Marcel van der Linden

Rumo a uma nova conceituação histórica da classe trabalhadora mundial

Este artigo apresenta uma discussao historiografica sobre o conceito de classe trabalhadora levando em conta as diversas experiencias historicas desde o seculo XIX. A questao a ser enfocada nas paginas seguintes e como podemos visualizar um novo conceito da classe trabalhadora levando em conta as contribuicoes oferecidas por Breman, Gooptu, Linebaugh e outros. A fim de encontrar uma resposta a essa questao, o artigo realiza uma critica construtiva do conceito de classe trabalhadora em Marx.

Labour History as the History of Multitudes

Marcel van der Linden Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden Hisxadtory of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press 2000) LABOUR HISTORIANS STUDY the working class to examine its development, compoxadsition, working conditions, lifestyle, culture, and many other aspects. But what exxadactly do we mean when we use the term working class? Over the past half-century, the answer to this seemingly simple question has changed continuxadously. In the 1950s and 1960s it usually denoted male breadwinners who earned a living in agriculture, industry, mining, or transport. In the 1970s and 1980s objecxadtions from feminists instigated a fundamental revision that broadened the focus bexadyond the male head of die household to include the wife and children. Occupational groups that tended to be overlooked in the past, such as domestic servants and prosxadtitutes, started to receive serious consideration. The chronological and geographic scope of the research expanded as well. Labour historians became interested in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and took a closer look at pre-industrial wage earnxaders. Our overall perspective on the working class has undergone a paradigmatic revolution. The signs indicate that this first transitio n is merely a harbinger of a secxadond one. However broadly labour historians have interpreted their discipline thus far, their main interest has always been free workers and their families. They perceived such a wage earner in the Marxian sense as the worker who as a free individual can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity and has no other commodity Marcel van der Linden, Labour History as the History of Multitudes, Labour/Le Travail, 52 (Fall 2003), 235-43.

Labour History: An International Movement

The meaning, preliminary work carried out, new methods, infrastructures, and research carried out on the global labour history is discussed. It is argued that Australian Society can be a natural participant in the Global Labour History project due to their awareness about the larger world, usage of broad definition of labour history for a long time, experience with other countries labour historians in solid collaborative projects, and readiness to travel.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was set up in 1949 and now has 215 affiliated organizations in 145 countries and territories on all five continents, with a membership of 125 million. It is a confederation of national trade union centres, each of which links together trade unions of that particular country. The ICFTU cooperates closely with the International Labour Organization and has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The present book is the first history to be written of this important organization. A team of researchers describes the development of the ICFTUs precursors (the International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres, the International Federation of Trade Unions, and the early World Federation of Trade Unions), and reconstructs the complicated history of the ICFTU itself, from its origins during the Cold War, through anti-colonial struggles, European unification, international campaigns against Apartheid and many other issues. A final chapter discusses the organizations prospects in the twenty-first century.

Reading Ethnography as Labour History: The Example of the Iatmul, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea

The present essay explores how ethnography can contribute to the development of a truly global labour historiography. Since the 1910s, ethnographers have been carrying out fieldwork among the Iatmul, a small ethnos in Papua New Guinea. Up to about 40 years ago the indigenous people lived from fishing and agriculture, but then began to move into the cities, where they became wholly or partly proletarianised. The reports of British, American and Swiss ethnologists who have visited the Iatmul time and again in their original villages, and later in the urban squatter settlements, can be read diachronically as a kind of long-term study of gendered proletarianisation processes.

The Importance of Anti-Labour History

The importance of labour history is explained. Anti-Labour has historically been an extremely flexible set of forces that cannot be reduced to just one form. The paper provides evidence of the fact.

International Unionism: Recovering History, Reshaping Theory, Recasting Practice?

The potential of international unionism is to provide a political counterweight to the ever-growing power of international capital, which has over the past 25 years rolled back many of the gains made by organised labour during the post-war Tong boom. The topic is surprisingly under-researched, despite its salience to labour history, industrial relations, political economy and international relations. This may be because it has tended to inhabit the interstices of these discrete, and sometimes inwardly focused, disciplinary areas. In addition, crucial archival material has been lost or was until recently unavailable to historians. These five books all address the topic of international unionism in the global political economy. The first book, by Carew et al, is a major historical study based on the newly catalogued archives of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), published on the fiftieth birthday of the ICFTU in 1999. The second, edited by De Wilde, is a collection of papers delivered in an international conference which addressed the recently released historical material thematically. The third