Volume 53 part 1 (April 2008)

Summaries

Ratna Saptari, The Politics of Workers' Contention: The 1999 Mayora Strike in Tangerang, West Java
This paper aims to examine the interplay between individual subjectivities and collective action through a collective action which occurred within a moment of political transition from Suharto's authoritarian regime to a more democratically inclined government . It attempts to highlight some of the problems in understanding the nature of protest and collective action and the construction of workers' identities. By looking at the different actors involved, the way policies and regulations are enacted by state institutions; the strategies of the company management to contain workers' protest actions and to create divisions among them; and the processes of coercion and persuasion underlying workers' collective action, we see the different ways in which power relations are exercised and contested. it allows a closer examination of 'the subjective domain of class systems', the individual responses and the relationship between the individual and the collective. By also following sequence of a strike we are able to see the collaborations and conflicts between the leaders and those who are central in the protest action with those who are at the margins, between those who join and those who do not join but hope to obtain the benefits of the results. This also means that it provides us with a better understanding of the complexities involved when we refer to 'consciousness', 'identities' and 'experiences' as analytical constructs. Such a focus can counter the often simplistic links made between action and intent, between the economic circumstances and political action.

Leen Beyers, From Class to Culture: Immigration, Recession and Daily Ethnic Boundaries in Belgium, 1940s-1990s
Each society has myths about the successful adaptation of former migrants. Historians need to deconstruct these myths by dealing with the imagined boundaries between 'indigenous' and 'foreign' people that give way to them. This essay does so by comparing how children of Polish inter-war immigrants and children of Italian post-war immigrants came to be seen as insiders in the Belgian Limburg mining region. Oral testimonies, associational records and population data reveal that Poles achieved the status of industrious, adapted people around 1960, due to the equal promotion of Polish and indigenous miners' sons in the mines and to the labour migration regime which constructed Italians as unskilled outsiders. Around 1980, the industrial recession caused unemployment among young Italians. However, migration politics has, since the recession, primarily focused on culture. Moreover, European legislation constructed foreignness as non-European. Consequently, it is not class, but European culture which has turned Italians into 'integrated' people.

Wade Matthews, Class, Nation and Capitalist Globalization: Eric Hobsbawm and the National Question
This article will argue that scholars concerned with the nexus between socialism and nationalism have overlooked the work of Eric Hobsbawm, the foremost present-day Marxist historian and a key theorist of modern nationalism. The article will repair that neglect by providing the first systematic analysis of Hobsbawm's encounter with the national question. It will contend that Hobsbawm's work is a key site for those interested in exploring the clash between class consciousness and national identity, and that his historical and political writing provides a unique window on the nexus between nationalism and socialism in the last half of the twentieth century. The article will also suggest that Hobsbawm's changing conception of the relationship between nationalism and socialism is crucial to an understanding of the shifts his politics have undergone in the last three decades or so.

Marc Buggeln, Were Concentration Camp Prisoners Slaves?: The Possibilities and Limits of Comparative History and Global Historical Perspectives
The author discusses the question of whether concentration camp prisoners can be characterized as slaves during the period of their intensified exploitation as forced labourers in the German war economy after 1942. Recent research has negated this question. This finding rests, however, primarily on the fact that the form of slavery practiced in the southern United States was chosen as a reference system and that certain differences are posited as too absolute. The author analyses differences and similarities in selected subject areas between slavery as it was practiced in the American South and the forced labour demanded of concentration camp prisoners. Subsequently, an attempt is made to explain the apparent differences and similarities from a global-historical perspective, and hypotheses towards a history of slavery in the age of globalization are elaborated. The goal here is to criticize the central positioning of slavery in the American South as the normative slavery system and to raise once again the question of the various forms of unfree labour under capitalism.