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Author: David Mandel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a period of steep economic decline, followed by economic reform, soaring inflation, corruption and crime. Despite the fact that unions were part of the State and that membership was obligatory, incorporating 98 percent of the labor force, millions of workers were not paid their wages.Based upon an abundance of first-hand material, Labour After Soviet Socialism examines the complex interplay of history, ideology, leadership, state policy and economics, to explain the difficulty workers have encountered in defending their interests.David Mandel, labor scholar and activist, teaches political science at the University of Quebec, Montreal. He is co-founder of the School for Worker Democracy, which conducts rank-and-file labor education in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Author: David Mandel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a period of steep economic decline, followed by economic reform, soaring inflation, corruption and crime. Despite the fact that unions were part of the State and that membership was obligatory, incorporating 98 percent of the labor force, millions of workers were not paid their wages.Based upon an abundance of first-hand material, Labour After Soviet Socialism examines the complex interplay of history, ideology, leadership, state policy and economics, to explain the difficulty workers have encountered in defending their interests.David Mandel, labor scholar and activist, teaches political science at the University of Quebec, Montreal. He is co-founder of the School for Worker Democracy, which conducts rank-and-file labor education in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Author: Marsha Siefert
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863384
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.
Author: Denis MacShane
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
This is the first major study of the role of industrial unions in the launch of the Cold War in the 1940s. Using unpublished archival material from Europe and America, Denis MacShane challenges existing interpretations of international labour's role in the Cold War, arguing that European traditions and political differences were more important than American interventions in determining labour's attitudes to international problems after 1945. Existing interpretations which focus on national confederations such as the TUC in Britain or the AFL in America treat the question of labour and the Cold War as a political and diplomatic quarrel. Dr. MacShane revises the view that the TUC shaped post-war trade union structures in West Germany, or that any TUC blueprint existed for German industrial trade unionism after 1945. In particular he examines trade unions in the engineering, steel, car, and metal industries who were at the peak of their power, size, and influence in 1945. Their productionist philosophy, which was powerfully tapped by the Marshall Plan, is examined to show why Leninist and Stalinist forms of trade union organization were rejected after 1945. This book blends archival research, contemporary accounts, and interviews from Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Switzerland to present a fascinating narrative of labour internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as a challenging thesis which will alter existing historical perceptions of the role of labour in the politically-charged years between 1945 and 1948 when the Cold War got under way.
Author: Giovanni Razzu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317327950
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Under communism there was, in the countries of Eastern Europe, a high level of gender equality in the labour market, particularly in terms of high participation rates by women. The transition from communism has upset this situation, with different impacts in the different countries. This book presents a comprehensive overview of gender and the labour market since the fall of communism in a wide range of Eastern European countries. Each country chapter describes the nature of inequality in the particular country, and goes on to examine the factors responsible for this, including government policies, changing social attitudes, levels of educational attainment and the impact of motherhood. Overall, the book provides an interesting comparison to the situation in Western developed countries, outlining differences and similarities. No one single Eastern European model emerges while, as in Western developed countries, a range of experiences and trends is the norm.
Author: S. A. Smith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191667528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 834
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Book Description
The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.
Author: George Comninel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317487966
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
The International Workingmen’s Association was the prototype of all organizations of the Labour movement and the 150th anniversary of its birth (1864-2014) offers an important opportunity to rediscover its history and learn from its legacy. The International helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. It also spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force; and that it was essential to overcome the capitalist system itself, since improvements within it, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate exploitation and social injustice. This book reconsider the main issues broached or advanced by the International – such as labor rights, critiques of capitalism and the search for international solidarity – in light of present-day concerns. With the recent crisis of capitalism, that has sharpened more than before the division between capital and labour, the political legacy of the organization founded in London in 1864 has regained profound relevance, and its lessons are today more timely than ever. This book was published as a special issue of Socialism and Democracy.
Author: Mark Pittaway
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822978121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399
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Book Description
In 1956, Hungarian workers joined students on the streets to protest years of wage and benefit cuts enacted by the Communist regime. Although quickly suppressed by Soviet forces, the uprising led to changes in party leadership and conciliatory measures that would influence labor politics for the next thirty years. In The Workers' State, Mark Pittaway presents a groundbreaking study of the complexities of the Hungarian working class, its relationship to the Communist Party, and its major political role during the foundational period of socialism (1944-1958). Through case studies of three industrial centers—Ujpest, Tatabanya, and Zala County—Pittaway analyzes the dynamics of gender, class, generation, skill level, and rural versus urban location, to reveal the embedded hierarchies within Hungarian labor. He further demonstrates how industries themselves, from oil and mining to armaments and textiles, possessed their own unique labor subcultures. From the outset, the socialist state won favor with many workers, as they had grown weary of the disparity and oppression of class systems under fascism. By the early 1950s, however, a gap between the aspirations of labor and the goals of the state began to widen. In the Stalinist drive toward industrialization, stepped up production measures, shortages of goods and housing, wage and benefit cuts, and suppression became widespread. Many histories of this period have focused on Communist terror tactics and the brutal suppression of a pliant population. In contrast, Pittaway's social chronicle sheds new light on working-class structures and the determination of labor to pursue its own interests and affect change in the face of oppression. It also offers new understandings of the role of labor and the importance of local histories in Eastern Europe under communism.
Author: Stefano Bellucci
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303028235X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
This edited collection is a global history of workers’ organisations since 1919, the year when the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Comintern and the International Federation of Trade Unions were formed. This historical moment represents a caesura in labour history as it epitomises the beginning of what the editors and the contributors in this book call the internationalisation of the labour question. The case studies in this centenary volume analyse the relationship between global workers’ organisations and the new ideological confrontation between liberal capitalism, socialism and communism since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Workers’ organisations, trade unions in particular, grew in importance and managed to organise internationally, forming alliances cemented by ideology and sustained by international institutional bodies or centrals. In the nascent capitalist versus communist struggle, trade unions thrived. Is it mere coincidence that today’s decline of unionism coincides with the end of ideological antagonism? This book emphasises important global labour issues such as gender as well as international workers’ histories from Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Author: Martha Lampland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226468297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Did socialist policies leave the economies of Eastern Europe unprepared for current privatization efforts? Under communist rule, were rural villages truly left untouched by capitalism? In this historical ethnography of rural Hungary, Martha Lampland argues not only that the transition to capitalism was well under way by the 1930s, but that socialist policies themselves played a crucial role in the development of capitalism by transforming conceptions of time, money, and labor. Exploring the effects of social change thrust upon communities against their will, Lampland examines the history of agrarian labor in Hungary from World War I to the early 1980s. She shows that rural workers had long been subject to strict state policies similar to those imposed by collectivization. Since the values of privatization and individualism associated with capitalism characterized rural Hungarian life both prior to and throughout the socialist period, capitalist ideologies of work and morality survived unscathed in the private economic practices of rural society. Lampland also shows how labor practices under socialism prepared the workforce for capitalism. By drawing villagers into factories and collective farms, for example, the socialist state forced farmers to work within tightly controlled time limits and to calculate their efforts in monetary terms. Indeed, this control and commodification of rural labor under socialism was essential to the transformation to capitalism.
Author: Giles Udy
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1785902652
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
The Labour Party welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917: it paved the way for the birth of a socialist superpower and ushered in a new era in Soviet governance. Labour excused the Bolshevik excesses and prepared for its own revolution in Britain. In 1929, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to work in labour camps. Subjected to appalling treatment, thousands died. When news of the camps leaked out in Britain, there were protests demanding the government ban imports of timber cut by slave labourers. The Labour government of the day dismissed mistreatment claims as Tory propaganda and blocked appeals for an inquiry. Despite the Cabinet privately acknowledging the harsh realities of the work camps, Soviet denials were publicly repeated as fact. One Labour minister even defended them as part of 'a remarkable economic experiment'. Labour and the Gulag explains how Britain's Labour Party was seduced by the promise of a socialist utopia and enamoured of a Russian Communist system it sought to emulate. It reveals the moral compromises Labour made, and how it turned its back on the people in order to further its own political agenda.
