1790s–1840s, this article explores the dissemination of the ideas and militancy inspired by Spence (“Spenceanism”) across the British Empire and the United States. By applying Digital Humanities methods to investigate British radical history from a transnational perspective, the global reception of Spenceanism is reconstructed by examining and comparing a corpus of 275 newspaper articles through text-mining methods such as keyword analysis, co-occurrences, and sentiment analysis. These methods enable the identification of key themes in references to Spenceanism and advance hypotheses concerning both their geographical and chronological distribution: not only when and where Spence and the Spenceans were alluded to and commented upon, but also how a newspaper's geographical location may have impacted its rhetoric in a specific year and historical context. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article contributes new insights regarding the global circulation of radical ideas across the nineteenth-century English-reading world.

Theories about the impact of digital technology on society and the development of capitalism and debates about the influence of digital information technologies on the future of work have been abundant since the end of the twentieth century. Most of the academic debate has taken place outside labour history, leaving the actual effects of digital technologies on human work and labour relations often overlooked. Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation focuses precisely on these effects, and as such provides a good opportunity to engage with these debates from a labour history perspective. This Review Dossier includes four comments on Altenried's book, by Bridget Kenny, Nico Pizzolato, Görkem Akgöz, and Greg Downey, to which the author responds. The contributors focus on different aspects of The Digital Factory depending on their own perspective on recent developments in the digital economy in the larger context of global capitalism.

In the early 1970s, the plight of a charismatic Black American communist and philosophy professor Angela Davis, put on trial in the United States for her alleged involvement in a courtroom shootout in California, galvanized international public opinion. A massive publicity campaign in support of Angela Davis resonated across the globe and drew in millions of volunteers and sympathizers. The nations of the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, were particularly active in rallying their citizens in defense of a jailed American radical. In 1970–1972, Davis became a household name throughout the Soviet Union (but also in East Germany, Cuba, Poland, and other socialist nations). The “Free Angela Davis” campaign was unprecedented in scope and left a lasting mark on the collective memory of the citizens of the Soviet Union and its socialist satellites. Such was the impact of this propaganda juggernaut that decades later the image of Angela Davis remained current as a pop-cultural phenomenon across the former Soviet spaces and a symbol of unrealized and often conflicting aspirations towards freedom.

This article explores peasant women’s labour activism in 1890s Hungary, in the southeastern part of the Habsburg Empire, where repeated harvesters’ strikes and peasant uprisings took place during the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, making it the first centre of agrarian workers’ socialist organizing in Hungary. Informed by a more inclusive approach to women’s activist histories and subaltern studies, this article develops a new perspective on the periodization and geography of the international and Hungarian history of women’s social movements, to contribute to the historiographies of peasant women’s labour activism in the Eastern European countryside.

This comment on Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication of labour and labour relations for reconfigured class relations and resistance and argues that the differentiated social relations across spatial and material contexts ask for a theorization of the conjunctural nature of these relations.

The history of Soviet “rights defenders” is seemingly well known. Emerging in the 1960s in response to fears of a creeping re-Stalinization, the rights movement was part of the broader dissident milieu that coalesced in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Drawing on new documents from the Ukrainian KGB, this article broadens the canon of what we consider “Soviet rights talk” by focusing on a group completely ignored in the existing history of Soviet rights defenders: African students. As the article demonstrates, Soviet citizens were not the only people to draw on a discursive repertoire of civil and universal rights to articulate their demands against the Soviet state. By closely examining the letters and petitions activists produced, it becomes clear that African students’ language of rights grew alongside and, in many respects, pre-empted the Soviet rights movement. The article concludes by considering why, despite sharing the same discursive and physical spaces, neither African nor Soviet rights defenders succeeded in building bridges between their respective islands of protest. Examining this failure to build meaningful solidarities demonstrates the value of pursuing the social history of internationalism; it is only in the banality of the everyday that the capacity for Soviet internationalism to create unanticipated frictions and conflicts reveals itself.

This essay introduces a review dossier dedicated to Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts in and beyond Europe (London, 2023). The dossier features comments by four historians – Constance Bantman, Georgina Brewis, Nicole Robertson, and Mark Hurst – as well as a response from Laqua himself. Laqua's book provides a framework for studying different forms of transnational activism in connection to one another.

People's Solidarity (Volkssolidarität) is an East German organization founded in Dresden, Saxony, in 1945. It is primarily known for its activities dedicated to the care of older people. However, in the early 1950s, members of People's Solidarity were also involved in international solidarity campaigns for Greece, North Korea, and Vietnam. This article examines this little-known chapter of the organization's past. It reveals an unusual willingness among older East Germans both to donate money for the benefit of people in distant countries, and to relate to their suffering regardless of the (post-war) hardships faced at home. As the example of People's Solidarity shows, internationalism to some extent informed the roots of everyday, voluntary care practices under socialist rule in East Germany.

Rapid technological development means that the ground on which recent academic studies and public debates about the future of work organisation are based is shifting too rapidly for predictions to be credible. Organisational studies scholars have provided a counterpoint to this futuristic, speculative debate about the world of tomorrow with studies that contextualise seemingly new trends within a longer history of industrial capitalism. In this article, using Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) as a starting point, I further explore the historical contextualisation of two aspects of platform capitalism: its de-spatialisation and its use of “autonomy”.

The article examines the role of memory in Yugoslav exchanges with the postcolonial world, focusing on the agency of Yugoslav war veterans and their involvement with Algeria. During decolonization, Yugoslav institutions and associations stood in solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements. Former Partisans were critical agents of Yugoslav internationalism, and the memory of the People's Liberation War (Narodnooslobodilački rat, NOR), which dominated the Yugoslav memory culture, played a connecting role in this context. The article focuses on the transnational aspect of the Yugoslav war memory, an intrinsically everyday phenomenon, exploring its exportation and internationalization. Applying the transnational memory framework to relations between Yugoslav Partisans and Algerian mujahideen, the article illuminates the twofold role of memory: as narratives of the shared past, and as the transfer of knowledge in war commemoration. Firstly, Yugoslav veterans identified with the anti-colonial struggle as comparable to their own. This was not only an official political discourse, but was also shared by Yugoslav society at large. Secondly, they engaged in transfers of knowledge in memory work, providing expertise and training to Algerian veterans. The People's Liberation War memory constituted a key aspect of everyday life in Yugoslav state socialism and veterans internationalized it, adding the dimension of personal war memory. The exchanges of knowledge illuminate the transfer from the discursive level of the shared past to the sphere of commemorative policies and practices that reshaped cultures of war remembrance. The article represents a starting point of a global history of the Yugoslav revolution and a transnational history of memory from the perspective of anti-colonial solidarities.

Chapter Four of Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders, on “Class, Revolution and Social Justice”, opens stimulating avenues for reflection with its cross-partisan approach, over an ambitious chronological span – from the post-1848 wave of revolutionary exile to the contemporary global justice movement. From the perspective of a historian of pre-1914 transnational anarchism, this brief review essay considers three prominent aspects of this chapter: historiographic perspectives on socialist activisms; the modalities of transnational activism; and borders and boundaries.