Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity
A dynamic historian revisits the workers' internationals, whose scope and significance are commonly overlooked.
In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century--from the 1860s to the 1970s--worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism.
The creation in London of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864 was a turning point. What would later be called the "First International" aspired to bring together European and American workers across languages, nationalities, and trades. It was a major undertaking in a context marked by opening borders, moving capital, and exploding inequalities.
In this urgent, engaging work, historian Nicolas Delalande explores how international worker solidarity developed, what it accomplished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and why it collapsed over the past fifty years, to the point of disappearing from our memories.
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Nicolas Delalande is an associate professor of history at the Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po and editor in chief of La Vie des Idées, an online magazine. He is the author of Les Batailles de l'impôt: Consentement et résistances de 1789 à nos jours (2011) and a coeditor, with Patrick Boucheron, et al, of Histoire mondiale de la France (published in English in 2019 as France in the World) and, with Nicolas Barreyre, of A World of Public Debts: A Political History (2020).
"A fascinating book about globalization, internationalism, and wealth redistribution between 1870 and 1914, with lots of lessons for the twenty-first century...A must-read."
-- "Thomas Piketty, #1 New York Times bestselling author""An indispensable history of working-class internationalism."
-- "Eric Blanc, author of Red State Revolt""An extraordinary resource for workers seeking to build new cross-border solidarities to prevent the pervasive globalization phenomenon 'from benefiting only the rich and powerful.'"
-- "Joe William Trotter Jr., author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America""This critically important history of international solidarity efforts reminds us that we must know the past to be effective activists today."
-- "Erik Loomis, author of A History of America in Ten Strikes"
