This introduction reconceptualizes the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a pivotal arena of Cold War labour internationalism by narrating its history through the experiences of actors outside the traditional metropolitan core. It offers the first systematic synthesis of a dispersed body of scholarship on the WFTU, integrating work on communist internationalism, decolonization, gender, and trade union education into a coherent analytical framework. Methodologically, the introduction breaks new ground by adopting an actor-centred approach that foregrounds “subaltern labour leaders” from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and traces their trajectories across multiple scales, from workplaces and national centres to WFTU congresses and UN forums. Reconstructing key moments in the federation’s history, it highlights a polyphony of national internationalisms within a shared communist project and shows how struggles over gender, empire, and sovereignty intersected with, but were not reducible to, East–West bloc politics. In doing so, the introduction advances a more nuanced understanding of the WFTU as both an instrument of state socialism and a generative space for alternative visions of global labour solidarity.

Historians of the Second International have researched extensively the differences among and within member parties in terms of tactics, ideology, and national circumstances. This article illustrates the practice of socialist internationalism by examining how Austrian Victor Adler and Belgian Emile Vandervelde were able to mediate those differences through carefully crafted congress resolutions on three of the most important issues – ministerialism, socialist revisionism, and international conflicts – at the 1900 Paris, 1904 Amsterdam, and 1907 Stuttgart international socialist congresses. Both leaders played vital and complementary roles – the Adler-Vandervelde dynamic – elevating their effectiveness in forging socialist unity primarily between French and German socialism.

Using a rich set of multilingual sources, this article traces the underexplored history of China’s involvement in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) from 1949 to 1966. It details the WFTU’s role in providing an institutional infrastructure for China’s international activism and documents the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ engagements with socialist internationalism and people’s diplomacy.

After 1960, against the backdrop of the Sino–Soviet split, the WFTU became a platform for Chinese dissent against pro-Soviet positions. After a decade of mutual collaboration, China’s position changed dramatically and relations with the WFTU were eventually halted in 1966 due to developments in the international communist movement and the radicalization of China’s internal and external politics. By focusing on the WFTU, the article highlights the possibilities (and constraints) presented by Soviet-backed international organisations for China’s foreign relations, illuminating broader issues related to China’s socialist internationalism, labour diplomacy, and transnational networks during the early Cold War.

This article explores the perspectives of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) on international labour unity during the 1980s and 1990s, a subject largely neglected in previous historical studies. With a focus on high-ranking WFTU officials, it investigates the political and ideological motivations behind the communist federation’s approach to international cooperation, as well as internal debates regarding rapprochement with its Western-oriented counterpart, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). It also examines the polycentric nature of the WFTU, revealing divergent regional perspectives from Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and the varying degrees of support for East–West engagement. The article argues that competing visions of international labour unity within the WFTU intensified internal divisions after 1989 between European and non-European trade unionists.

The article investigates the formation of an industrial workforce in Săvinești, a major center of Romania’s socialist chemical industry. Based on archival sources and oral history interviews, it examines how proletarianization was not fully realized but instead developed as a deliberately maintained dual condition. Industrial employment was combined with long-term commuting, ties to subsistence agriculture, and uneven access to urban housing. Such arrangements reflected the socialist state’s efforts to expand production while managing limited infrastructure and demographic realities. By situating this case within wider debates on proletarianization under socialism, the study offers a more grounded account of class formation in Eastern Europe.

From its founding in 1938 onwards, the activities of the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) were rooted in anti-imperialist struggle. Initially, this was in response to the plundering of Latin America in the service of US economic interests, while later anti-imperialist efforts were directed against the hegemony that Europe and the US exerted over markets and territories in Africa and Asia. In the immediate post-war period, the CTAL engaged in a markedly anti-imperialist discourse. The confederation established solidarity alliances and trade union campaigns committed to supporting causes in distant, culturally diverse places, because they were considered part of the same history of dependence, neglect, and exclusion that had to be overcome to build autonomous nations. This article covers meetings between trade union leaders from different continents, as documented in letters, magazine and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, and the records of workers’ organizations. Working through the CTAL and the World Federation of Trade Unions, these individuals disseminated their beliefs and sought to achieve widespread mobilization for their union and political struggles, with the goal of eradicating imperialism from the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

The two books discussed in this review essay speak to issues of projections implied in Western political thinking in the distinction between the “West” and the “East”. This includes a tradition in “Western” discourse to project features with negative connotations, such as “despotism”, onto a construed “Eastern other”, thus obliterating comparable structures of hierarchy in the “own”, and it is also linked to the heavy ideological load that concepts of “East” carry when it comes to geopolitical projections of otherness, and often enmity. In Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, Jie-Hyun Lim undertakes a sweeping critique of the projections just mentioned and links this with a critique of nationalism as well as current mass politics. In Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, Kolja Lindner is concerned with reconciling postcolonial perspectives with at least some of Karl Marx’s work, insofar as it has been criticized for Orientalist and modernist bias.

In 1949, the British Labour Party had been in power for four years. Domestically, the British government faced post-war reconstruction; internationally, its imperial grip was loosening. Nonetheless, it still ruled over lands in Africa and Asia and controlled resources such as oil in the Middle East. A contradiction emerged between its people-focused internal politics and its condescension in the conduct of foreign and colonial affairs. Concerns around the emerging Cold War infused British imperial policy. Seeing the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a communist vehicle, the British government treated it with suspicion, especially in view of its influence over two areas of imperial interest: the Iranian oil industry and the British colony of Malaya. An examination of the situations in both countries reveals the WFTU’s influence on trade union movements in those regions and uncovers London’s imperial anxieties about its position in the post-war global order.

This article examines how the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) functioned as a contested arena where divergent projects of labour internationalism and decolonization intersected in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the Indian communist trade union leader Shripad Amrit Dange (1899–1991). Drawing on the concept of subaltern internationalism, it analyses how Dange, as WFTU vice-president and executive committee member, sought to appropriate the federation as a vehicle for anti-colonial projects, and how his scope for action was shaped by colonial and post-colonial repression, structural inequalities, and Cold War ideological conflicts. Using materials from the WFTU and All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) collections, along with contemporary journals, the article reconstructs three key phases: the 1945 founding conferences; the contested development of a WFTU Colonial Department and a Pan-Asian initiative; and the post-1949 period, when the federation reoriented itself towards a more explicit anti-colonial programme after the split. Methodologically, the article employs a biographical lens to trace how Dange’s reflections on colonial capitalism and the social composition of the Indian working class fed into debates on decolonization within the WFTU, challenged dominant Western notions, and articulated a vision of post-colonial labour internationalism that linked workplace struggles “from below” to institutional measures “from above”, culminating in his interventions at the fourth world congress in Leipzig in 1957.