The International Working-Class Movement

The first of a projected seven volumes, running to some 292,000 words and stopping around 1870.

Its subject is the birth of the working-class movement: Luddism, the Lyons silk-weavers of 1831 and 1834, the Silesian weavers of 1844, Owen's communities, Cabet and Dezamy, Chartism, the League of the Just, the June days in Paris, and the founding of the International Working Men's Association. It was produced by the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement, a body set up in Moscow in 1966 to do exactly what its name says, under a general editorial committee of twenty-one and an editorial board headed by A. S. Chernyayev.

As a synthesis it attempts something few national labour histories do: to treat the early movement as a single international phenomenon, comparing the same decade across several countries and asking why the same years produced risings in Lyons, Silesia and the English manufacturing districts. The research base is wide and the documentation heavy.

On the title page, above every one of the twenty-one committee members, stands the name of Boris Ponomarev, who supplies the introduction. He was a Secretary of the Central Committee and for three decades head of its International Department - the office that ran Moscow's relations with every communist party outside the bloc. He is not a scholar who happens to hold rank; he is the rank, and his introduction is about what the seven volumes are for.

Written at the high point of detente and reaching English readers months after the army entered Afghanistan.

Volume One. Translated by Yuri Shirokov and H. Campbell Creighton.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.