In the 1970s, young activists of the Turkish revolutionary left found themselves in France as refugees, students, or workers. Amongst them, members of Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), galvanized by the intensity of the struggles in Turkey, decided to do their bit by organizing migrant workers from Turkey. So they organized the struggle of undocumented garment workers in Paris in 1980. At the end of a mobilization involving hunger strike, occupation, marches, and public demonstrations, several thousand workers obtained victory. During this episode, Devrimci Yol militants combined in a singular way the anti-imperialist discourse with an analysis of the conditions of exploitation of foreign labour in Europe. However, when the September 1980 coup d’état led to massive repression and arrests in Turkey, activists in France were forced to abandon their effort towards immigrant workers to concentrate on supporting their imprisoned comrades or those forced into exile. Based on archival material and interviews in Turkish and French, the study of this episode allows us to reflect on the possibilities of politics inscribed in the multiple temporalities of a transnational space between the global North and South. Moreover, it explores the tensions between anti-imperialist and immigration labour movements.

The 1960s and 1970s in Spain were a period of intense social mobilization against Franco’s dictatorship. The clandestine and democratic labour movement was the main political agent behind efforts to improve working conditions and to achieve a political transition towards democracy in Spain. However, within this context, domestic workers were alien to this process. The Francoist dictatorship did not consider domestic service to be a form of employment, and thus excluded maids from the labour laws and social protection measures that were reserved for workers and their families. This also meant that when the anti-Franco unions began to gain strength in mobilizing many sectors of the workforce, domestic service was not among them. However, the lack of concern from the main trade unions towards domestic workers does not mean that there were no alternatives for collective action outside the purview of traditional working-class organizations. The Young Christian Workers, a Catholic workers’ organization born in Belgium in 1924 that began to take a stand in Spain from the 1960s onwards against the dictatorship and in favour of democracy and socialism, did focus on domestic workers’ struggles.

The election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on 5 July 2024 after fourteen years of Conservative (mis)rule may represent an important turning point in British political history. At any rate, this was how the new Prime Minister represented his party’s ‘landslide’ victory. Starmer made two short speeches that day, the first to supporters outside London’s Tate Modern art gallery, the second to the wider public outside 10 Downing Street. Similar in many ways, they were angled differently. The keynote of the first was the necessity for ‘Change’, which had been Labour’s endlessly repeated slogan during the election campaign. What that would mean in terms of practical policies designed to transform the country had been unclear to say the least, and Starmer was loath to provide any real illumination still. But he was emphatic about what had made his electoral success possible, which was that he and his supporters had ‘changed the party’ – thinly veiled reference to the defeat of the left alternative that developed after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in 2015

The Great Belfast Strike of January–February 1919, although hardly explored until now, was part of the movement to reduce the working week, which affected large British industrial centres in the aftermath of the First World War. Apart from its longevity (four weeks), this social dispute was characterized by its organizational mode, which some, notably in the English and Irish press, went as far as to equate with that of a local soviet. Since revolutionary Ireland was to be the scene of a hundred or so experiments in workers’ self-management under the name of ‘soviet’, mainly in the south and south-west of the island, it is therefore questionable whether the Belfast Strike Committee encompassed ‘some of the attributes of an industrial Soviet’, as the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent argued, and if so, to what extent it paved the way for the subsequent Irish soviets. To this end, this article sets out to conduct a comparative study using the ‘Irish Soviets’ methods’ – as defined by one of the protagonists of the Drogheda soviet of September 1921 – as an analytical tool.

The novelist Charlotte Brontë and the historian E.P. Thompson both claimed that the Yorkshire Luddites of the 1810s were Antinomians, descendants of the seventeenth-century radical Christian sects who claimed, as Christ’s elect, that they were not bound by the (moral) law. This article follows a thread that links Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (in which he made this claim) with his later study of William Blake, Witness against the Beast, which, far from being just an esoteric study of an esoteric figure, uncovered an antinomian tradition that linked the radicalism and protest of the ‘age of reason’ with the seventeenth century. In doing so, it revisits the relationship between Thompson and religion, still an underexplored aspect and too overshadowed by his polemical attacks on Methodism. Having sketched this antinomian tradition, the article then turns to Brontë’s novel Shirley, which recounts the Luddism of the West Riding, and situates it in the context of Thompson’s antinomian tradition, exploring why Brontë chose to present the Luddites as Antinomians. The final section tests the hypothesis of Brontë and Thompson that Luddites may have been Antinomians through a case study of Luddism in the West Riding and the place of religious enthusiasm in working-class protest and culture in the early nineteenth century.

This article takes a reflexive approach in a case study of the dubious career of a syndicalist trade unionist and journalist just before and during the First World War. E.L. Pratt was an elusive tr...