Working-Class Nationalism and Internationalism until 1945: Essays in Global Labour History ed. by Steven Parfitt et al. (review)

Is the study of nationalism in relation to working-class movements and working-class internationalism turning in new directions? The editors of this collection of essays believe that “historians in recent decades have begun to extend the study of working-class internationalism beyond the Internationals, on one hand, and the largely institutional studies of international trade union and union federations on the other” (13). This is a strange claim when considering the seminal works in working-class social history, such as E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, published more than half a century ago, in 1963, and representative of much of the scholarship in the journal Past and Present, founded in 1953. The editors do cite a 2012 article from International Labor and Working-Class History on Indian labor history in a note (13, 14n21), but in their main text they do not mention this scholarly journal, which began in 1972 and is perhaps the most important one publishing in comparative/international working-class history.

The chapter contributions were originally papers presented at the 2015 conference on working-class nationalism and internationalism, held at the University of Nottingham, and tend to reflect the limitations often encountered in these types of conferences. The editors’ introduction has insights but ultimately is far too narrow, even though their return to a discussion of the socialist, and later communist, working-class Internationals has a degree of value given the continued relevance of Marxist theory and practice as one approach to our current global political and economic environment.

The key to understanding the editors’ assertion about working-class history “in recent decades,” however, is related to their discussion of the four Internationals. The first three are well known to historians and are crucial for discussions of the history of the socialists and communists: the First International, led by Marx and his followers; the Second International, with its strongest affiliation being the Social Democrats of Germany; and the Third International — resulting from the 1914 split over whether socialists should support or oppose their own governments in the Great War — formed by the Bolsheviks, later to become the Comintern under the direction of the Soviet Union. But the Fourth International? This was founded by Leon Trotsky’s followers in 1936 in opposition to the Stalinist Comintern. This “International” has not been at the center of historians’ analysis of working-class internationalism, but it has been an obsession with Trotskyist political groups, none of which have held state power or been major Left parties in parliaments.

To understand how the papers in this collection relate to nationalism and internationalism in terms of working-class history requires understanding the influence of Trotskyist theory and historical interpretation on that history. Nevertheless, the editors have taken an open approach and have included papers running counter to an anti-Stalinist position, which include Yiannis Kokosalakis’s intriguing analysis of political instruction to the Soviet Baltic Fleet (1926–40) and Kerrie Holloway’s informative piece on Britain’s Aid Spain Committees during the Civil War. Those not entering the “Stalin/Trotsky” controversy include Christian Dietrich’s well-researched and disturbing piece on the links between colonial policy debate and Labour Zionism and Aurelien Zaragori’s chapter on Christian trade unions and dilemmas of internationalism in the ILO. Suz Garrard’s superb chapter contrasting the poetry response to Giuseppe Garibaldi’s visit (“ ‘Welcome, Garibaldi!’ Factory Poet Ellen Johnston, Working-Class Radicalism, and the Poetics of Victorian Cosmopolitanism”) is set prior to the First International, drawing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetic perspective as a bourgeois liberal in mid-nineteenth-century England and Johnston’s working-class nationalist outlook in Scotland.

In contrast, Trotsky’s politics and theory are explicitly advocated by Dan Gallin in his keynote speech at the Nottingham conference. Gallin, himself a trade union activist, focuses on Edo...