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Volume I, Number 1, Jun. 2012 Volume I Number 4 January 2014 International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts Table of contents LETTER FROM THE EDITOR .............................................................................. 5 THE CENTRALITY OF SOCIAL RELATIONS: E.P. THOMPSON’S CONCEPT OF CLASS AND THE RENEWAL OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ........................... 6 GARY BLANK ..................................................................................................... 6 LATIN AMERICA: DEPENDENCY AND SUPER-EXPLOITATION ....................... 34 ADRIÁN SOTELO VALENCIA ............................................................................. 34 GLOBALISATION, TRADE UNIONS AND LABOUR MIGRATION: OLD DILEMMAS, NEW OPPORTUNITIES ................................................................ 49 RONALDO MUNCK ........................................................................................... 49 WORKING-CLASS HISTORIOGRAPHY IN FRANCE, ITALY AND SPAIN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY (1939/45-1982).......................................................... 74 ROBERTO CEAMANOS LLORENS ...................................................................... 74 WAS THERE A “GREAT LABOUR UNREST” IN THE NETHERLANDS? ............ 84 SJAAK VAN DER VELDEN ................................................................................. 84 THE FRANCOIST PERSECUTION AND REPRESSION OF GALICIANS OF PORTUGUESE ORIGIN IN GALICIA (1936-1940): A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORICAL APPROACH ............................................................................... 110 DIONISIO PEREIRA, ANDRÉS DOMÍNGUEZ ALMANSA AND LOURENZO FERNÁNDEZ PRIETO ..................................................................................... 110 POLITICS IN THE PERONIST UNIONS (1946-1955) ....................................... 134 MARCOS SCHIAVI .......................................................................................... 134 THE BIRTH OF AN INTERNATIONAL ANARCHO-SYNDICALIST CURRENT .... 150 FRANÇOIS GUINCHARD ................................................................................. 150 OUR AUTHORS .............................................................................................. 172 ABSTRACTS ................................................................................................... 175 International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts Editorial Board Alvaro Bianchi Andréia Galvão Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, UNICAMP UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil) (Campinas, Brazil) Marcel van der Linden Raquel Varela International Institute of Social History Instituto de História Contemporânea, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) Serge Wolikow Sjaak van der Velden Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Independent researcher Université de Bourgogne (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) (Dijon, France) Xavier Domènech Sampere Centre d'Estudis sobre les Èpoques Franquista i Democràtica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) Executive Editor António Simões do Paço Instituto de História Contemporânea Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) Assistant Editor (English language) Sean Purdy Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) Contact [email protected] Website http://workersoftheworldjournal.net/ Workers of the World is the journal of the International Association Strikes and Social Conflicts, born in Lisbon on March 2011. The Association now has the participation of more than three dozen academic institutions from Europe, Africa, North and South America. Website: http://iassc-mshdijon.in2p3.fr/ Advisory Board Andrea Komlosy Universität Wien (Austria) Angelo D’Orsi Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy) Anita Chan University of Technology, Sydney (Australia) Antony Todorov New Bulgarian University, Sofia (Bulgaria) Armando Boito UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil) Asef Bayat University Urbana-Champaign (Illinois, USA) Asli Odman Independent researcher (Turkey) Babacar Fall University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal) Beverly Silver Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA) Bryan Palmer Trent University (Peterborough, Ontário, Canada) Christian DeVito Honorary Fellow, IISH, Amsterdam Claire Cerruti University of Johannesburg (South Africa) Cristina Borderías Universitat de Barcelona (Spain) Deborah Bernstein Haifa University (Israel) Elizabeth Faue Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan, USA) Fernando Rosas Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) François Jarrige Université de Bourgogne (France) Gregory S. Kealey University of New Brunswick (Canada) Jean Vigreux Université de Besançon (France) Javier Tébar Universidad Rovira i Virgili (Spain) John Kelly Birkbeck College, University of London (UK) Kevin Murphy University of Massachusetts (Boston, USA) Manuel Peréz Ledesma Universidad Autonoma Madrid (Spain) Marcelo Badaró Matos Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil) Martí Marin Universidad Autonoma Barcelona (Spain) Michael Hall UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil) Michael Seidman University of North Carolina Wilmington (USA) Mirta Lobato Universidad Buenos Aires (Argentina) Nitin Varma Humboldt Universität, Berlin (Germany) Nicole Mayer-Ahuja Universität Göttingen (Germany) Nicolás Iñigo Carrera PIMSA (Argentina) Paula Godinho Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) Peter Birke Koordinierender Redakteur von sozial.geschichte online Procopis Papastratis Pantheion University (Athens, Greece) Ratna Saptari Leiden University, (Netherlands) Ricardo Antunes UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil) Ruben Vega Universidad Oviedo (Spain) Ruy Braga Universidade São Paulo (Brazil) Silke Neunsinger Arbark (Sweden) Verity Burgmann University of Melbourne (Australia) Wendy Goldman Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) Xavier Vigna Université de Bourgogne, France 5 Letter from the editor his is the fourth issue of Workers of the World – International Journal on T Strikes and Social Conflicts. Differently from what we might start calling ‘usual’, this issue is not thematic (as the previous one – and the next, which will be dedicated to “Conflit in contemporary rural world: new perspectives on an old problem”, and it doesn’t have a dossier either. This is for a very good reason – authors from different continents keep providing us with a constant flow of article proposals which can’t wait (too much) to be published. So in this issue we have articles from Northern and Southern Europe, North and South America, from young researchers as François Guinchard, Gary Blank and Marcos Schiavi and others no longer as young… You can have an overview of the articles and a short notice about their authors at the end of this issue. We regret though not having the possibility to publish in this issue any article from Africa or Asia, related with the struggles of the large detachments of the Indian, Chinese and Indonesian working classes, to mention just a few of the most significant ones. This is also an invitation to researchers worldwide to propose such articles. Workers of the World is the journal of the International Association Strikes and Social Conflicts (http://iassc-mshdijon.in2p3.fr/), born in Lisbon, in March 2011. The Association membership includes now more than three dozen academic institutions from four continents. Workers of the World is an academic journal with peer review published in English, for which original manuscripts may be submitted in Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese. It publishes original articles, interviews and book reviews in the field of labour history and social conflicts in an interdisciplinary, global, long term historical and non Eurocentric perspective. Articles should be sent, according to the Editorial and publishing rules that you may find in our site (http://workersoftheworldjournal.net/), to the executive editor at [email protected]. António Simões do Paço Executive Editor Workers of the World, Volume I, Number 4, Jan. 2014 The Centrality of Social Relations: E.P. Thompson’s Concept of Class and the Renewal of Historical Materialism1 Gary Blank P. Thompson was an avowedly Marxist historian, but did not hide his E. aversion for what he termed Marx’s “Grundrisse face.” Marx’s critique of political economy, Thompson suggested, only confronted the political economists on their own turf. Marx became entrapped within the “circuits of capital,” developing a highly conceptualized and abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of production in which determinism appeared to be “absolute.” According to Thompson, it was necessary to make the analytical shift from the circuits of capital to capitalism—in which the hypotheses of historical materialism were not simply assumed, but shown to be so historically. Against Marx’s allegedly absolute determinism, Thompson posited a “historical” version of determination as the “exerting of pressures” or “logic of process,” in which determinations emanating from one direction are met with countervailing determinations from another.2 Without suggesting that the differences between Marx and Thompson are unimportant, however, it is possible to see a similar dialectical method at work between them, at least with respect to historical process and determination. Rather than engaging in a detailed historical account of capitalism’s emergence, Marx sought to identify the “economic law of motion” of capitalism at its highest level of abstraction.3 Yet, as Geoffrey Pilling has noted: “The task of Marx’s critique of political 1 I would like to thank George Comninel for the intellectual guidance he provided in writing an early version of this paper,
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