The World-Historical Opening and the 1945 Conferences

The idea of a unified international trade union movement gained momentum during World War II. In 1941, the British TUC and the Soviet all-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (ACCTU) renewed contact, encouraged by the wartime alliance and a shared need to coordinate labour support for the anti-fascist struggle.Footnote ¹⁹ These initiatives were embedded in broader political contexts: demands for peace and social reconstruction grew not only in the Allied countries but also among populations subjected to fascist occupation and colonial rule. For many trade unionists, the collapse of the pre-war international labour movement, combined with the urgency of wartime mobilization, rendered a compromise between social democrats and communists both necessary and conceivable.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, there was agreement that any new federation had to be more inclusive than the “Amsterdam International”, officially the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU, 1919–1945). As Carolien Stolte has noted, however, the election of the staunchly anti-communist British union leader Walter Citrine, who had formerly been at the helm of the IFTU, as WFTU president already sent a problematic signal regarding the likely limits of this inclusivity.Footnote ²¹

The WFTU secretariat did seek to move beyond the IFTU’s narrow base.Footnote ²² The IFTU had long been criticized for its weak global representation, with only a handful of Afro-Asian unions joining in the 1930s.Footnote ²³ This absence did not stem from a lack of contact with these unions but from the perception, among decolonizing actors, that the IFTU was not a credible body to turn to with their concerns.Footnote ²⁴ In contrast, the Profintern had explicitly supported anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles and helped to establish initiatives such as the League Against Imperialism and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers.Footnote ²⁵ But with Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power and the seventh Comintern Congress of 1935, the Comintern abandoned its earlier anti-colonial emphasis. Prominent intellectuals from colonial countries, including the Indian Marxist M.N. Roy and the Pan-Africanist George Padmore, distanced themselves from Soviet socialism and sought alternative frameworks for anti-imperialist internationalism.Footnote ²⁶ These interwar experiences left a lasting imprint on the generation of activists who, in the mid-1940s, returned to the international stage and saw in the plans for a united trade union federation a renewed chance to push their agendas.

The 1945 conferences of the WFTU thus unfolded at a moment that may be described as a “world-historical opening”.Footnote ²⁷ Delegates from across the globe, including many who had been active in interwar networks, converged to debate the structure and orientation of a new federation. The London conference in February 1945 brought together 135 delegates and thirty observers representing around forty national trade unions and some sixty million workers, alongside representatives of international bodies and observers from neutral countries. Newly represented countries included Brazil, British Guiana, Ceylon, China, Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Gambia, the Gold Coast, Guatemala, India, Iran, Jamaica and Barbados, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia, Palestine, Panama, Puerto Rico, Sierra Leone, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay.Footnote ²⁸ The fragmentation of the Indian labour movement was reproduced at this level: in addition to the AITUC delegation, which included Dange, R.A. Khedgikar, and K. Boomla, the Indian Federation of Labour was represented by A.K. Mukerji, Tyab Shaikh, and I. Ramsingh.Footnote ²⁹ It is striking that no delegates from Portuguese or Belgian colonies attended, which likely reflected stricter colonial controls over international travel as well as political reluctance to allow colonial representatives to appear at such forums.Footnote ³⁰

Despite the rhetoric of inclusivity, decision-making power within the WFTU remained concentrated in the hands of European, US, and Soviet delegates. Representation on the executive committee was apportioned according to membership size and financial strength. The Soviet, US, and British unions each held three seats, whereas other regions were grouped together. West Indian and Latin American unions were represented by Lázaro PeñaFootnote ³¹ and Vicente Lombardo Toledano;Footnote ³² one seat was allocated jointly to India and Ceylon (held by Dange and V.B. Karnik) and one to Africa (held by Brian GoodwinFootnote ³³). The influential executive bureau, however, included no representatives from Africa or South Asia. Chaired by Citrine, the bureau counted among its vice-presidents Vassili V. Kuznetsov (ACCTU), Sidney Hillman (CIO), Léon Jouhaux (Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour), CGT), Giuseppe Di Vittorio (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour), CGIL), and Evert Kupers (Nederlands Verbond van Vakverenigingen (Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions), NVV), alongside Lombardo Toledano and the Chinese trade unionist Xuefan Chu.Footnote ³⁴ This institutional architecture structurally limited the influence of delegates from colonial and semi-colonial territories, even as their presence was hailed as a hallmark of the federation’s global reach.

Two political camps formed with diverging views on colonialism: those whose governments still owned colonies were reluctant to publicly articulate their political views, because they could find themselves in a conflict of interests between supporting national foreign policy and the goals of the WFTU.Footnote ³⁵ Many delegates from colonial or semi-colonial countries saw themselves as communists, even if they defined what that meant in very different ways. But they saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a great example for their own movements and in some cases had also had contact with Moscow in the interwar period or even received training there.Footnote ³⁶ Many had been imprisoned for their political beliefs, so their support for communism also arose from a certain opposition to their governments. Elsewhere, I explore the question of how the demands for decolonization went hand in hand with communist ideas and argue that many of the actors developed their beliefs out of communist ideologies without following them dogmatically. They were communist actors with their own globalization project: a project that was directed against racism, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism but also against the globalization projects of the US and of West European and Soviet countries.Footnote ³⁷

All this applied to Dange. In 1929, he, along with thirty others, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy against the British Crown. In court, he spoke openly about his sympathy for communism and Marxism.Footnote ³⁸ A biography describes how Dange “lived under the banner of Communism which was the foundation of his thinking and his being”.Footnote ³⁹ He supported Marxist ideology by arguing that:

He was convinced of orthodox Marxist ideology but sought to infuse it with the historical and cultural contexts of Indian reality. One striking feature of Dange’s conception of the Indian path to communism was that working-class unity could not be achieved without Hindu and Muslim unity. He remained true to this belief in later years. In the early 1960s, he commented on developments in the Cold War as follows:

The WFTU conference in London in February 1945 coincided with the Yalta Conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, which underscored the extent to which the WFTU was operating in the shadow of high-level intergovernmental negotiations. Trade unions were under pressure to formulate positions on the war and on post-war reconstruction if they wished to be taken seriously as global actors. Debates about peace, fascism, and reconstruction dominated the agenda. It was Lombardo Toledano who first sought to broaden the discussion beyond Europe by insisting that the situation in the colonies needed to be addressed. Only after repeated interventions by other delegates from colonial territories did the chair allow further speeches on colonial questions. These delegates demanded that discussions on economic and social reconstruction not be separated from the realities of colonial and semi-colonial countries. They stressed that these societies required support in dismantling imperial structures that, if left intact, could pave the way for new forms of authoritarian rule.Footnote ⁴²

In this context, Dange urged the committee on “Furtherance of the Allied War Effort” to extend its remit. He proposed that, in addition to endorsing civil and political freedoms in “liberated countries”, the committee should explicitly call on governments in control of colonies to apply similar principles there. The British TUC representative Arthur Deakin sidestepped the proposal by insisting that the committee’s mandate was strictly limited to measures directly related to the war effort. While he acknowledged the significance of the issues Dange had raised and offered assurances that they would be “taken into account” elsewhere, he effectively prevented any substantive commitment from being written into the committee’s report. This exchange epitomized the entrenched asymmetry between unionists from imperial centres, who could invoke procedural constraints to defer controversy, and those from colonial territories, whose calls for structural changes were repeatedly redirected into other channels.Footnote ⁴³

Such patterns had a longer history. The British TUC sought to influence the Indian trade union movement’s development right from its earliest days, sending several fact-finding missions to India in the late 1920s. These missions were driven less by an interest in solidarity with anti-colonial struggles than by concerns about industrial relations and competition in the textile sector.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Africa, similarly, the TUC established ties with colonial administrations and labour departments as well as with emerging unions. In 1942, it joined employers on the British Colonial Labour Advisory Committee, which channelled recommendations to the Colonial Office but did not endorse independence movements.Footnote ⁴⁵ This politics of “guided” trade union development shaped British positions within the WFTU and informed their ambivalent stance towards a more assertive anti-colonial agenda.

At the WFTU’s founding congress in Paris in autumn 1945, Dange resumed his earlier line of argument. While the London conference had focused on the defeat of fascism and the contours of peace in Europe, the Paris congress needed to address colonial questions directly: “Our world labour will have to define its attitude on this question. […] You cannot avoid this question, because economy is essentially tied to the national independence of each country in Asia”.Footnote ⁴⁶ This intervention can be read as an early formulation of his critique of monopoly capitalism. Dange rejected any conception of decolonization that would confine itself to constitutional change while leaving structures of foreign economic domination intact. He argued that political sovereignty in India would remain incomplete as long as key sectors remained under the control of Britain or other foreign powers, and that trade unions therefore had to treat the national question and the transformation of economic power relations as intrinsically linked dimensions of a single anti-imperialist project. His later writings and speeches on independent India’s development path – where he criticized the persistence of foreign corporate interests and the concentration of wealth in monopoly groups – can be seen as consistent elaborations of the intuition first articulated in Paris in 1945: that political independence without economic transformation would perpetuate a reconfigured but still fundamentally imperial regime of domination.

The Founding of a Colonial Department and a Planned Pan-Asian Conference

In December 1945, the WFTU executive bureau initiated the establishment of a Colonial Department within the federation. The move appeared to acknowledge that colonial and semi-colonial issues required sustained attention at the level of the secretariat. Yet, it took until the summer of 1946 to identify a candidate willing and able to head the new department. The American CIO was charged with proposing the director. After one candidate declined, the CIO appointed Adolph Germer; when his performance was deemed unsatisfactory, he was replaced in late 1947 by Elmer Cope, also of the CIO and known for his pronounced anti-communist stance. Cope’s appointment strengthened the CIO’s position in the secretariat but did little to transform the Colonial Department into an effective instrument for anti-colonial work.Footnote ⁴⁷

The early activities of the Colonial Department and the debates in the executive bureau about its functions reveal divergent conceptions of what an anti-colonial policy for the WFTU should entail. The prolonged delay in staffing the department suggests that colonial issues were not a priority for the CIO. Once Cope took office, CIO representatives became concerned that communists might instrumentalize the department, and they advocated a cautious, narrowly defined mandate.Footnote ⁴⁸ The British TUC likewise hindered the development of a robust anti-colonial policy. British union leaders did not deny that colonial questions mattered, but they framed work in this field as prohibitively costly and politically sensitive. WFTU president Citrine warned that such work would be “expensive and thankless” and feared that activities in Asia and Africa would be dominated by Soviet and communist propaganda.Footnote ⁴⁹ Given the TUC’s longstanding entanglement with colonial administrations and its alignment with British foreign policy, these objections reflected not only financial concerns but also a desire to avoid initiatives that could undermine imperial interests.

Historians have often interpreted the role of the CIO and TUC in the WFTU primarily in terms of growing dissatisfaction with the federation’s perceived “politicization”, the intrusive character of communist propaganda, and the alleged “hijacking” of the organization by Soviet-aligned affiliates, culminating in the withdrawal in 1949.Footnote ⁵⁰ The debates around the Colonial Department invite a more nuanced reading. British unionists deployed the critique of “propaganda” to circumscribe the development of any ambitious anti-colonial programme that might have required significant material commitments and challenged British imperial policies. The reluctance to empower the Colonial Department thus cannot be understood solely as a reaction to Soviet behaviour; it also reflects an attempt to maintain tight control over the scope and direction of the WFTU’s engagement with colonial questions.

By contrast, Soviet trade unionists and representatives of the Italian CGIL and the French CGT repeatedly called for an expansion of the Colonial Department’s activities.Footnote ⁵¹ They urged the secretariat to undertake missions to Africa and Asia, to collect detailed information on local conditions, and to assist in building trade union structures in colonized territories. It was largely thanks to these initiatives that the WFTU undertook any action at all in these regions during its “united” phase.

Evidence on how Dange and other colonial actors assessed the delayed establishment, limited mandate, and hesitant functioning of the Colonial Department is difficult to come by. They were not represented in the key decision-making bodies that shaped these choices and left no published commentary on the internal organizational debates. Indirect evidence, however, suggests that Dange regarded the expansion of WFTU activities in the colonial and semi-colonial world as extremely urgent. The discussions surrounding the planned Pan-Asian conference, analysed in the next section, indicate that he pushed for a far more proactive stance and sought to transform Asia into a central area of WFTU work.

The negotiation and planning of the Pan-Asian conference, which ultimately did not take place, vividly illustrates the tensions already visible in the debates on the Colonial Department. From an early stage, it was widely accepted that a conference in Asia, alongside a similar initiative in Africa, would be indispensable for building closer relations with non-European unions and for demonstrating that the WFTU truly aspired to global representation. But the reluctance of British and US union leaders meant that such a gathering could not take place as long as the WFTU remained formally united. Both TUC and CIO representatives feared that a major Asian conference might strengthen communist trade unions and provide a platform for what they regarded as destabilizing agitation.

The need for a Pan-Asian conference was first discussed at the 1945 Paris congress, which adopted a resolution instructing the WFTU executive to convene such a conference. At the first executive committee session in Moscow in June 1946, the general secretary was authorized to organize the conference and to send a delegation to Asia in preparation. However, the initiative stalled and only in November 1947 did the executive bureau return to the issue. Lacking up-to-date information on conditions in Asia, the bureau invited Dange and the Australian union leader Albert Ernest Monk, who represented Asian countries on the executive committee, to report on the situation and advise on how the conference might be organized.Footnote ⁵²

Monk, who had recently returned from an ILO conference in New Delhi, outlined the difficult circumstances under which many South-East Asian labour movements operated, highlighting political conflicts tied to liberation struggles and raising doubts about whether adequate representation of all workers could be guaranteed.Footnote ⁵³ Fabiana Kutsche has provided a detailed analysis of both the preparation and proceedings of this conference.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is striking that, despite the unstable situation in India, the ILO not only undertook an extended fact-finding mission in the spring of 1947 but also went ahead with the conference itself, which was attended by representatives from the countries discussed here. This suggests that there was, in principle, a readiness among ILO actors to travel to a volatile region – provided the initiative was conducted under the auspices of the “right” institution. Monk suggested Calcutta as a possible venue for the WFTU conference, citing its central location and relative accessibility for delegates with limited resources. At the same time, he emphasized that organizing a conference there would involve “great difficulties”.Footnote ⁵⁵

Despite all the contradictions mentioned, Dange insisted that the conference should not be postponed. He argued that, even if trade union structures were not yet fully formed in some countries, holding the conference was essential to demonstrate that the WFTU genuinely existed for, and was interested in, Asian unions.Footnote ⁵⁶ He also took issue with the suggestion that the conference be endowed with only an “advisory” status. In his view, it would be “striking” and politically damaging if, as at the earlier Dakar conference, resolutions adopted at the Pan-Asian conference were not formally binding and were not transmitted to the central WFTU bodies for implementation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Dange thus framed the planned conference as a constitutive moment in which Asian unions should enter the WFTU not as peripheral consultees but as rights-bearing participants whose decisions would shape the federation’s overall direction, particularly on colonial policy.

Apart from the organizational issues, there was a debate about who should be present at the Pan-Asian conference, given that some countries had national trade unions with different political affiliations or unions that were still in the process of being formed. There was also the question of who should get access: only those who had paid their membership fees, or also those who would probably become members in the future? Enquiries by the general secretary as to whether a survey should be made beforehand regarding the situation in the respective movements made clear that relatively little information about the situation in the countries was available.

Once again, Dange intervened. This time, he did more than argue over the timing or practicalities of the conference, but raised the more fundamental question of who counted as a “worker” in Asia and what forms of labour the WFTU should prioritize. Responding to concerns that many wage earners in Asia were employed in agriculture, mining, or plantations, he emphasized that plantation work was much more similar to mining than to agriculture as understood in Europe.Footnote ⁵⁸ Seen against his longer intellectual trajectory, including early writings such as Gandhi vs. Lenin,Footnote ⁵⁹ in which he underscored the centrality of the peasant question and called for the dismantling of large estates, these remarks can be read as an attempt to broaden the category of the proletariat in colonial conditions. Rather than simply adopting a narrow Western focus on industrial workers, Dange questioned Eurocentric distinctions between “industrial” and “agrarian” labour and anticipated later political-economy analyses of plantation capitalism and the integration of rural and urban labour into global regimes of accumulation.Footnote ⁶⁰ He was, of course, not alone in this. Indian delegates at the ILO conference had also drawn attention to conditions in the agrarian sector.Footnote ⁶¹ They articulated clear expectations for development support in both industrial and agricultural spheres and challenged the ILO to broaden its policy frameworks. Although it is not possible here to examine in detail how these arguments diverged in their emphases and concrete proposals, even this brief summary underscores the broader point that actors from colonial and semi-colonial countries sought, in multiple international arenas, to draw attention to their specific situations and to question prevailing approaches.

The broader political context in India further complicated the prospects for a Pan-Asian conference in Calcutta. After prolonged negotiations between the British administration, the Indian National Congress, and the Muslim League, the British government resolved to terminate colonial rule and grant independence. This process culminated in the decision to partition British India into the two dominions of India and Pakistan, which was announced in June 1947 and sparked widespread communal violence and mass displacement. It was in this turbulent context that the WFTU executive committee met in Prague in June 1947, where Dange, in an interview on the sidelines, warned that Partition would almost inevitably lead to armed conflict, civil strife, and severe economic dislocations arising from the separation of industrial and raw-material regions.Footnote ⁶² He contrasted this scenario with an alternative path based on radical democratic reforms – above all land redistribution and universal suffrage – that might have prevented division “along racial lines” and provided the basis for a unified, socially restructured India.

At the executive committee meeting in Rome in May 1948, the controversy over the Pan-Asian conference became a proxy for broader disagreements about colonial policy and responsibility within the WFTU. Brian Goodwin of the Northern Rhodesian Mineworkers’ Union criticized the federation’s approach to colonial questions as overly declaratory and lacking in concrete measures, invoking the Dakar resolution as an example. He warned that some major unions sought predominance rather than genuinely furthering anti-colonial work.Footnote ⁶³ Monk then presented the failure to dispatch the planned Asiatic mission – which never even began its exploratory journey – as evidence of deeper political and administrative dysfunction.Footnote ⁶⁴ General Secretary Louis Saillant rejected the suggestion that the collapse of the initiative was primarily due to secretariat mismanagement. Instead, he pointed out that key national unions, above all the British and US ones, had simply failed to nominate delegates – effectively blocking the formation of the commission and preventing the preparatory trip from going ahead.Footnote ⁶⁵ The non-realization of the Pan-Asian conference thus appears to have been less a product of bureaucratic ineptitude and more one of political reluctance on the part of crucial Western affiliates.

Dange did not attend the Rome meeting, so his immediate reaction to these developments is unknown. Subsequent correspondence does, however, confirm that union leaders in India perceived the failure as sabotage. A 1949 letter from AITUC general secretary Manek Gandhi squarely blamed the TUC and the CIO for undermining the conference by withholding delegates, arguing that their inaction had caused “immeasurable damage” to the Asian trade union movement and prevented the WFTU from fulfilling its responsibilities.Footnote ⁶⁶ At the same time, the political situation on the ground further reduced the likelihood that Calcutta could host such a gathering. India’s independence and Partition generated massive violence and instability. From the autumn of 1948 onwards, US and British unions delayed the convening of the preparatory commission, and at the executive bureau meeting of September 1948 the British TUC refused to contemplate holding the conference in view of the “critical political situation” in Asia. By then, the British were already preparing to leave the WFTU, and they pursued a strategy of blocking decisions on key questions. When the executive bureau reconvened in January 1949, the Pan-Asian conference was no longer on the agenda.

After the Split

The WFTU split in 1949 transformed the political landscape of international trade unionism. At its first post-split congress, held in Milan in the summer of that year, the federation reformulated its goals for colonial and dependent territories. It pledged to help end the system of colonies, protectorates, and dependent areas as zones of economic exploitation; to promote trade union organizations in these countries without discrimination; to encourage labour laws guaranteeing workers protection and effective participation in economic policymaking; to fight social, economic, and political discrimination based on race, colour, religion, or sex; and to support colonized peoples in asserting their right to self-determination and full national independence.Footnote ⁶⁷ Travel and direct contact were now explicitly prioritized over correspondence, reflecting Saillant’s conviction that letters alone could not build the networks and trust required for durable cooperation.Footnote ⁶⁸

These commitments intersected with a rapidly changing situation in India. While the WFTU leadership welcomed Indian independence, it viewed the new government critically, seeing it as a bourgeois elite aligned with “the original colonialists” and “American imperialists” in promoting international capitalism.Footnote ⁶⁹ Cooperation with institutions such as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund was cited as evidence of this orientation. From the WFTU’s perspective, the victims of this development were the Indian people, who faced rising prices, currency inflation, and restrictions on democratic trade union activity. New legislation and policing practices hit the AITUC particularly hard.Footnote ⁷⁰ By the late 1940s, many of its leading figures, including Dange, had been arrested without trial.

From 1948, the Communist Party of India (CPI) was forced underground as the post-colonial state responded to what it perceived as a revolutionary challenge from the left. The CPI adopted an increasingly confrontational line, portraying the Nehru government as aligned with Anglo-American imperialism, while seeking to radicalize sections of industrial labour. In response, central and provincial governments banned the party and cracked down on its mass organizations. Thousands of communists were arrested or detained, party offices were closed and clandestine structures proliferated; in some regions, legal bans persisted into the early 1950s. Given the close ties between the CPI and the AITUC, this repression severely affected the trade union federation. Membership declined, key leaders were imprisoned, and much of its work had to continue in semi-legal or underground forms.Footnote ⁷¹

At the AITUC’s twenty-third annual congress in May 1949, Dange was appointed general secretary in absentia and nominated as a delegate to the WFTU congress in Milan. The WFTU appealed to the Indian government to release him, but without success.Footnote ⁷² As a result, the Indian labour movement was not represented in Milan, although Dange formally retained his position as one of the federation’s vice-presidents. In 1950, while he was still in prison, the WFTU executive committee sought to exert pressure on Indian authorities through diplomatic protests and solidarity campaigns. It sent a formal message to Prime Minister Nehru, denouncing the continued detention of Dange and other labour leaders without inquiry or trial and framing these measures as violations of human rights, as proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.Footnote ⁷³ The committee also addressed a message directly to Dange, praising him as a courageous fighter for the working class, portraying the Indian bourgeoisie as a new oppressor in the post-colonial state, and situating his case within a broader struggle for liberation from imperialism and its “lackeys”.Footnote ⁷⁴ By pledging to publicize the repression and mobilize international opinion, the WFTU attempted to turn Dange’s imprisonment into an emblematic case of post-colonial injustice.

Given the difficult situation in India, the prospect of holding the Pan-Asian conference in Calcutta receded further. There was a lack of local organizers with sufficient authority and resources to coordinate a meeting of at least one hundred delegates. Ultimately, the change of venue from Calcutta to Beijing reflected not only these political and practical obstacles but also China’s growing importance within the communist trade union movement.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to Leow, plans for an Asian conference in Beijing were being developed in Moscow in early 1949 and were endorsed at the Milan congress.Footnote ⁷⁶ What was now called the Asian–Australasian Trade Union Conference took place in Beijing in November/December 1949 under the auspices of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). It aimed to consolidate support for the WFTU against its rivals, to establish an Asian liaison office, and to assist Asian trade unionists in both their workplace and political struggles.Footnote ⁷⁷

One major outcome of the Beijing conference was the expansion of trade union education in Asia, coordinated by the ACFTU and the WFTU. The Asia–Australasian Liaison Bureau, staffed by representatives from the USSR, India, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan, became an important hub. In 1951 the ACFTU founded a training school for trade unionists and, by 1953, reported having trained over 100,000 people.Footnote ⁷⁸ The WFTU, for its part, established an international solidarity fund in 1950 and launched its own international educational programme. Beginning in 1953, the first cohorts – drawn largely from Asia – attended classes in Budapest; by 1959, this institution had been formalized as the WFTU College.Footnote ⁷⁹ Beyond institution-building and training, the WFTU also provided material aid in the event of natural disasters and social emergencies, reinforcing its profile as a global actor.

Dange was released from prison in 1950 and soon thereafter elected to the CPI politburo and central committee, where he contributed to debates over the party’s programme and strategy.Footnote ⁸⁰

Simultaneously, he intensified his work in the trade union movement through the AITUC. During the general textile strike of 1950, he again played a leading role in organizing and supporting workers under repressive conditions. His attempt to attend the World Economic Conference in Moscow in April 1950 failed, however, when Indian authorities refused to grant him an exit permit.Footnote ⁸¹ This episode underscores the extent to which his international mobility remained constrained, despite or because of his positions in both (communist) party and trade union structures.

From 1953 onwards, Dange was once again able to travel abroad. He spent an extended period in Vienna, where the WFTU secretariat had its headquarters. During this stay he participated in the WFTU executive committee meeting in February 1953 and a subsequent conference on the defence, improvement, and extension of social welfare, which placed social security deficits and the role of trade unions in shaping welfare states at the centre of discussion.Footnote ⁸² He was accompanied in Vienna by his wife, Ushabai Dange, who spoke at the conference as a representative of the Indian Federation of Textile Workers. Her intervention highlighted the precarious situation of Indian workers in the absence of a comprehensive welfare regime and under conditions of chronic unemployment, thus inserting Indian working-class experience into a transnational debate on social rights.Footnote ⁸³

Ushabai was one of the first women trade union leaders in interwar and post-war Bombay. Moving from the position of a child widow to that of a central figure in textile workers’ and women’s organizing, she frequently acted as her husband’s public stand-in and key organizer during his imprisonments, leading strikes and mobilizing women workers. Her Marathi autobiography Pan Aikta Kaun (“Who listens to me”), published in 1970, offers an intimate perspective on this shared political life, detailing her precarious existence as a communist and trade unionist, her repeated arrests, and the difficulties of raising children amid poverty, surveillance, and state violence. Although the relationship between Ushabai and Shripad Dange is not at the centre of this analysis, Ushabai’s autobiography is still highly revealing, since it necessarily also offers a distinctive, intimate perspective. Her own entry into party and trade union work occurred through him, yet over time – particularly during his long periods of imprisonment – she carved out an increasingly autonomous role, which underscores a personal career path that, while remarkable, remained constrained by the gendered limits placed on Indian women of her generation. The fact that it was Ushabai, and not Shripad Dange, who addressed the Vienna conference, and that she appeared there not merely as his wife but as a representative of the textile workers’ movement in her own right, highlights her position within the trade union movement and the specific authority she had acquired as an actor on the international stage.Footnote ⁸⁴

Shripad Dange returned to Vienna in October 1953 for the WFTU’s third world congress (see Figure 1). Bringing together 819 delegates from seventy-nine countries, the congress signalled a more systematic engagement with the problems of colonial and semi-colonial societies.Footnote ⁸⁵ Dange was re-elected to the executive committee alongside figures such as Jacques N. Gom (French Cameroon) and Abdoulaye Diallo (French West Africa/Togo),Footnote ⁸⁶ thereby embodying the federation’s effort to integrate anti-colonial perspectives into its leadership. In his interventions, he framed recent strikes and mass protests in India as evidence of a “new phase” of working-class unity from below. He highlighted the contradiction between rising industrial output and worsening living standards, inflation, and unemployment, characterizing these dynamics as expressions of a “monopolistic system” and locating India within a broader post-colonial critique of capitalist development.Footnote ⁸⁷

Source: World Federation of Trade Unions (ed.), Die Weltgewerkschaftsbewegung, double issue 21/22 (1953), p. 78.

Figure 1. Shripad Amrit Dange at the third World Trade Union Congress, Vienna, October 1953.

During 1954, although he did not travel, Dange continued to use WFTU channels and publications to raise awareness of labour conditions in India and to solicit international solidarity. In a May Day message published in the WFTU’s journal, he called on the international labour movement to defend principles of trade union liberty enshrined in the United Nations Charter and warned that monopoly capital, large landowners, and their governments were intensifying attacks on democratic freedoms. He stressed that the right to strike was nowhere explicitly guaranteed in the Indian Constitution and remained under constant pressure. Interpreting large-scale strikes – from the Calcutta tramway struggle to tea plantation disputes – as laboratories of unity from below, he argued that workers’ own unity committees and local action fronts had pointed beyond the fragmentation of the Indian trade union movement and offered a blueprint for national reunification and a more effective, internationally connected anti-imperialist labour politics.Footnote ⁸⁸

At the WFTU general council meeting in Sofia in September 1956, Dange explicitly framed post-colonial India as a site of incomplete decolonization, where political sovereignty coexisted with brutal repression of labour protest. He urged the international trade union movement to combine support for the Indian government’s “progressive” anti-colonial stance in foreign policy with open condemnation of police shootings and mass arrests of peaceful strikers.Footnote ⁸⁹ For Dange, solidarity could not be equated with uncritical endorsement; it required active protest, material assistance, and the willingness to hold even formally independent governments accountable to working-class interests.

Dange’s report “Trade Union Tasks in the Fight against Colonialism” (see Figure 2), delivered as a general political statement at the WFTU’s fourth world congress in Leipzig in 1957, crystallized his mature position as both trade unionist and political leader. The report condensed a comprehensive strategy for decolonization into a trade union programme. Dange interpreted the “awakening” of hundreds of millions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the fulfilment of colonialism’s historical fate, distinguished between already-independent states and those still under foreign rule, and insisted that political independence must be followed by economic decolonization through the expulsion of foreign monopoly capital and planned industrial development. Situated within what later historiography described as the “Bandung moment” of trade union internationalism, Dange’s position anticipated Afro-Asian practices of “positive neutrality”: he accepted international assistance in principle but demanded that it neither compromise sovereignty nor reproduce neo-colonial dependency.Footnote ⁹⁰ Identifying as a communist, he presented socialist countries as preferred partners whose technical aid he framed as proletarian internationalism rather than imperial tutelage. At the same time, he called for inclusive trade union unity across international affiliations, arguing that cooperation with all unions willing to defend workers’ interests was necessary to counter imperialist “splitting” tactics and sustain a broad anti-monopoly, anti-colonial front:

Source: World Federation of Trade Unions (ed.), S.A. Dange: Trade Union Tasks in the Fight against Colonialism. Report Presented to the Fourth World Trade Union Congress (Leipzig, 1957).

Figure 2. Cover page of the printed speech by Shripad Amrit Dange at the fourth World Trade Union Congress, Leipzig, 1957.

Within this framework, Dange’s analysis of the worker–peasant alliance was particularly farsighted. He identified the peasantry as the “natural ally” of the working class and urged trade unions to support independent peasant organization, land redistribution, and improvements in rural livelihoods. His emphasis on plantation labour as a hinge between rural and industrial worlds anticipated later scholarship that treated peasant and agrarian workers as central actors in global labour history, rather than as a mere “reserve”. It also resonated with contemporary debates on worker–peasant alliances as a precondition for effective anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle.Footnote ⁹² Dange’s Leipzig report thus appeared as a synthesis of ideas he had developed over decades and, in retrospect, as a paradigmatic articulation of mid-century Afro-Asian labour internationalism in alignment with the WFTU.