Marcel van der Linden

International Institute of Social History · Research Department

Rosa Luxemburg gilt vielen als Heldin, aber nur wenigen als theoretische oder strategische Inspiration. Sozialdemokraten und Kommunisten stoßen sich an ihrer Geringschätzung der Parteiarbeit, Feministinnen ist sie zu marxistisch und Marxisten gilt ihre Theorie der Kolonisierung nicht-kapitalistischer Räume als krasse Fehlinterpretation von Karl Mar...

The Socialism that wasn't: Marxist critiques of Soviet Society, This article presents a few saliant contributions to the Marxist debate on the Soviet Union's class nature since the 19305, If focuses on the theories of Bettelheim, Clift; Trotsky, Rizzi, Carlo, Bahro and Ticktin

The theory of the ‘Permanent War Economy’ has played a rather important role in the debates of the radical left from the late 1940s to the 1980s. The founder of this theory was the secretive US Trotskyist economist Edward Solomon (1913–99), who in 1940–41 changed his name into Sard, and published most of his political writings under three consecuti...

Social progress needs to be considered from a grounded historical perspective and through a global rather than Eurocentric optic. We are now probably at the peak of human possibilities in terms of social progress but also facing a possible abyss if negative trends are not countered by society. Whether it is global inequality, uncontrolled climate c...

The essay closely investigates and questions the assumptions that Leninist theory is more or less a consistent whole, which must be accepted or rejected in its entirety, and that Bolshevik policy under Tsarism was the direct result of Leninist theory-that Bolshevism and Leninism are synonyms. It tries to determine the position of Lenin's theory in...

Social progress needs to be considered from a grounded historical perspective and through a global rather than Eurocentric optic. We are now probably at the peak of human possibilities in terms of social progress but also facing a possible abyss if negative trends are not countered by society. Whether it is global inequality, uncontrolled climate c...

Ghostbusting or Real Pluralism? A Brief Response to Peter Ackers - Marcel van der Linden

There is no doubt that without uprisings, social movements and everyday forms of collective resistance, today’s Europe would look quite different. In no small measure, guild battles, peasant wars and revolutions have helped shape our present. Despite this, historians have for many years shown little interest, or no interest at all, in the protests...

The first conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) took place on December 14–16, 2015, in Turin, Italy. It was, for the time being, the culmination of a development that has been going on for a number of years. Increasingly European labor historians work together across borders. Since the 1970s the number of research projects compar...

How did Rosa Luxemburg, in her The Accumulation of Capital and other writings, analyse the development of the working class and other subordinate classes under capitalism, and how did she view the relationship between these classes and those living in ‘natural economic societies’? Following primary sources closely, the present essay reconstructs an...

Marx's theory of the proletariat is in need of serious reconsideration. Its theoretical demarcation of the proletariat with regard to other subaltern groups (the lumpenproletariat and chattel slaves) is inconsistent; the concrete class analyses based on this theory have, to a significant extent, been refuted by empirical historical research; and it...

In the scholarly debate about the increasingly flexible, informal, and precarious nature of employment relations, it is often suggested that these trends are new. This is especially true for the advanced capitalist countries. “Previously,” employees had permanent jobs, with good social benefits and a vast array of rights, whereas “nowadays” they ar...

‘Labor history’ has two meanings: it denotes the history of labor movements and of the working classes at large. This article discusses the rise of labor movement history in the late nineteenth century, the growth of working-class historiography during the twentieth century, the origins of the current paradigmatic crisis in labor history, the disci...

Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider is a book of great merit. But it contains a remarkable paradox: it argues strongly against racism and nationalism, but it does so in an insular way. Now and then there is mention of other parts of the world, but the book does not as such look beyond England’s boundaries. This implies at leas...

The Okanisi: A Surinamese Maroon Community, c.1712–2010* - Volume 60 Issue 3 - Marcel van der Linden

This article discusses the emergence of the concept of the working class in Western Europe during the nineteenth century; the classical patterns of interpretation (structural, agency-focused, and combinations of these two approaches); the rise of 'peripheral' working classes, their historiography, and their conceptual implications; and the new insi...

The classical conceptualization of the working class, of workers’ collective action and, especially, of trade unionism, was implicitly or explicitly based on the Standard Employment Relationship that, for a few decades, has been dominant in North America, Europe, Japan and Australasia. The ‘classical’ model of collective bargaining, which has shape...

Precariat refers to groups of people who previously had been known as the casual poor, that is, workers who have no control over their destiny and depend on the goodwill of others. Precarious employment relations are temporary, involving jobs that last a day, a week, or a few months at most. In this short essay Marcel van der Linden discusses the d...

My essay “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History” in issue 82 (Fall 2012) received commentaries from five colleagues. In this reply I focus on seven central issues: the ambiguities of commodification; the contested notion of “capitalism”; the concept of class; household labor; the need for comparative approaches; the newness of Global L...

The American economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron (1904–1978) gained fame as the creator of the theory of the ‘advantages of backwardness’, according to which latecomers in the industrialization process could obtain important advantages from their later start. The parallel with the theory of combined and uneven development in historical materi...

L'historiographie du travail, des travailleurs, des mouvements sociaux et des organisations associatives, syndicales et politiques qui en sont issues (l' « histoire du travail ») a près d'un siècle et demi. Elle trouve son origine dans la région Atlantique Nord. L'un de ses grands pionniers fut Émile Levasseur qui, dans les années 1850 et 1860, pub...

The idea that the histories of different regions in the world are interconnected is not particularly novel; it already existed several centuries ago. Thus, for example, when the German historian and playwright Friedrich Schiller was granted a chair at the University of Jena in 1789, he declared in his inaugural address that the most remote regions...

The period 1500–1650 was characterized by huge global transformations. These had a major impact on a wide range of societal forms and cultures. As a result, different work ethics clashed and formed hybrid combinations, and new work ethics came into being during many-sided confrontations. The question of how the labouring poor in different parts of...

Mainstream history generally assumes that modern labor-management techniques originated in factories in Europe and North America employing ‘free’ wage laborers. The present explorative article argues, however, that important innovations were born outside the North Atlantic region (especially in the colonies), in attempts to control unfree workers;...

In 1905, Henry Nevinson, at the time a well-known British journalist, visited Angola. He discovered that the slave trade was still going on in secret in that region, many years after it had officially been abolished. Deep inside Southern Africa slaves were caught; they were forced to walk hundreds of miles to the coast until they arrived at Katumbe...

Building on Robert Merton’s theory of unanticipated consequences of purposive action and Charles Tilly’s theory of error correction, the present article presents a stylized narrative about the British campaign to abolish the trading in African slaves, from its beginning in 1807 until the end of the nineteenth century. In the end, this campaign was...

Charles Tilly (19292008) was one of the greatest sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century. His incredible energy and creativity were a powerful force in reviving the historical-comparative perspective in social sciences and produced many new insights. Tilly has covered a very broad range of subjects, from contentious behaviour, urba...

p>http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-9222.2009v1n1p11 O artigo apresenta uma nova fase da História Social do Trabalho, caracterizada pela tentativa de superação do nacionalismo metodológico e do Eurocentrismo, cujo potencial vem se revelando extremamente rico no estabelecimento de uma perspectiva global de entendimento da classe trabalhadora e de sua...

The recent growth of the working classes in various parts of the Global South (or what was called the Tricontinent of Africa, Asia, and Latin America some years ago) has important consequences for labor historians. For a very long time labor history was mainly based in the North Atlantic region, though there have also been important nuclei in the s...

Peter Linebaugh und Marcus Rediker, Die vielköpfige Hydra. Die verborgene Geschichte des revolutionären Atlantiks (aus dem Engl. von Sabine Bartel), Berlin und Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2008, 427 S. € 24,00.

This paper presents a critical reconstruction of the main Marxist debates about the idea of 'leaps forward' in historical development. There have been two important approaches: the so-called 'law of uneven and combined development', as developed by Leon Trotsky, George Novack and Ernest Mandel, and Jan Romein's 'handicap of a head start'. Although...

Annotated version of a plenary lecture, given at the Ninth National Labour History Conference, University of Sydney, 1 July 2005.

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...

Este artigo apresenta uma discussão historiográfica sobre o conceito de classe trabalhadora levando em conta as diversas experiências históricas desde o século XIX. A questão a ser enfocada nas páginas seguintes é como podemos visualizar um novo conceito da classe trabalhadora levando em conta as contribuições oferecidas por Breman, Gooptu, Linebau...

Employing innovative methods and new approaches to global labor history, the six essays in this collection explore important aspects of labor's role in global capitalism since the early modern period. Essays by Jan Lucassen and Jeffrey D. Glasco study the commercial agents, soldiers, and sailors that constituted the institutional framework for the...

Labor historians from Europe and North America frequently assert that their discipline is not in a healthy state. Such a picture is a distortion, however, for the world does not stop at the equator: in various regions of Latin America, Africa and Asia the historiography of workers and labor movements has made great strides in the last twenty to thi...

Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. By Michael Newman. The Merlin Press, London 2002; Monthly Review Press (USA); Fernwood Publishing (Can.). xiv, 368 pp. Ill. £15.95. - - Volume 49 Issue 1 - Marcel van der Linden

A paradox characterizes social historiography: simultaneous accumulation and fragmentation of knowledge. We understand social structures and processes in the past much better than we did a few decades ago. At the same time, much that once appeared to be solid has melted into thin air. Our discipline has splintered and there is a serious risk that c...

The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden His-tory of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press 2000) LABOUR HISTORIANS STUDY the working class to examine its development, compo-sition, working conditions, lifestyle, culture, and many other aspects. But what ex-actly do we mean when we use the term "working class"? Over the past half-century, the an...

At the beginning of the 1990s the discipline of labour history seemed to be in serious crisis. The editorial in Supplement 1 to this journal in 1993 was seriously concerned that, having peaked during the 1960s and 1970s, interest in labour history had declined very rapidly by the 1990s. The decline of "old labour history" prompted the question whet...