Ours to Master and to Own

Elaine Bernard is the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program and the Harvard Trade Union Program at Harvard Law School. Born and raised in Canada, Bernard has a BA from the University of Alberta, an MA from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD from Simon Fraser University. Her current research and teaching interests are in the areas of international comparative labor movements, union leadership, and governance, and the role of unions in promoting civil society, democracy, and economic growth.

Alberto Bonnet holds a doctorate of social sciences from the BUAP (Mexico) and magister in economy and licentiate in philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). He is regularly an instructor and researcher at the UBA and at the University of Quilmes. These days his main interests include, on one hand, certain problems linked with the analysis of accumulation, domination, and social struggle in contemporary Argentina ; and, on the other hand, more theoretical problems linked with the capitalist state and the class struggle. The author of several books and articles, he is currently completing an essay, “The Constellation of the Red Stars,” on Marxism and workers’ councils.

Sheila Cohen has been a trade union activist, educator, researcher, and writer for many years. From 1990 to 1995 she edited and distributed the rank-and-file trade union paper Trade Union News and organized a number of conferences and day schools with trade union activists. In 2006, her book Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power, and How to Get It Back was published by Pluto Press, and she has also produced a series of pamphlets and articles on the nature of work and trade unionism. She has been involved with the National Shop Stewards’ Network and is employed with the Work and Employment Research Unit (WERU) at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Patrick Cuninghame

Patrick Cuninghame is a lecturer in sociology and politics at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. He is a member of the editorial board of Argumentos and Societies without Borders and an ISA-RC30 (Sociology of Work) executive committee member. He received a PhD in sociology from Middlesex University, London, in 2002 with a thesis on the Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy) movement in Italy in the 1970s. He was a member of the editorial committees of Capital & Class and London Notes, and has published articles in various languages on autonomous social movements in Britain, Italy, Mexico, and Latin America.

Pietro Di Paola is a lecturer in history at the University of Lincoln (UK). His research interests include the history of anarchism, political diaspora, and contemporary social movements. In 1997 he graduated from the University of Venice with a thesis analyzing the experience of working-class autonomy in a factory in the industrial area of Porto Marghera (Venice) between 1969 and 1980. He obtained his PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2004 with the dissertation Italian Anarchists in London, 1870–1914. His publications include Breve storia dell’anarchia (Rome: Carocci), “Il Biennio Rosso” in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, edited by Immanuel Ness (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009); Rudolf Rocker, Sindrome da filo spinato. Rapporto di un tedesco internato a Londra (1914–1918), edited by Pietro Di Paola (Caserta: Spartaco, 2006); Errico Malatesta, Autobiografia mai scritta, edited by Piero Brunello and Pietro Di Paola (Caserta: Spartaco, 2003); “Gli anarchici tra le due guerre” in Guerre, anteguerra, dopoguerra. Il fascismo e la seconda guerra mondiale, vol. II, edited by M. Isnenghi (Turin: UTET, 2008).

Andy Durgan lives and works in Barcelona. He has published in various languages on different aspects of Spanish history, in particular relating to the civil war, its origins, and the labor movement. These include B.O.C. 1930–1936: El Bloque Obrero y Campesino (Barcelona: Laertes, 1996) and The Spanish Civil War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). He was historical advisor for the award-winning Ken Loach film Land and Freedom (1996) and a founding member of the Fundació Andreu Nin.

Donny Gluckstein

Donny Gluckstein’s previous books include The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy (2006), The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (1999), The Tragedy of Bukharin (1994), and The Western Soviets: Workers’ Councils versus Parliament, 1915–1920 (1985). He is the coauthor, with Tony Cliff, of The Labour Party: A Marxist History (1988) and Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926 (1986). Donny lectures in history in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is a trade union activist and member of his union’s national executive. He is also a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (UK).

Ralf Hoffrogge was born in northern Germany in 1980. He studied history, psychology, and political science at the Freie Universität Berlin. His studies focused on political economy, Marxist theory, and the history of social movements, especially the German students’ movement in the former West Germany as well as German labor history; a second focus was the history of fascism and the Holocaust. For the academic year 2005–2006 he was granted a Fulbright and studied for two semesters at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. During his time at the Freie Universität, Hoffrogge was a student activist and organized campaigns against the privatization of the German educational system and published historical and political articles on educational issues. He was also elected to the student parliament at the university and served as vice chairman of the FU student council (AStA). In 2008 Hoffrogge finished his masters degree and his thesis was published as a monograph entitled Richard Müller—Der Mann hinter der Novemberrevolution (Richard Müller—the Man behind the German Revolution). Since 2009 Hoffrogge has been a PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam. He has received a scholarship from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation to support his doctoral work. His PhD thesis will focus on the biography of Werner Scholem (1895–1940), a German-Jewish Communist active in the 1920s, who was one of the few German Communist officials to oppose the politics of Stalin as early as 1925.

Marina Kabat holds a PhD in history and is a specialist in labor studies. A graduate of the University of Buenos Aires, Kabat serves as a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), which conducts studies of industry, the organization of work, and labor conflicts from historical and contemporary contexts. She coordinates the CEICS (Center for Studies in Social Sciences), a leading social science research group in Argentina. Kabat is editor of Razón y Revolución, a Marxist journal. She is also the author of Labour Process and Working Class in the Footwear Industry, 1880–1940 (Ediciones RyR, 2005) and has published numerous articles, including “Changes in the Work Organization of the Argentinean Footwear Industry” and “The Relative Surplus Population: An Obscure Marxist Conception of the Working Class.” Kabat teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and has developed extensive outreach, focusing on training for teachers engaged in labor activism.

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski is a former researcher in the Polish Academy of Sciences; he is currently the assistant editor in chief of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique; an independent researcher in history, theories and strategies of labor, national liberation and revolutionary movements; and a militant of the workers’ movement. In 1980–81 he was a regional leader of the trade union Solidarity in a large industrial center and a national leader of the movement for workers’ self-management. He has spoken and written extensively about this experience, including a book, Rendez-nous nos usines! Solidarnosc dans le combat pour l’autogestion ouvrière (La Brèche: Paris, 1985); and an interview (C. Phelps, “Solidarnosc in Lodz: An Interview with Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski”), which appeared in International Labor and Working-Class History (no. 73, Spring 2008).

David Mandel teaches political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where he specializes in the Soviet Union and its successor states. His main research interest has been that region’s working class, its history, and its contemporary situation. He is a longtime union and left political activist in Canada, as well as in Russia and Ukraine, where he cofounded the School for Worker Democracy. Among his publications on workers are Labour After Communism: Autoworkers and Their Unions in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2004); Rabotyagi: Perestroika and After, the View from Below (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993); Perestroika and Soviet Society: Rebirth of the Soviet Labour Movement (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991); The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (London: Macmillan Press, l984); The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (London: Macmillan Press, 1983).

Goran Musić studied international trade in the economics faculty at the University of Belgrade, where he was active in various grassroots initiatives for labor and student rights. In 2007 he defended a double MA thesis in global history at the University of Vienna and University of Leipzig on the comparative analysis of the 1968 movements in Belgrade and Mexico City. He is currently researching the Yugoslav labor movement in the decade preceding the breakup of the country as part of the PhD program at the European University Institute in Florence, and collaborating on a project tracing the development of hip-hop culture in Serbia.

Henrique T. Novaes

Henrique T. Novaes graduated in economic science at São Paulo State University (UNESP). He earned his masters degree at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil, where he conducted research on Latin American recovered factories and the history of workers’ self-management of factories and of agrarian class struggles. He is currently completing his PhD program at Unicamp, where his dissertation examines the relationship between the university and Latin American social movements. Novaes is author of the book The Fetish of Technology: the Experience of Recovered Factories (Expressão Popular-FAPESP, 2007).

Peter Robinson was an active socialist in Britain building support for the Portuguese Revolution. He traveled to Portugal in the summer of 1975 and worked as a political organizer in Lisbon with revolutionary left and workers’ organizations from October 1975 to June 1976. He returned to Portugal in the late 1970s and mid-1980s to conduct research, especially through interviewing activists. He holds an M Phil from the Centre for Sociology and Social University, Open University. He is author of “Portugal 1974–75: The Forgotten Dream,” Socialist History Society, Occasional Papers, no. 9, and “Portugal 1974–75,” in Revolutionary Rehearsals, edited by Colin Baker.

Maurício Sardá de Faria

Maurício Sardá de Faria is a professor of sociology at Federal University of Pariba in Brazil and holds a PhD in political sociology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where he studied labor and work. He is the director of the National Secretariat of Solidarity Economy (SENAES) at the Ministry of Labour and Employment of Brazil.

Gabriela Scodeller

Gabriela Scodeller received a PhD in history from the National University of La Plata, Argentina. She carried out research at the Gino Germani Institute of the University of Buenos Aires. She teaches at the National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, specializing in the history of the Argentine labor movement. Scodeller’s work currently focuses on workers’ consciousness and intra-class struggles as a constituting element in the processes of class formation. Her recent publications include “Praxis and the Workers’ Movement,” Revista Utopia y Praxis Latinoamericana; “Labour Struggles in Argentinas’ Recent History: A Standpoint,” A Contracorriente; and “Workers’ Consciousness: Notes for a Historical Approach,” Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales.

Arup Kumar Sen is assistant professor in the Department of Commerce, Serampore College, West Bengal, India. He completed his PhD in the Department of Business Management at the University of Calcutta. His special area of research interest is labor history; his PhD topic was “A Study of Labour Management Relations in Select Industries in Eastern and Western India: 1918–39.” Dr. Sen is a regular contributor to the Indian left publication Economic & Political Weekly as well as to Mainstream. His current research and writing focus on land acquisition, the deterioration of peasant life (de-peasantization), and the growth of state violence in the Indian state of West Bengal.

Samuel J. Southgate

Samuel J. Southgate is a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University. He recently completed a masters degree with distinction in Middle Eastern studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where he wrote his dissertation on the relationship between nationalist and Islamist movements and ideologies in Algeria, Lebanon, and Palestine. His research interests include North African history, social movements and contentious politics, Islamism, and theories of nationalism. Southgate was a journalist in the UK and a branch officer of the National Union of Journalists.

Jafar Suryomenggolo

Jafar Suryomenggolo is a research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. His doctoral thesis examines the history of the Indonesian labor movement during the revolution. His publications include “Labour Law without ‘Rights’ in Indonesia: The Making of Undang-Undang Kerdja 1948,” International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations 25, no. 4 (2009); “Early Years of Serikat Buruh Kereta Api (Railway Workers Union): Formation and Orientation,” Tounan Ajia Kenkyu 45, no. 4 (2008); and “Labour, Politics and the Law: A Legal-Political Analysis of Labour Law Reform Program,” Labour and Management in Development 9 (2008).

Dr. Alan Tuckman is a senior lecturer in human resource management at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses on work, employment, and society, including the construction, chemical, and automobile industries, and most recently within a call center. His work includes the analysis of factory occupations, strikes, and sociology of organizations, time studies, working-class agency, and working-class consciousness. He is author of: “Defying Extinction? The Revival of the Strike in UK Employment Relations,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, September 2010.

Victor Wallis teaches in the liberal arts department at the Berklee College of Music and is the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy. He previously taught political science for many years at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. He first encountered worker-control issues in the context of the aborted Chilean revolution of 1970–73. His articles—encompassing an array of subjects including ecology, political strategies, the U.S. left, and Latin American revolutionary film—have appeared in Monthly Review, Capitalism Nature Socialism, New Political Science, Socialism and Democracy, Jump Cut, Organization & Environment, and the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus; his writings on ecological socialism have been translated into nine languages.