Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global.
Camfield, David
Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class
Went Global (London: Harvill Secker 2007)
IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING advanced capitalist countries today,
familiarity with the history of the working-class movements that emerged
in the period from the early 19th century to the early 20th century is
restricted mostly to academic specialists and a few activist
intellectuals who came to the radical left in the 1960s or 1970s.
Paul Mason's book is motivated by a passionate desire to make
this history available to those who, in his view, "stand in dire
need of knowing more about it" (x): global justice activists in the
countries of the North, and workers in the expanding industries of the
South. Mason was born and raised in a British "blue collar"
Labour-voting working-class town in the 1960s, a social world in which
there was a great deal of continuity with the early decades of the 20th
century. That world no longer exists; it has been transformed by global
capitalist restructuring and the defeats inflicted on workers by the
neo-liberal offensive. Mason's response is neither a sentimental
look back at what we have lost nor a dismissive farewell to the
working-class. Instead, it is an effort to transmit a number of
historical experiences from the years before the end of the Second World
War to people engaged in contemporary struggles for workers' rights
and social justice. It attempts this with hope but not certainty; Mason
writes that we do not know if a new global mass workers' movement,
"a much bigger, multi-ethnic movement centred on India, China and
Latin America which communicates by text message in real time and in
which women are the majority," (xiv) will successfully emerge or
not.
Mason is not a professional historian but an award-winning BBC journalist, and Live Working or Die Fighting is not a conventional work
of history of the kind most often produced by professional historians.
It is also quite different from most popular histories of the
workers' movement, which are usually linear,
institutionally-focused social democratic narratives. Each of its nine
chapters opens with a brief (sometimes very brief) look at a moment in
working-class life in the years 2003 to 2006; the countries from which
these scenes are drawn are China, India, Nigeria, Iraq, Bolivia,
Argentina and the UK. In each case, we hear the voices of workers
themselves, ranging from Li Qi-bing in Shenzhen, who lost his leg below
the knee to a machine while making plastic flowers, to youth activist
Abram Delgado in El Alto, Bolivia (this city is arguably the most
radicalized part of the global reality referred to in the title of Mike
Davis's Planet of Slums (2006).
After its contemporary lead-in, each chapter then turns to its
historical case or cases. These, which make up the bulk of the book, are
early nineteenth century Manchester and Lyon, Paris from 1867 to 1871,
the rise of the Knights of Labor and the Haymarket Massacre, industrial
union struggles in Europe, Argentina, Australia and the us in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany from 1905 to 1923,
Shanghai from 1919 to 1927, the Bund in Poland, and workers'
struggles involving factory occupations in Italy in 1920, France in
1936, and the us in 1937. All of these histories are presented with
flair and insight. Mason skillfully uses the lives of individual
activists (some well-known, like Louse Michel and Bill Haywood, and
others not, such as Oskar Hippe and Toni Sender) as windows into the
movements and events in which they participated. He constructs lively
narratives, drawing on memoirs, oral histories, and other primary
material as well as secondary sources. He makes an effort to ensure that
some of the participants he profiles or whose reflections he quotes are
women.
Mason identifies the struggle for control as a "recurrent
theme." (xiii) In an Afterword, he offers some broad interpretive
conclusions. Working-class history since E.P. Thompson has made great
gains but "modern academics tend to avoid 'big truths'
within the life stories of those they have rescued from oblivion."
(279) Mason ventures to identify two. First, capitalism drives workers
to organize themselves in and outside the paid workplace as they fight
for control at work and try "to create the new society within the
old;" (280) when this becomes impossible, they become more
confrontational with "corporate power." (280) Second, a global
economy begins to create a global workers' movement. This began to
happen before the First World War, and it is happening today in the
context of a very different world economy. But the process faces real
obstacles.
Live Working or Die Fightingis a remarkable work of popular
history. I know of no other book which sets out to introduce a broad
readership to the history of the rise of working-class movements up
until the mid-point of the twentieth century in this way. The result is
a real accomplishment. This and Mason's passion and dynamic writing
make this a book that deserves to be widely read. The fact that Vintage
will be publishing a North American edition early in 2008 can only be
welcomed.
The book is certainly not without shortcomings. The extent to which
the chapters succeed in linking thematically their contemporary openings
and the historical materials varies widely. The first chapter, which
moves from Shenzhen 2003 to Manchester 1819, is probably the most
successful and the fourth, which couples Basra 2003 to Philadelphia
1869, perhaps the least. It would have been a stronger book if it had
made more of an effort to integrate an analysis of gender and race. To
give just one specific example, the Knights of Labor's mixed record
in relation to African Americans is discussed but their anti-Asian
racism is not. The Afterward describes unions across the advanced
capitalist countries in the four decades after 1945 as "ubiquitous,
passive, barely political, static." (276) This does not sit well
with what Mason briefly and inadequately refers to as the awakening of
labour's "dormant militant soul" (277) in the 1970s as a
response to economic crisis. The upsurges of militancy and radicalism
during the long post-war economic boom, whose most visible peaks
included workplace occupations in France in May 1968, the Italian
"May in slow motion," British strikes against restrictive
labour legislation, wildcats and Black Power in the plants in the us and
the radicalization of Quebecois unions, deserve more than a fleeting
mention. To refer to the very real phenomenon of worker activists'
concern for control and commitment to self-activity as a "gut
anarchism" (xiv) is misleading. The Afterword's silence about
the significance and possibilities of working-class movements in the
advanced capitalist countries today will leave some readers wondering.
There are also a few references that will be unclear to readers,
especially in Canada and the us.
My noting of these and other weaknesses should not obscure the fact
that Live Working or Die Fighting is a unique and very welcome book. It
deserves to be read in university and college courses and by labour and
community activists of all kinds. Anyone who cares deeply about
working-class history and who hopes to ignite the interest of someone
for whom it is unfamiliar would do well to give them a copy of Live
Working or Die Fighting.
DAVID CAMFIELD
University of Manitoba