Preliminary Programme

Historically, the relationship between the temporalities of economics and politics has been one of the key determinants of national working-class collectivity. In the Turkish case, the process of the formation of an industrial proletariat was simultaneous with the process of nation-building. The material and discursive interactions between these two processes, I argue, had a significant effect on working-class political and cultural behaviour. Patriotic references and a class-transcended image of national labour characterized the state’s language on factory work and shaped the political language of the labour movement. However, as well as serving the function of containing and disciplining of the workforce, the nationalist discourse provided workers with the opportunity of political participation by recognizing them as indispensable members of the national community. In this paper, I particularly focus on the interactions between the nationalist and the working-class political discourses with regards to the emergence of a language of class at a state factory. I research the process through which the category of “Turkish worker” as a form of subjectivity emerged by means of studying the ways workers related to the image of this state factory as a national site of production and their labour as national labour. (Show less)

With its definition of first survivors’ association in the département of Isère, the ADIRP has never stopped being, since its creation on the 16th of June 1945, the protector of the local ex-fighters and survivors’ Rights. This has been approved and developed far more by the members’ personality and their political implications, than by the more will of the association. Indeed they had all been very active communist militants since the Thirties, and their fight against the Nazis was the same during the War. And, even if this fights now over, another started in the context of the Cold War. It appeared in the opposition developped against the different governments in the watchful eyes of the communist Party and in the guideline of the specific memorial comprehension – the ideology of Victory - . The communist party, with about 75.000 executed victims, is the party which counted the highest rate of loss during the war. In Isère, the ADIRP was one of the groups in the local communist network.
1953 was the last round in the legislative fight to get the title of fighter for the political survivors of November 11th 1943, with the title of Résistants and survivors (DIR). Once claims for the first recognition were achieved, a new era began, that lasted until 1968. The speeches were clearly political, the claims and actions were made in the name of the PCF, especially in the traditional “red cities”: Saint Martin d’Hères and Fontaine. At this stage, the link between the memories of their battles and the militancy was been told, developped by words, actions and leaders.
So, the importance and the role of this association must be presented through three axes. Men and women leaders in the group imposed their ideology and decisions as much as the other members and the local States structures. To do so, they affirmed a political legitimacy in Isère in the name of their memories. However, this strategy appeared more and more as a tool for the militancy speeches, and for the unique political action in Saint Martin d’Hères and Fontaine in the protests and the oppositions against governments. Finally, if these survivors were well recognized, they also wanted to pass on their memories and beliefs to the new generation, and in particular to the children’s members to insure the same speeches, actions and the protection of their ideology. So, this presentation will put in evidence the actions of an association in political protests in the name of a memory, the one of the communist survivors and their network, opposed against politics, political leaders and others survivors affiliated to another political behaviour.
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This paper deals with the Swedish-speaking working-class and their political activism in Finland during the time-period 1900-1930. The paper studies the relations between Swedish- and Finnish-speaking workers in a small industrial community in Finland from a class-, gender- and the perspective of ethnicity. Applying a micro-historical approach, the purpose is to share light on the lost history of Swedish-speaking workers and their political activism in Finland and how identity mattered for their political behavior, but also to reveal the lost history of internal disputes within the working-class during the period of industrialization. By raising questions on class, gender and ethnicity as identity-shaping categories and their role in political activism, this paper aims in a broader sense discuss problems of methodological nationalism and teleological narratives in Finnish (but also in general) labour-history. Previous Finnish and Nordic labour-history has widely focused on the peaceful development of the Nordic societies towards the ”Nordic welfare-model”, also previous studies has not studied working-class political activism from a intersectional perspective on class, gender and ethnicity. This paper however choses to contest previous narratives by altering the scale of observation to the microscopic level and focus on the local-politics and the political culture in the small industrial community. A special focus will be on local labour-struggles or participation in national labour-struggles and contentious politics; how was class, gender and ethnicity expressed by the participants in these historical events? How can these events reveal the ”hidden structure” of tensions and relations among different workers in the community? The paper suggests that shifting from the national perspective towards a perspective of everyday life and the microhistorical, it is possible to deal with general theoretical problems concerning the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity in working-class political mobilization, and re-thinking the roots of contemporary Finland. (Show less)

The paper is based on a work in progress concerning the daily lives and collective action of working boys and girls during the long sixties, young men and women who attended night schools in the evenings after having finished their daily waged work. They formed a part of youth population, who experienced both the constraints and fears of usually precarious forms of child and youth labor and the hopes of an upward mobility fostered by the dynamics of post-war economic growth. At the time, Greek society was located on the economic “periphery” of the West but at the centre of the Cold War ideological and political conflict, due to the experience of an elongated Civil War (1946-1949) which bestowed a rather turbulent political life to the country. So, while the typical image of youth existence and mobilization during the long sixties more often than not refers to university students, the study of young workers –“working pupils”, as they identified themselves- within the same period opens the possibility of more complex comparisons regarding the processes of social transformation between different national and social settings. Is it possible to detect the various “unfamiliar combinations” of the long sixties youth cultures -such as that between consumer behavior, on the one hand, and extreme politicization, on the other- in contexts far less than spectacular such as work and school? How were the experiences of work and education interrelated within the daily practices and collective action of the working pupils and in what ways did they affect conceptions of the present and expectations about the future? How did they negotiate different levels of control and resistance that arose in the workplace, the classroom or the schoolyard? How was age and gender identity construction intertwined with class positions and identifications (or disidentifications) and within what kind of practices, cultural and political, did that process evolve? I am examining these subjects using both archival material and oral testimonies. But, besides their historical interest, I think that these questions are also relevant for the current conjuncture of financial, political, and educational crisis which tends to vanquish the professional and social prospects of the younger generations, clearly in Greece but more or less in the wider European scale. (Show less)