The International Labour Movement during and between the Two World Wars. Some starting points for a research project in transnational labour history

Contemporary European History, 2001

The activities of the international trades union movement extend far beyond the narrow confines of collective bargaining. They play a crucial, if less public, role in the conduct of international relations. Union organisations are, in virtually every nation, a major political force. Their leaders are intimately involved in political parties and frequently assume high governmental offices. Unions provide the backbone of innumerable socialist, social democratic and communist parties. Throughout their histories, the trades unions of Europe and North America have participated in the political process. In the Third World their role has been even more political. During the nationalist campaigns for independence the unions provided an alternative for nationalist activities when political parties were banned. Scores of Third World leaders (among them Gandhi, Toure, Mboya and many others) rose to power through the vehicle of their national unions. Inevitably, this close relationship between unions and the political process has attracted the attention of competing intelligence services seeking to influence the political affairs of those nations in which the unions are active. One of the major battlegrounds of the Cold War has been the international union movement. As the unions seek to establish a role in the face of the new demands of the multinational corporations and the strong economic challenges posed to unions by the spread of free trades unionism in Eastern Europe, they have sought to build new institutions of international labour cooperation. This book describes the development of the international trades union movement in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America and the competing political influences which played a major part in this process.

A background to the election of January 25, 2015

The Internationalisation of the Labour Question. Ideological Antagonism, Workers' Movements and the ILO since 1919, 2020

The text address and analyse the attitudes and difficulties of the global socialist movement in the 1920s, to reach an understanding and policy on the colonial question. Emphasis is on the deliberations of the LSI Colonial Commission to assess and reach a standpoint on colonialism and imperialism. The text is based on archival sources located in the LSI archive at IISH, Amsterdam, and the Comintern Archive, Moscow.

forthcoming in Global Networks 2018

Why did domestic anticommunism convulse the United States of America during the early Cold War but barely ripple in the United Kingdom? Contemporaries and historians have puzzled over the dramatic difference in domestic politics between the USA and the UK, given the countries' broad alignment on foreign policy toward Communism and the Soviet Union in that era. This article reflects upon the role played by trade unions in the USA and the UK in the development of each country's culture and politics of anticommunism during the interwar years. Trade unions were key sites of Communist organizing, and also of anticommunism, in both the USA and the UK, but their respective labor movements developed distinctively different political approaches to domestic and international communism. Comparing labor anticommunist politics in the interwar years helps explain sharp divergences in the politics of anticommunism in the USA and the UK during the Cold War.

The labour aristocracy and imperialism: Part 1-6, 2001

This publication is an edited and extended version of a talk given by DAVID YAFFE to the Free University of Turkey in Zurich on 13 May 2001. It was published over six issues of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! It argues that Capitalism is failing the vast majority of humanity: 1.3bn of the world's population live in absolute poverty. Inequalities are rapidly widening between rich and poor nations and within all nations whether rich or poor. Britain has registered the greatest inequalities in wage levels since statistics began in 1886. Yet within imperialist countries like Britain, no political party has so far arisen to represent the interests of the growing numbers of poor working class people. There are few signs, as yet, of an organised, coherent anti-capitalist movement or the revival of the socialist movement. Indeed, leading up to May Day in 2000, we saw the unprecedented unity of the police, the Labour Party, the media, Ken Livingstone (darling of the left and Mayor of London) and 'radical' journalists such as George Monbiot in what can only be described as a witchhunt against anti-capitalist campaigners and their intended protest on 1 May. How can this be explained and what possibilities exist for changing this? How can socialism be revived in imperialist countries like Britain? What forms of organisation can meet this challenge? Are existing labour organisations adequate for this purpose? What attitude should communists take towards them? This contribution will advance a number of propositions which can serve as a basis for discussing these issues.

Using the Trades Union Congress general council of 1925-6 as an example, this paper considers the relatively weak development of a biographical literature on such subjects within the field of British labour history. Practical and methodological challenges in the production of such lives are noted, as are the pitfalls of a genre of 'tombstone' biography that can of necessity be extended only to the few. Nevertheless, the case is made for the wider employment of biographical methods in the writing of trade-union history and the problematisation in this way of the sociological stereotypes that have hitherto dominated the field. These points are further developed by specific reference to the author's recent study of the militant trade-union leader A.A. Purcell. The case is made, not only for further biographical work on such figures, but for a conception of the life-history method that recognises the distinctive articulations of both individual and collective that was characteristic of the British Labour movement.