Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity

Historian Delalande (coeditor, A World of Public Debts) delivers a scholarly take on the development and influence of the mid-19th-century international workers’ movement. The International Workingmen’s Association, founded in 1864 and later known as the First International, “pressed globalization into the service of those men and women who were busy creating it,” Delalande argues, forming a framework in which abstract concepts of solidarity could be expressed as collective actions, including labor strikes. The First International and other groups emerged alongside the modern state and global capitalism, and were riven by internal debates between socialist, anarchist, and moderate factions over the necessary degree of opposition to those institutions. British trade unions, with their regularized dues-paying and accounting, provided crucial financial support to other European workers’ groups, but were also criticized as too condescending and conservative, especially by refugees from the 1871 Paris Commune. Institutional dissolution and inefficacy are common threads: the First International self-destructed in 1872, strikes and work stoppages often failed to accomplish their goals, and international donations didn’t always arrive in time. However, Delalande argues that the “repertoire of actions of solidarity” developed by these organizations enabled the international solidarity of the mid-20th century. Though nonspecialists may find themselves adrift in a sea of names and events, this is a persuasive reinterpretation of a period of labor activism often viewed as “chaotic, conflictual, and contradictory.” (Jan.)