The proletarians have lost their innocence. A conservative sociologist once described wage labourers as follows:

The worker is personally free, i.e. his physical and spiritual-moral powers are completely at his own disposal. […] He has no property, i.e. he has no exclusive material power over capital as a secure basis with relative permanency. […] He has neither a stock of consumer goods that enable him to live, nor permanent interests of capital. […] He lives in economic circumstances in which means of subsistence can be obtained only through economic returns. […] He is forced to offer personal capacities with an economic exchange value in return for means of subsistence.

The paper centers on the question of how widespread was the impact of the lively discussion of housing and household reform during the Weimar Republic. Therefore the focus is on the experiences of working-class women. Against the background of material conditions in proletarian households, it analyzes which norms and standards concretely shaped working women's everyday housework in the urban working-class milieu in the 1920s, and how these norms and standards arose. The paper demonstrates the substantial reservations and resistance with which even better-off working women approached all efforts at rationalizing their housework in the 1920s. They wanted better living conditions and new household appliances, but the vast majority could not afford both. The specific norms and standards against which a “good” housewife was measured, norms and standards which corresponded more to the “old” model of the “economical, clean and tidy” housewife, also blocked acceptance, however.

Formed as an anti-communist labour international, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) nevertheless experienced internal conflict over the appropriate approach to communism. The different perspectives of the two largest affiliates, the British TUC and the American AFL-CIO, caused disharmony and ultimately near organizational paralysis until it forced a change of leadership. Caught between these rival positions, the ICFTU secretariat's relations with the AFL-CIO were initially the most strained, but as the International extended its activity in Africa, in a bid to outflank communist organization among labour, relations with the TUC also deteriorated over the correct stance on nationalism and colonialism.

The article investigates relations between workers and intellectuals in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party in St Petersburg and the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. It commences with a background examination of the social position and traditions of the intelligentsia in each country and the emergence of a stratum of so-called “conscious” workers. The position of workers in each party is then analysed, especially with respect to leadership, and the nature of tensions between workers and intellectuals explored. The investigation demonstrates that workers acquiesced in their subordination to a greater degree in Shanghai than in St Petersburg, and this and other differences are traced back to historical and cultural context. In conclusion, the implications of contextual differences are explored in order to suggest why the intelligentsia in the People's Republic of China (PRC) attracted greater odium from the party-state than its counterpart in the Soviet Union.

Since 1917, the European social democratic movement has given fulsome support to Zionism. The article examines the ideological basis on which Zionism and, in particular, Labour Zionism gained, from 1917, the backing of social democratic parties and prominent socialists. It argues that Labour Zionism's appeal to socialists derived from the notion of “positive colonialism”. In the 1930s, as the number of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution increased considerably, social democratic pro-Zionism also came to be sustained by the fear that the resettlement of Jews in Europe would strengthen anti-Semitism and the extreme right.

This article argues that historians have underestimated the importance and complexity of Marxists' engagement with feminism during the introduction of their doctrine into the French socialist movement before the First World War. It examines the ideological discourse of the Parti Ouvrier Français, the embodiment of Marxism in France from 1882 to 1905, in order to reveal the ambiguities and contradictions of the French Marxists' approach to the “woman question” – seeking to explicate the puzzling coincidence in the movement's rhetoric of a firmly feminist commitment to women's rights with an equally intransigent hostility to organized feminism.

In the history and historiography of labour servitude, the ideology of modernity and progress looms large. Thus it was with bitter irony that a British officer described the miserable condition of a labourer in late nineteenth-century colonial India: “Steam, the great civilizer, has not done much for this man, although the railroad runs within a few hundred yards of his door.” The persistence of the miserably poor existence was bad enough, but truly appalling was the fact that the introduction of modern industry had not set the labourer free. The poor labourers, or kamias as they were called locally, had seen modernity whizz past them without carrying them along in its journey to progress and freedom.

Throughout the long debate on whether the workers' movement of Imperial Germany was predominantly radical or reformist in nature, little attention has been paid to attitudes at the grass-roots level. It is argued here that during the years of 1905–1906, when all Europe was witnessing turmoil and an intensification of social conflict, the German Social Democratic leadership deliberately put the radicalism of the masses to the test. The Dresden suffrage demonstrations of December 1905 were the first to end in violent clashes between participants and police. However, contrary to what has been written to date on this incident and those similar to it, the great majority of the demonstrators were not militant. But they did exhibit a remarkable readiness to engage in civil disobedience, which the Social Democrats could use to press the party's political aims.

The “Brenner Debate” launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about “agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe”. Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and “commercial change” into the equation. Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.

Labour history in Latin America has, to a great degree, followed the models set by the rich historiography in Europe and North America. Other than a justifiable concern with the peculiarities in production for export of primary goods, much of the Latin American historiography suggests that the process of labour formation was rather similar to that of the North Atlantic economies, only lagging behind, as did industrialization in this region of the world. However, this was not the case. The export orientation of the mining industry and its peripheral location in the world economy introduced certain modifications not found in the North Atlantic economies. The vagaries of the mining industry, exacerbated by the severe swings in raw material prices, created conditions which hindered proletarianization and modified the consciousness of the mine workers.

The sugar workers of large-scale capitalist plantations in the Caribbean are familiar figures in social history. As portrayed in Sidney Mintz's landmark research in southern Puerto Rico, sugar workers are manifest rural proletarians: landless wage labourers exploited by “land-and-factory combines”. In Mintz's studies, Puerto Rican sugar workers became the classic case of modern rural proletarians. Such rural proletarians are the dichotomous opposite of peasants: hence given rural populations are either peasants or rural proletarians.

The year 1995 marked the centenary of the exploitation of a 400 squarekilometre tract in the Indian province of Bihar known as the Jharia coalfield. From 1895, when rail lines entered the region, until the end of the World War I, coal output in India increased tenfold and the size of the mines' workforce fivefold. By 1907 Jharia was yielding half of India's output. One of its oldest mines was Khas Jharia, which worked a 260-feet deep source. Thirty-four years after it opened, its surface had merged with the outskirts of Jharia township and restrictions were imposed on the dimensions of its galleries. Despite these, Khas Jharia's pillars collapsed on 8 November 1930 causing an 18-feet deep subsidence and widespread destruction. This incident was the proximate cause of an underground fire which rages to this day.