Chico mendes ‐ the Defence of life

A rubber tapper (seringueiro) since his youth, Francisco Alves Mendes devoted practically all his life to the defence of the workers and people of the forest. He took part in setting up the Union of Rural Workers of Brasiléia and Xapuri (Sindicato de los Trabajadores Rurales de Brasiléia y Xapuri), the Workers’ Party (PT or Partido de los Trabajadores) in Acre, and the National Council of Rubber Tappers (Consejo Nacional de los Serin‐gueiros). In his organisational activity Chico Mendes united trade union struggles, the defence of the forest and party militancy. His work was recognised internationally, and in 1987 the United Nations conferred recognition on him as one of the most important defenders of the environment. In his struggle for the setting up of extractive reserves, Chico combined the defence of the forest with an agrarian reform reclaiming land for rubber tappers opposed to the large‐scale cattle ranching interests represented by the Rural Democratic Union. (Uniáo Democrática Ruralista or UDR ). On the 22 December 1988, Chico Mendes was murdered.     

Silenced narratives of women’s participation in labour and political struggle in Spain, 1960–1975

ABSTRACT

This article studies women’s participation in the struggle against the dictatorship in Spain (from 1960 to 1975). Drawing on life stories of women activists from el Marco de Jerez, it examines their repertoires of actions, their frames, and the lack of recognition from both academic and political spheres. A Gramscian approach and the perspective of hegemonic masculinity contribute to explain how women organized, how represented their collective action, and why their memories have been silenced. The theoretical approach has helped to identify relations of hegemony within feminist studies and political movement.     

Books reviewed

The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States. By Patrick Renshaw. Garden Gty, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1967. 312 pp. $5.95.

Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement. By Joseph R. Conlin. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969. 244 pp. $6.95.

Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies. By Joseph R. Conlin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Corp., 1969. 165 pp. $8.50.

We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. By Melvyn Dubofsky, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. 557 pp. $12.50.

Joe Hill. By Gibbs M. Smith. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969. 286 pp. $7.00.     

Teacher Unions conflict in New York City, 1935–1960

Abstract

While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual demise to the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s, this article situates the TU in the history of New York City teachers’ associations more generally. It argues that the Union’s fate was a consequence not simply of anticommunism, but of competition between the Union and other city teachers’ associations. In particular, the Teachers Guild fought with the Union for the mantle of teacher radicalism. While the two organizations fought for some of the same issues, the liberal Guild was accommodating to the government, while the radical Union was confrontational. When it came to the Union’s ideology, however, the Guild consistently sacrificed its commitment to academic freedom by collaborating with public authorities to reveal the extent of the Union’s Communist commitments. Using archival data – private correspondence of teacher unionists, minutes of Union meetings, and articles from the teachers’ unions’ official periodicals – this article documents the Guild’s efforts at subverting the Union, particularly at moments when the Union’s political commitments became salient in public affairs.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

Technocrats and Tortured Bodies: Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Through an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's final novel Les Belles Images (1966), this article examines how a 1960s French technocratic class dealt with individual and collective traumas, particularly how they placed their faith in an undying hope in the future while simultaneously ignoring the horrors of wartime violence. The article contends that Beauvoir's novel is a story of not remembering—or, more specifically, attempting to forget—Algeria and all the conflict signified to the average French citizen, including decolonization, torture, racial difference and political tumult. Analysis rests on the novel's representation of its protagonist Laurence, who had been shaken to the core after reading a newspaper article about a (likely Algerian) woman tortured to death, ultimately causing a nervous breakdown that forever altered her interactions with her family and fellow technocrats. Gender and nationality also figure centrally in this examination of the broader role that images—not only belles images—played in the construction of French national identity at this historical moment.     

Hard labour: Four views on women in the workforce

Desley Deacon, Managing Gender. The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830–1930 (Oxford) Melbourne 1989; Sally Hacker, Pleasure, Power and Technology. Some Tales of Gender, Engineering and the Cooperative Workplace, (Unwin Hyman) London 1989; Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries Talk. Sexuality, Power and Work, (Allen & Unwin) Sydney 1988; Claire Williams, Blue, White and Pink Collar Workers in Australia. Technicians, Bank Employees and Flight Attendants, (Allen & Unwin) Sydney 1988.     

Mediated territoriality: rural workers and the efforts to scale out agroecology in Nicaragua

The Spanish word formación can be translated as ‘training’ or ‘education’, but Latin American social movements use it as inspired by Che Guevara’s notion of ‘molding’ the values of the new woman and new man for egalitarian, cooperative social relations in the construction of a ‘new society’. This contribution presents findings on the dialectical linkages between the formación processes led by the Rural Workers’ Association (ATC) and the gradual transformation of the Nicaraguan countryside by peasant families choosing to grow food using agroecological practices. We use Vygotsky’s sociocultural historical theory to explore the developmental processes of formación subjects and the pedagogical mediators of their transformation into movement cadre. The motivations of active learners to develop new senses and collective understandings about their material reality become a counterhegemonic process of internalization and socialization of agroecological knowledges and senses. In this paper, we further explore the formación process by identifying territorial mediators: culturally significant elements within and outside of individuals that facilitate the rooting of agroecological social processes in a given territory where the social movement is active. By placing the territory, rather than the individual, at the center of popular education processes, new synergies are emerging in the construction of socially mobilizing methods for producing and spreading agroecological knowledge.     

Feminizing Politics

Sons and Daughters of Darkness

Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, £17.20 pbk.

Fin‐de‐siècle Fictions

Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, £35, £12.99 pbk.

David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, £47.50, £15.95 pbk.

Historicizing the Uncanny

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth‐century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, £27.50, £11.99 (pbk.).

Erotic Aesthetics

Suzanne Nalbantian (ed.), Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives, London: Macmillan, 1997, £40.

Topic of Cancer

Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, London: Routledge, 1997, £45.00, £13.99 pbk.     

Internal union conflict: The flat glass workers, 1936–1937

From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of an Industrial Union, 1869–1897. By Harold W. Aurand. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1971. 168 pp. $10.00

Strike! By Jeremy Brecher. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. 1972. 329 pp. $3.95.

Self‐Reliance and Social Security 1870–1917. By Hace Sorel Tishler. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press. 1971. 214 pp. $10.95.

American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957. By Joseph R. Starobin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. 331 pp. $12.95.

The Bracero Program. By Richard Craig. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1971. xvii + 233 pp. $7.50.

Government as Employer. By Sterling D. Spero. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1972. 528 pp. $10.00.

Public Workers and Public Unions. Edited by Sam Zagoria for the American Assembly, Columbia University, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice‐Hall. 1972. $5.95 cloth, $2.45 paper. 182 pp.

Blue‐Collar Workers: A Symposium on Middle America. Edited by Sar A. Levitan. New York: McGraw Hill. 1971. 393 pp. $12.50.

Trade Unions and National Economic Policy. By Jack Barbash. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1972. 206 pp. $8.50.

El Socialhmo en Mexico; Siglo XIX. By Gaston García Cantú. Ediciones Era, Mexico D. F. 1969. 515 pp.

My Generation. By Will Paynter. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1972. 172 pp. £3.00.

Education and Politics, 1900–1951: A Study of the Labour Party. By Rodney Barker. Oxford University Press. 1972. 173 pp. $10.25.

Ireland and the Irish Question. A Collection of Writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engles. Edited by R. Dixon. New York: International Publishers. 1972. 518 pp. $2.95.

The Life and Times of James Connolly. By C. Desmond Greaves. New York: International Publishers. 1972. 448 pp. $1.65.

The World of the Office Worker. By Michel Crozier. Translated by David Landau. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1971. 224 pp. $10.50.

Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870. By Reginald E. Zelnik. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1971. xii + 452 pp. $15.00.

Soviet Agricultural Trade Unions, 1917–1970. By Peter J. Potichnyi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1972. 258 pp. $12.50.

The Origins of Polish Socialism, The History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist Party 1878–1886. By Lucjan Blit. Cambridge University Press. 1971. 160 pp. $10.

Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International. By Georges Haupt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1972. 270 pp. £5.

Labor Organization in the United States and Mexico. By Harvey Levenstein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. 258 pp. $10.00.     

Jackpine Savages: Discourses of Conquest in the 1916 Mesabi Iron Range Strike

A wolf ran along the swamp a bear rambled on the heath; the swamp moved at the wolf's tread and the heath at the bear's paws there iron rust rose and a steel rod grew where the wolf's feet had been, where the bear's heel had dug. (The Kalevala) In the summer of 1916, independent action on the part of immigrant miners on Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range, the source of the bulk of the nation's iron ore and the taproot of the powerful Steel Trust, drew the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) into a conflict with some of the nation's most powerful capitalists and employers. The Mesabi's mine-owners—led by the omnipresent Oliver Mining Company—had grown accustomed to an almost colonial dominance over the region after successfully breaking up earlier strikes led by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Acute demand for iron ore from Europe, the curtailment of European immigration, and an increasingly radical Range workforce seemed to bode well for the Wobblies' chances, however, and the existence of a vibrant socialist movement among the immigrants who lived and worked on the Mesabi Range, especially among radical Finns, held out a ray of hope and a possibility for success that IWW organizers simply could not pass up.     

A stolen revolution: popular class mobilisation in Burkina Faso

ABSTRACT

The political history of Burkina Faso since the formal end of its colonisation is characterised by vibrant mass mobilisation by largely Marxist-oriented labour unions and their allies, namely organisations from the human rights, student, and youth movements. This article traces the development of social mobilisation and protest in Burkina Faso through six historical phases since 1960, including the recent regime change in 2014 that has frequently been referred to as a ‘revolution’. It is argued that the relative success of mass mobilisation in Burkina Faso can be explained through the concept of the unity of the popular classes, building on the basic idea that organised labour and other segments of exploited classes are not distinct from one another.

Abbreviations: ANEB: Association Nationale des Etudiants Burkinabé; CCVC: Coalition nationale de lutte Contre la Vie Chère, la corruption, la fraude, l’impunité et pour les libertés; CDAIP: Coordination des comités de Défense et d’Approfondissement des acquis de l’Insurrection Populaire; CDP: Congrès pour la Démocratie et le Progrès; CDR: Comités de Défense de la Révolution; CGT-B: Confédération Générale du Travail du Burkina; CBTB: Confédération Nationale des Travailleurs du Burkina; CSB: Confédération Syndicale Burkinabé; FO-UNSL: Force Ouvrière – Union Nationale des Syndicats Libres; MBDHP: Mouvement Burkinabé des Droits de l’Homme et des Peuples; MPP: Mouvement du Peuple pour le Progrès; ODJ: Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse du Burkina Faso; ONSL: Organisation Nationale des Syndicats Libres; PAI: Parti Africain de l’Indépendance; PCRV: Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire Voltaïque; RSP: Régiment de Sécurité Présidentielle; UAS: Unité d’Action Syndicale; UGEB: Union Générale des Etudiants Burkinabé; UNIR/PS: Union pour la Renaissance/Parti Sankariste; UNSTB: Union Syndicale des Travailleurs du Burkina Faso     

Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics

Abstract

In the 1970s magazines, journals and periodicals constituted an alternative public sphere for second wave feminism. These publications provide an index—and at times the only documentation—of the activities of the women’s art movement as well as its many iterations and divisions. This article addresses this imbalance, arguing that Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1992) was exemplar of the radical political challenge feminism posed to the art world and culture more broadly. Launched in 1977 by the Heresies mother collective, which included Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Lucy R. Lippard, Harmony Hammond and May Stevens among others, the magazine had thematic issues edited by different collectives and was comprised of material from an open call. Content ranged from poetry, to academic essays, to artworks both original and reproduced. This article considers the collaborative process of producing the magazine, which attempted to be inclusive, but in fact came to mirror the divisions—as well as political investments—of the broader women’s movement, alongside the dissensus the publication provoked and attempted to confront.     

Counterpublic and counterprivate: Zoe Leonard,David Wojnarowicz,and the political aesthetics of intimacy

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.     

Postmaternal Times and Radical Feminist Thinking

ABSTRACT

Linking the postmaternal to postfeminism as products of late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism, postmaternal thinking is defined in this article by its historical time period, from the early 1980s onwards, and by its legacy of radical feminist thinking which was critical in messing up traditional understandings of maternity. This is demonstrated through research and resources related to the women’s peace movement, with specific reference to the women-only peace camps at Greenham Common (U.K.) and Pine Gap (Australia). The intellectual legacies of these complex and compelling debates around the social practices of maternity, the politics of family, collective domesticity and activism are often occluded in social memory, as Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking (2011). This paper extends Stephens’ working definition of postmaternity to argue for an interconnected structural social analysis of postmaternal times, and contests modernist categories of knowing to consider postmaternity as postmodernist in its multiple and shifting array of politics. In this way postmaternity becomes a time in which maternity is open to redefinition through a proliferation of meaning and possibilities, and this is demonstrated by concluding in the form of a manifesto.     

Editing the 1930s: The Lost Work of Josephine Johnson Excerpts from Josephine Johnson's published and unpublished writings are quoted with permission of the Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon. All quoted materials © Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon 2005.

The radical avant-garde has aged profoundly. Yet, led by director Judith Malina, the Living Theatre, founded in 1947, remains the longest surviving political theatre collective in the US. The Living Theatre opened its doors at a new theatre/home on New York City's Lower East Side in 2007, where Malina directed a much lauded revival of the company's groundbreaking 1963 production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, and performed the role of Maudie in the premiere production of Hanon Reznikov's adaptation of Doris Lessing's Maudie and Jane. Vibrant and luminous at 81, an aged Venus rising from the half shell, Malina (dis)played the decaying and decrepit Maudie, standing naked onstage, sensually and lovingly bathed by Pat Russell, playing Jane. Malina's ageing activist/artist's body and voice spoke volumes about decades of societal and cultural transformations, of sexual revolutions, and of wounds that never heal.

Evoking Pierre Nora's ‘sites of memory’—this performative lieu de memoire ‘talks back’ on many levels, both in contemporary contexts and re-membering the zeitgeist of Malina's earlier performances—nearly naked, strident and much younger in the Living Theatres’ legendary production of Paradise Now (1968–70), and eloquently, flamboyantly anarchist, if too old, playing Antigone in Malina's adaptation of Brecht's version of Sophocles play (1967–84). This essay analyses the mise en scène and the reception of Maudie and Jane in light of the working processes and performance history of director/performer/inspirator Malina. Finally, the challenges and hope made visible and corporeal in Malina's on- and off-stage performances are explored.     

Labor conflicts in the Toronto construction industry, 1968–1973. A crossroads of ethnic issues,business innovations,class struggle,and union action

ABSTRACT

This article concerns a case study in labor history which represents an interesting example of union action in a workers’ community characterized by intersections between ethnic and class belonging.

The focus of the article is on labor conflicts in Toronto’s construction industry between 1968 and 1973. In that period, the Torontonian residential sector represented a sort of ethnic niche dominated by Italian immigrants, who populated this industry both as workers and as contractors. At the same time, important economic, technological, and organizational innovations formed part of this niche. In particular, it refers to the new Toronto real estate boom and to the introduction of new building techniques such as the drywall technique, or concrete forming, as well as business innovations such as the flying form or the creation of teamwork. This article tells the story of successful unionization in a peculiar industry dominated by continuous formal and informal bargaining. Moreover, the powerful presence of the phenomenon of mafiosi and widespread racism made the context still more difficult. In this situation, despite the ambiguities, the final result was the unionization of thousands of workers and the successful signing of collective contracts.     

New Unionism at the Grassroots: The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Rochester,New York, 1914–29

Labor movements have always found it difficult to reveal and transform the social relations that constitute markets. The growing transnational movements of goods, capital, and services in themselves have therefore not triggered closer trade union cooperation across borders. Transnational collective action also requires conscious choices and a mutual understanding that solidarity across borders is warranted. For this reason, this special issue of Labor History assesses the role that politicization processes play in triggering transnational union action.     

Educação do Campo [Education for and by the countryside] as a political project in the context of the struggle for land in Brazil

Latin American and Brazilian rural social movements believe that significant social transformation requires the collective construction of a political project of an historical character. Education is conceived as an historical–cultural and political project to transform the peasantry into an historical subject through emancipatory educational–pedagogical praxis. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), the most emblematic peasant movement in Brazil, has played the leading role in this debate, which also includes many other peasant organizations. The MST has identified education as the key element in forging an historical–political actor out of the landless peasantry. This is articulated through the struggle for education for rural peoples, and along a theoretical–epistemic axis that revolves around the emergent concept of Educação do Campo (‘Education for and by the Countryside’). I ask how the MST conceptualizes education, and what the role is of education in strengthening peasant resistance and sharpening the dispute between political projects for the countryside. I focus on the epistemic dimensions of the concepts of education and pedagogy in the trajectory of the MST in Brazil, and I examine Educação do Campo as an educational-political project and in terms of policy conquests in the political dispute between the rival political projects for the Brazilian countryside of peasants and capital.     

Historical analysis and labor regulation in the progressive era

We Shall Be All—A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, by Melvyn Dubofsky. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. XVIII, 557 pp.