Pub Date : 2023-03-09DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000187
Edward Brudney
Abstract This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that “continuous innovation”—whether technological or practical—has meant the devaluation and/or destruction of existing labor relations. I expand this concept to show how this logic of “creative destruction” maps onto spatialized ideas of modernity. The trauma that workers experienced in the 1990s is most productively understood vis-à-vis the unfulfilled promises of “progress” which claimed to bring efficiency, growth, and long-term stability but instead delivered job loss, atomization, and the breakdown of social relations of labor.
{"title":"“Every time, they took more from us”: Privatization and Telecommunications Workers in Rural Argentina, 1969–2000","authors":"Edward Brudney","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000187","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that “continuous innovation”—whether technological or practical—has meant the devaluation and/or destruction of existing labor relations. I expand this concept to show how this logic of “creative destruction” maps onto spatialized ideas of modernity. The trauma that workers experienced in the 1990s is most productively understood vis-à-vis the unfulfilled promises of “progress” which claimed to bring efficiency, growth, and long-term stability but instead delivered job loss, atomization, and the breakdown of social relations of labor.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44609991","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-08DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000242
Jason Resnikoff
A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”
{"title":"The Myth of Black Obsolescence","authors":"Jason Resnikoff","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000242","url":null,"abstract":"A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45697644","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-07DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000278
E. Caja
“The worker has his own personality, his own self-respect, his own ideas, his own political opinion, his own religious beliefs, and he wants these rights to be respected by everyone, especially by the employer,” said the first leader of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) Giuseppe Di Vittorio in 1952. Yet between this statement in the 1950s and today many things have changed: not only what the worker is and has become, but also how trade unions have represented workers. This article, focusing on the introduction of the first minimum-income scheme in Italian history, explores how the role of trade unions in representing workers and promoting welfare expansion changed in the country in the 2010s.
{"title":"Evolving or Disappearing? Italian Trade Unions in the 2010s","authors":"E. Caja","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000278","url":null,"abstract":"“The worker has his own personality, his own self-respect, his own ideas, his own political opinion, his own religious beliefs, and he wants these rights to be respected by everyone, especially by the employer,” said the first leader of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) Giuseppe Di Vittorio in 1952. Yet between this statement in the 1950s and today many things have changed: not only what the worker is and has become, but also how trade unions have represented workers. This article, focusing on the introduction of the first minimum-income scheme in Italian history, explores how the role of trade unions in representing workers and promoting welfare expansion changed in the country in the 2010s.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43926703","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-07DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000266
M. Nolan
Abstract This review article surveys recent studies of the state of and challenges to academic labor in the ongoing regime of academic capitalism, corporate managerialism, and neoliberalism in colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and select other countries around the world. Some works analyze changing funding models, accountability mechanisms, and forms of administrative power, while others explore the discourses pervading higher education and impacting the self-understanding of academics. Higher education administrators, boards of trustees, and politicians have sought to create flexible and inexpensive academic labor. New studies explore the three main strategies pursued: the failed effort to promote Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the proliferation of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs), and the continuing expansion of contingent labor, full and part time. Other works analyze the innovative unionization efforts on the part of contingent faculty and graduate teaching assistants.
{"title":"The Troubled Present and Uncertain Future of Academic Labor","authors":"M. Nolan","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000266","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This review article surveys recent studies of the state of and challenges to academic labor in the ongoing regime of academic capitalism, corporate managerialism, and neoliberalism in colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and select other countries around the world. Some works analyze changing funding models, accountability mechanisms, and forms of administrative power, while others explore the discourses pervading higher education and impacting the self-understanding of academics. Higher education administrators, boards of trustees, and politicians have sought to create flexible and inexpensive academic labor. New studies explore the three main strategies pursued: the failed effort to promote Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the proliferation of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs), and the continuing expansion of contingent labor, full and part time. Other works analyze the innovative unionization efforts on the part of contingent faculty and graduate teaching assistants.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45344958","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000205
Suramya Thekke Kalathil
In post-independence India, as in many developing post-colonial nations, the capitalist class was dependent on the state to discipline the laborforce, and the rapid uptake of capitalist production methods prompted the new government to intervene aggressively in industrial labor relations. The main goal of postcolonial labor policy was to maintain peaceful labor relations at any cost in order to foster economic development. The newly elected government failed to help capitalists increase their profits through productivity growth, so the way forward was to impose restrictions on labor. Pro-capital labor legislation initially enabled capitalists to curb the mobility and resistance of workers. In due course, however, irrespective of how consistently or effectively labor regulations and repressive measures were enforced, the reaction of the working class heightened its political consciousness, and thus aggravated frictions between capital and labor. When the state resorted to labor welfare laws as a new strategy to reduce these conflicts, employers often fragmented production among smaller units (such as workshops and households) in order to dodge labor regulations. As a reaction to this production decentralization, the working-class movement created impediments to the process of continual capital accumulation.
{"title":"State Regulation and Class Struggle in the Beedi Industry of Post-Colonial Malabar, 1947–1970","authors":"Suramya Thekke Kalathil","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000205","url":null,"abstract":"In post-independence India, as in many developing post-colonial nations, the capitalist class was dependent on the state to discipline the laborforce, and the rapid uptake of capitalist production methods prompted the new government to intervene aggressively in industrial labor relations. The main goal of postcolonial labor policy was to maintain peaceful labor relations at any cost in order to foster economic development. The newly elected government failed to help capitalists increase their profits through productivity growth, so the way forward was to impose restrictions on labor. Pro-capital labor legislation initially enabled capitalists to curb the mobility and resistance of workers. In due course, however, irrespective of how consistently or effectively labor regulations and repressive measures were enforced, the reaction of the working class heightened its political consciousness, and thus aggravated frictions between capital and labor. When the state resorted to labor welfare laws as a new strategy to reduce these conflicts, employers often fragmented production among smaller units (such as workshops and households) in order to dodge labor regulations. As a reaction to this production decentralization, the working-class movement created impediments to the process of continual capital accumulation.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48560117","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-20DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000217
S. Branco
This article is about the resistance and resilience of workers when confronted with the likelihood of losing their jobs and seeing the factory where they worked close down. It discusses this topic by concentrating on the particular and singular case of workers’ self-management of Fateleva – Indústria de Elevadores, a firm that specialized in the production and maintenance of elevators, located in the northern part of Lisbon Metropolitan Region, Portugal. It was occupied by its workers in the context of the Carnation Revolution (1974–1976) and then self-managed until its closure in 2016.
这篇文章是关于工人在面临失业和看到他们工作的工厂倒闭的可能性时的抵抗力和韧性。它通过集中讨论Fateleva–Indústria de Elevadores公司工人自我管理的特殊案例来讨论这个话题，该公司是一家专门从事电梯生产和维护的公司，位于葡萄牙里斯本大都会区北部。在康乃馨革命（1974–1976）的背景下，它被工人占领，然后自我管理，直到2016年关闭。
{"title":"Resistance and Resilience: The Nothing Factory and the Workers’ Self-Management of Fateleva","authors":"S. Branco","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000217","url":null,"abstract":"This article is about the resistance and resilience of workers when confronted with the likelihood of losing their jobs and seeing the factory where they worked close down. It discusses this topic by concentrating on the particular and singular case of workers’ self-management of Fateleva – Indústria de Elevadores, a firm that specialized in the production and maintenance of elevators, located in the northern part of Lisbon Metropolitan Region, Portugal. It was occupied by its workers in the context of the Carnation Revolution (1974–1976) and then self-managed until its closure in 2016.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47591346","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}
Pub Date : 2023-02-02DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000229
Sridevi Menon
Abstract This article delineates a hitherto eclipsed labor history of the Northwest Borneo oilfields. In 2018, Brunei Shell Petroleum (BSP) in an unprecedented move, released to Brunei's national archive two labor registers of the British Malayan Petroleum Company (BMPC-renamed BSP in 1958), with entries dating between the 1940s and 1950s. These registers provided a rare glimpse of the workers who were recruited to the Brunei oilfields as labor, a category distinct from staff. As BMPC labor they worked to rehabilitate the company town and the oilfields that were destroyed during the Second World War by the Japanese army and allied bombing in the British protectorate of Brunei. Like colonial records that amassed information for the control and rule of colonized subjects, each entry in BMPC's ledger meticulously noted the date of engagement, place of employment, wages, work history, as well as some biographical information about its workers. Inadvertently, these entries also revealed modes of worker resistance and assertions of agency, thus providing a glimpse of the hidden transcripts of a labor history shaped by the policies of BMPC in this colonial outpost. My article draws on these two BMPC labor registers to trace a micro-spatial history of “Dayak” labor in the emergent Borneo oilfields. Often obscured in historical records, the registers made visible the ways in which Indigenous workers negotiated and resisted the company's control of its labor force. I explore Dayak labor recruitment within the context of the 1880s-1941 when state borders irrevocably shifted and regional economies were increasingly drawn into a global market. In doing so, I chart migrant labor routes across varied regional economies in Northwest Borneo, BMPC's management of a multiethnic labor force, and company workers' agency.
{"title":"Dayaks in a Ledger: A Bornean Labor History and an Oil Town's Indigenous Workers","authors":"Sridevi Menon","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000229","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article delineates a hitherto eclipsed labor history of the Northwest Borneo oilfields. In 2018, Brunei Shell Petroleum (BSP) in an unprecedented move, released to Brunei's national archive two labor registers of the British Malayan Petroleum Company (BMPC-renamed BSP in 1958), with entries dating between the 1940s and 1950s. These registers provided a rare glimpse of the workers who were recruited to the Brunei oilfields as labor, a category distinct from staff. As BMPC labor they worked to rehabilitate the company town and the oilfields that were destroyed during the Second World War by the Japanese army and allied bombing in the British protectorate of Brunei. Like colonial records that amassed information for the control and rule of colonized subjects, each entry in BMPC's ledger meticulously noted the date of engagement, place of employment, wages, work history, as well as some biographical information about its workers. Inadvertently, these entries also revealed modes of worker resistance and assertions of agency, thus providing a glimpse of the hidden transcripts of a labor history shaped by the policies of BMPC in this colonial outpost. My article draws on these two BMPC labor registers to trace a micro-spatial history of “Dayak” labor in the emergent Borneo oilfields. Often obscured in historical records, the registers made visible the ways in which Indigenous workers negotiated and resisted the company's control of its labor force. I explore Dayak labor recruitment within the context of the 1880s-1941 when state borders irrevocably shifted and regional economies were increasingly drawn into a global market. In doing so, I chart migrant labor routes across varied regional economies in Northwest Borneo, BMPC's management of a multiethnic labor force, and company workers' agency.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45879678","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-26DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000175
Ahmad Azhar
Abstract This article marks an experiment in narrating a longue durée intellectual history ‘from below’ of West Punjab’s organised labour movement (c.1920–2000). This movement bridges the late colonial and post-colonial periods and links the histories of working-class movements across the Indian and Pakistani States. Punjab’s revolutionary heritage of the twentieth century has been, over the last decade, at the heart of broader theoretical arguments on the relationship of the internationalist Left with localised articulations of radical politics across South Asia. This resurgent scholarship, I argue in my paper, overstates and presents in a somewhat uncomplicated and teleological frame the role of left ideologies and institutions in the formation of the revolutionary subjectivities of Punjab’s working classes and poor. It crafts in a deeply hagiographic mode a narrative of the working classes’ intellectual emancipation through contact with what are generally taken to be the enlightened and progressive elements amongst the bourgeoisie of those times. This is made possible only by glossing over tensions haunting the potentially transgressive relationship between the worker and the intellectual and which this paper brings to the fore. By focusing on the upheavals attending the fraught relationship between Lahore’s worker militants and its renegade bourgeois intellectuals of the political and academic left over three generations, I question these narratives and their underlying assumptions. It is argued that instead of emancipating the worker, an education in the theory of socialism and the practical experience of left activism alongside bourgeois comrades ultimately reinforced the social and intellectual hierarchies separating the two. The processes through which this inequality was further enshrined are partly revealed by looking at the discursive formation of these workers as a proletarian vanguard, both by the State and the Communist party. Sources used for this purpose include colonial and post-colonial State records, official inquiry reports and their evidence volumes, the internal documents (in Urdu) of the Lahore district branch of the Communist party and newspapers in English and Urdu published from Lahore for the colonial and post-colonial periods. For this proletarian vanguard’s perspective on its own making and unmaking the article draws upon oral interviews (in Punjabi and Urdu) of worker leaders in the archives of local NGOs, published memoirs, as well as formal interviews and informal conversations with trade-unionists and leftist intellectuals directly involved in the workers’ movement, especially through study circles and other ‘educational’ projects, up till the late 1990s.
{"title":"“We don't need no education”: Lessons from the (Un)making of Lahore's Proletarian Vanguard (ca. 1920–2000)","authors":"Ahmad Azhar","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000175","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article marks an experiment in narrating a longue durée intellectual history ‘from below’ of West Punjab’s organised labour movement (c.1920–2000). This movement bridges the late colonial and post-colonial periods and links the histories of working-class movements across the Indian and Pakistani States. Punjab’s revolutionary heritage of the twentieth century has been, over the last decade, at the heart of broader theoretical arguments on the relationship of the internationalist Left with localised articulations of radical politics across South Asia. This resurgent scholarship, I argue in my paper, overstates and presents in a somewhat uncomplicated and teleological frame the role of left ideologies and institutions in the formation of the revolutionary subjectivities of Punjab’s working classes and poor. It crafts in a deeply hagiographic mode a narrative of the working classes’ intellectual emancipation through contact with what are generally taken to be the enlightened and progressive elements amongst the bourgeoisie of those times. This is made possible only by glossing over tensions haunting the potentially transgressive relationship between the worker and the intellectual and which this paper brings to the fore. By focusing on the upheavals attending the fraught relationship between Lahore’s worker militants and its renegade bourgeois intellectuals of the political and academic left over three generations, I question these narratives and their underlying assumptions. It is argued that instead of emancipating the worker, an education in the theory of socialism and the practical experience of left activism alongside bourgeois comrades ultimately reinforced the social and intellectual hierarchies separating the two. The processes through which this inequality was further enshrined are partly revealed by looking at the discursive formation of these workers as a proletarian vanguard, both by the State and the Communist party. Sources used for this purpose include colonial and post-colonial State records, official inquiry reports and their evidence volumes, the internal documents (in Urdu) of the Lahore district branch of the Communist party and newspapers in English and Urdu published from Lahore for the colonial and post-colonial periods. For this proletarian vanguard’s perspective on its own making and unmaking the article draws upon oral interviews (in Punjabi and Urdu) of worker leaders in the archives of local NGOs, published memoirs, as well as formal interviews and informal conversations with trade-unionists and leftist intellectuals directly involved in the workers’ movement, especially through study circles and other ‘educational’ projects, up till the late 1990s.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42453978","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-19DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000291
Inna Shtakser
Abstract The four books under review challenge the revolutionary leadership-centered view of the Russian Revolution from various perspectives. Specifically, they highlight the influence on revolutionary politics of seemingly peripheral groups such as workers and Jewish revolutionary activists. Each of the authors claims that the agendas of these groups were considerably more important than the agendas of the revolutionary leadership in ensuring the success or the failure of revolutionary policies.
{"title":"Rethinking Political Agency in the Russian Revolution: A View from the Russian Empire's Borderlands","authors":"Inna Shtakser","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000291","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The four books under review challenge the revolutionary leadership-centered view of the Russian Revolution from various perspectives. Specifically, they highlight the influence on revolutionary politics of seemingly peripheral groups such as workers and Jewish revolutionary activists. Each of the authors claims that the agendas of these groups were considerably more important than the agendas of the revolutionary leadership in ensuring the success or the failure of revolutionary policies.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46282125","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000157
Colleen Wood
Abstract What forms of precarity do civil society actors experience in Central Asia? What are the sources of these precarities? In this article, I synthesize literature from political science and development studies to identify five top-down mechanisms of precaritization for civil society: (extra)legal restrictions on operations, financing activities, flows of funding from the Global North, professionalization, and the sociopolitical atmosphere. I draw on twenty-seven interviews with activists and human rights defenders in Kazakhstan to consider how civil society actors navigate structural constraints on their work. In line with the literature on authoritarian regimes, I find that civil society actors who criticize the regime face precarity through coercion and bureaucratic demands. But whereas development studies scholarship has been pessimistic about the effects of professionalization, Kazakhstan's civil society actors see their technical training and pressure to formalize their organizations as beneficial to their reputation and institutional leverage.
{"title":"Between a Rock and a Hard Place: How Kazakhstan's Civil Society Navigates Precarity","authors":"Colleen Wood","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000157","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What forms of precarity do civil society actors experience in Central Asia? What are the sources of these precarities? In this article, I synthesize literature from political science and development studies to identify five top-down mechanisms of precaritization for civil society: (extra)legal restrictions on operations, financing activities, flows of funding from the Global North, professionalization, and the sociopolitical atmosphere. I draw on twenty-seven interviews with activists and human rights defenders in Kazakhstan to consider how civil society actors navigate structural constraints on their work. In line with the literature on authoritarian regimes, I find that civil society actors who criticize the regime face precarity through coercion and bureaucratic demands. But whereas development studies scholarship has been pessimistic about the effects of professionalization, Kazakhstan's civil society actors see their technical training and pressure to formalize their organizations as beneficial to their reputation and institutional leverage.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136301865","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}
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