Preliminary Programme

Textile workers are usually identified with early Capitalist growth. Moreover, they have been one of the empirical bases for historical materialism. The role of textile workers in connection with state building has been much less under investigation by social historians. One of the reasons for that lacuna is that the development of textile plants in Western countries usually preceded state building. Since the textile industry has been moving over the years to new states, an interesting question emerges: How were textile workers affected by being a part of a state-building project? More questions then emerge on their strategies, their mutual aspirations and dispositions.

To begin to answer these questions, the lecture will focus on textile workers in a new town in Israel, between 1955 and 1967. These textile workers were Jewish immigrants who were settled in a new town in the south. Textile plants were built to supply work and income to those immigrants. The State of Israel supported the plants which were managed by private owners. In sum, the textile industry was more in the interest of the state than it was of interest to the capitalists.

The textile workers of the new town represented a “false consciousness” in Marxist terms. They did not protest over poor salaries or for better work contracts. Nevertheless, different historical developments have different consequences and should be analyzed with different analytic tools, as been discussed over the last decades among labor historians. In the lecture, I will address the problems textile workers had to deal with, problems which were closely linked to the fact that the industry was built by the state and for its’ building. Mutual dispositions developed in relation to the surrounding community, closely connected to spatial conditions. Hence, strategies of textile workers, which were part of state building, were different than those of early industrialization. Textile workers, who were also Jewish immigrants settled in a new town by the state, were targeting a different ‘enemy.' Their war was on their home front, creating protest against the state, and not towards the capitalists. (Show less)

This paper examines the program of modernization with a nationalist twist set up by the leaders of the Romanian Social Institute in interwar Romania, program which they promoted as an innovative and original attempt of constructing the Romanian nation on a scientific basis. I focus here on one particular project initiated by the Institute: the monographic campaigns carried out in the countryside from the mid-1920s until 1939, during which student teams, coordinated by the Institute, studied and worked in Romania’s villages during their summer vacations. In 1938, the campaigns were legally endorsed as the Social Service program, under which every student was required to work for nation during at least one summer at the countryside. My overall argument is that, under a discourse of modernization grounded in national particularities, the monographic campaigns produced significant changes in ideologies of labor, class and gender, as well as in the relationship between the individual and the state. More specifically, I argue that the Social Service challenged the class divide between the rural and urban locations through labor. It did so by changing the connotations of labor as a social sign, more specifically the relationship between physical and intellectual labor. It reevaluated physical labor, by investing it with new social meaning and equating it with community and nation, at the expense of the intellectual labor, which if it was not done for the nation, equaled nothing. However, while it operated changes in the meaning of class, it reinforced a gendered model of labor, which took for granted and promoted in villages a model of gender relations shaped around the private/public divide of the urban middle class. The first part of this paper focuses on the Institute and its agenda and then set within the (highly unstable) political context of 1930s Romania. In the second part, I look at the ways in which labor, class, and gender were being employed and redefined through the workings of the campaigns. (Show less)

The seventies political and social struggles from Villa Constitución city (Santa Fe province, Argentina) show crucial aspects faces of the national struggles which continues until the 1976 coup d'état. This paper is aimed proposed to locate theses struggles in the struggle for power struggle and to discuss them in relation to historical interpretations. The labor conflicts from Villa Constitución express the increasing social mobilization, which shows important changes due
to the new Peronist government in of 1973. After the "Cordobazo" protest in 1969, the political struggle is increasingly militarized until 1976, shaping a civil war scenario. At the beginning, this political violent process is accomplished by the mass political
violence, but, since 1973, the Peronism - a movement based on labor – break the parallel relation between political violence and mass protest. The growth of the political violence is explained by the struggle of the social forces, that's it, as a social conflict. Nevertheless, an analysis on armed facts and labor contentions shows that the progressive militarization is dominated by the state repression (legal and illegal) rather than by popular mobilization. (Show less)