Book Review: Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization by James Mark, Paul Betts, Alena Alamgir, Péter Apor, Eric Burton, Bogdan C. Iacob, Steffi Marung and Radina Vučetić

Abstract

instinctively suspicious of legal restrictions on trade unions, citing both their right to free association and the hostility of the bourgeois judiciary. Comrades in Conflict also ably draws out the personal element of the disagreement, the antipathy that trade union leaders and trade union MPs had towards the ‘academic, middle-class’ proponents of In Place of Strife – such as Wilson and Castle – straying onto their turf, in addition to the misogynistic treatment of Castle herself. The fundamental disagreement at the heart of the conflict over In Place of Strife, however, regards the nature of industrial conflict. For Castle and Wilson, unconstitutional and unofficial strikes reflected disorder, a disorder generated first and foremost by irresponsible trade unions. For Jones, Scanlon, et al., these strikes were primarily the product of reckless and intransigent employers. Some engagement with how workers on the shop floor understood these issues and reacted to this legislation would have enabled Comrades in Conflict to weigh in more directly on which of those positions most closely approximated reality. This remains, however, a valuable volume that deepens our understanding of policy formation and power under the post-war settlement.