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ADDRESS

Labour History : an International Movement

Marcel van der Linden

Annotated version of a plenary lecture, given at the Ninth National Labour History Conference, University of Sydney, 1 July 2005.

 1
Maybe, the best way to begin this talk, is just to mention a few events of the recent past and the near future.
  • In late February 2004, at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, I received a telephone call from South Korea, announcing the visit of Mr Kim Keum-Soo, the Chairman of the Korean Tripartite Commission. Mr Kim and his delegation wanted to study our institute in preparation of an official South Korean labour history archive. Now that the employers and unions are legally obliged to keep their records the founding of a serious archive for the documentation of industrial relations has become urgent.
  • At the end of July, this year, a 10-day conference will be held in Hyderabad, South-India, on 'World Economies, Local Communities: Setting an Agenda for Global Labor History'. The convenors are three Canadian scholars: Daniel Bender, Rick Halpern and Jayeeta Sharma.
  • In mid-November a conference will be held at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, Noida (North-India), 'Towards Global Labour History: New Comparisons', organised by the ambitious and highly successful Association of Indian Labour Historians (founded in 1996).
  • In mid-December a conference will be held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on 'Alternative Indonesian Historiographies', at which labour topics will be prominent.

All these events are part of an ongoing trend.

  • In late December 1999 the Pakistan Institute for Labour Education and Research organised in Karachi the first conference on the history of labour and labour movements in Pakistan ('Labor in Pakistan').
  • In 2000 members of the Brazilian national historians' organisation (ANPUH) formed a section for the study of working-class history (Mundos do Trabalho). When ANPUH held its national congress the following year (22-27 June 2001, Niteroi), that section had grown to the second largest.
  • In 2001 (25-26 April), the conference 'Twentieth Century Iran: History from Below' was hosted in Amsterdam, providing the first opportunity for Iranian historians in exile to discuss with an Iranian historian living in Iran about research into the history of the Iranian working class.
And so on ...

 2
Labour historians from Europe and North America frequently assert that their discipline is not in a healthy state. Unambiguously they remind us of the boom in such studies during the 1970s, when, largely under the influence of the student movement, a mighty tide of monographs, dissertations and articles were written and published in their fields. It is, of course, undeniable that the interest in working- class history within the North Atlantic area declined from the end of the 1980s, if not earlier. Many students have turned to other topics, and their teachers also changed course, choosing new subjects which attracted their interest or promised more in career terms. Likewise, many scholarly journals have changed or expanded their titles or subject matter, while others stick to the old profile and are losing subscribers. This is not an exact diagnosis, but we cannot ignore the general and relative decline in the fortunes of labour history writing. 3
      Such a picture is a distortion, however, for the world does not stop at the equator: in various regions of South America, Africa and Asia the historiography of workers and labour movements has made great strides in the last 20 to 30 years. The examples I have just given amply prove that labour and working-class history has gradually become a subject of research all over the globe. I am therefore of the opinion that one cannot really talk about a 'crisis' in our field, but has to differentiate between continents and subcontinents.1

 4
We clearly see what one could call a 'globalisation' of labour and working-class history. By 'globalisation' of labour history I mean not only an enormous geographical extension in the field of knowledge but in content as well. Labour-history writing does not exist in a vacuum since trends in one country or region influence colleagues abroad. One aspect of labour studies with many adherents was, of course, the history of the 'Internationals' (First, Socialist and Communist), another how events like the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution affected developments in many lands. However, a systematic type of transnational communication between historians of labour seems to have begun on a cautious note in the 1960s at the earliest. I mention the ITH, the International Conference of Labour Historians in Austria (since 1965)2, and the IALHI, the International Association of Labour History Institutions (since 1970).3 Serious international-comparative studies took off in the course of the 1970s and have proliferated enormously since then. 5
      All these developments had their center in North America and Europe. That situation is now undergoing rapid change, largely due to economic globalisation: proletarianisation, new forms of workers' protest, new labour movements, and the growing consciousness of worldwide interdependence, that is One World, despite the contradictions in the production and distribution of wealth and resources. This 'globalisation' in the study of labour history calls for a new type of historiography, one which 'overtakes' old-style labour history from North America and Europe by incorporating its findings in a new globally orientated approach. 6
      The new labour history that we see developing at the moment is sometimes called 'Global Labour History'. What do we mean by this concept? I suggest a provisional five-point demarcation.4
  1. Global labour history is a field of attention, not a theory to which everyone must adhere. We know and accept the fact that our conceptions of research and our interpretative frameworks can differ. Not only is this pluralism inevitable, it can equally well be intellectually stimulating — provided we are at all times prepared to enter into a serious discussion of our disparate views. Notwithstanding our different points of departure, however, we must also strive to work productively in the same fields of research.
  2. Global labour history means the transnational and even the transcontinental study of labour relations and workers' social movements in the broadest sense of the word. By 'transnational' we mean the placing in a wider context of all historical processes, no matter how geographically 'small', by means of comparison with processes elsewhere, the study of interaction processes, or a combination of the two.
  3. The study of labour relations encompasses work that is both free and unfree, paid and unpaid. Workers' social movements consist of both formal organisations and informal activities. The study of both labour relations and social movements requires that equally serious attention be devoted to 'the other side' (employers, public authorities).
  4. The study of labour relations concerns not only the individual worker but also his/her family. Gender relations play an important part within the family and in labour relations involving individual family members.
  5. Global labour history primarily concerns the study of labour relations and workers' social movements which have evolved along with the growth of the world market since the fourteenth century. Wherever indicated, for instance for comparative purposes, studies going back further in time are by no means excluded however.
That is, indeed, an extremely ambitious project which has scarcely begun. Many of the goals of this new departure are unclear or need elucidation.		 7
   

What Has Already Been Done?

 
A considerable amount of preliminary work in global labour history has been carried out, but much of it tends to be Eurocentric, mainly because the quantity of data available is not the same for all regions. For the historian who wants to use secondary sources, it is obviously important that such sources exist. If the history of a particular working-class or labour movement has barely yet been studied, it is tempting to leave that case out of the sample. In practice, this often results in the exclusion of former communist countries or Third World countries. But fortunately there are some recent developments pointing in a different direction. 8
      We can begin by looking at what Ira Katznelson has termed the first level of class analysis, viz. class structures, the broad structural patterns of capitalist economic development (business structures, family patterns, demography, state organisation and policies, cultural traditions).5 There is a substantial body of quantitative material, although its reliability is frequently open to doubt. As far back as 1913, Robert Rene Kuczynski published his monumental Arbeitslohn und Arbeitszeit in Europa und Amerika, 1870–1909. Since then extensive databases have been established, the majority of which, however, are restricted to North America and Western Europe. But attention is now gradually being devoted to the Third World as well, as exemplified by the most recent edition of B.R. Mitchell's International Historical Statistics, which also covers Latin America, Africa and Asia. Another example is the database at the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton, containing information on upwards of 80,000 instances of labour unrest around the globe. The situation is nonetheless still very one-sided. The analysis of quantitative data, for instance, continues to be focused much more heavily on the advanced capitalist countries than on the rest of the world. The Belgian-Swiss historian Paul Bairoch, a pioneer of the non-Eurocentric approach, thus far remains a solitary figure. 9
      Moving on to the other levels defined by Katznelson (class-based ways of life, class dispositions, and collective action) — the levels generally classed as labour history in the narrower sense — we discern a highly promising development. This is not the place for an extensive overview, but it may be stated that the historiography of the working classes in Asia, Africa and Latin America has made huge strides over the past 20 years. John French, the Brazilian historian, speaks about a 'Latin American Labor Studies Boom'.6 In Asia (especially South Asia) the number of sophisticated labour history publications has been increasing significantly since the 1990s.7 And also as regards African labour history, many notable contributions have appeared since the 1970s (though it must be added that some countries receive considerably more attention than others). 10
      The work at all analytical levels is still largely unfocused on transnational interactions and testing comparisons. In so far as research does deal with two or more countries, it is usually either contrasting or additive: in the one country the one, and in the other country the other. More penetrating analysis and theory building are as yet in their infancy, even though some very interesting beginnings have been made. 11
   

What We Should Do Soon

 
I would like to say a few words about three aspects: methods, concepts and infrastructures. 12
   

New Methods

 
Little methodology has as yet been developed in global labour studies. One of our most important tasks in the coming years is to remedy this situation. This being the case, a few remarks about two major aspects, namely the units and levels of analysis, must necessarily suffice here. 13
      Generally speaking, labour historians have grown up with the idea that the nation state is the logical unit of analysis. Most of us have specialised in the working- class history of a particular country, like the USA, Argentina, the Netherlands or whatever. Even those amongst us who are engaged in comparative studies usually stay within these bounds. There are numerous studies comparing labour movements or particular aspects thereof in two or three countries. There is nothing amiss with this approach so long as the historian concerned is fully aware of the fact that the nation state is itself a historical product to be explained and placed in perspective. The difficulty is that this is not how we were taught to view it, but rather that the world consisted of interacting national communities. As Immanuel Wallerstein has rightly pointed out, this is a nineteenty-century fiction: 'It reifies and therefore crystallises social phenomena whose real significance lies not in their solidity but precisely in their fluidity and malleability'.8 14
      From the point of view of global labour history, it seems more logical to proceed from the premise that all people who influence one another's social lives belong to the same society. 'Society' thereupon becomes a global entity in which by reason of migration, commodity flows, wars, etc. people in different regions are in contact with one another (and there are also people who do not belong to the global society because their own society is isolated from it). Within this global society individual nation states seek to incorporate the inhabitants of their own territories into their own particular systems. 15
      Before going any further, let me try to clear two misunderstandings out of the way. First, in arguing for the transnational society as a framework for our studies I am certainly not saying that labour historians should all henceforth concern themselves with transcontinental subjects. I would almost say: quite the opposite! For the challenge is precisely that of linking together micro- and macro-history. The author of a monograph on a mining village in Bolivia, Poland or Belgium can make an innovative contribution to global labour history by doing one of two things. Either she can show that the movement in that village has multiple links with the outside world through migrants in its midst from nearby or distant parts, through the fact that the local coal mine is incorporated in a transnational chain of economic processes, or through the integration of the religion of the majority of the miners and their families in the transnational hierarchy of the Catholic church, to mention just a few possibilities. Or she can compare aspects of the movement in his village with similar movements in villages elsewhere, and thus determine what they have in common and what is specific to each individual movement. 16
      To prevent a second misunderstanding, let me say that acceptance of the concept of the global society does not imply that labour historians can no longer legitimately compare national developments. The comparative method remains extremely useful, also in the study of national similarities and differences, but only on one condition, which is this: the researcher must be fully aware of the fact that a comparison of this kind carries with it the implicit assumption that separate national processes are causally independent. This assumption is of course wrong, and if this is properly understood then at least the so-called error of contamination can be avoided. 17
      We speak of contamination when one process has caused similar changes in different cases. Suppose we wanted to determine why anarchism was influential in the early twentieth-century labour movement in both Argentina and Spain. We could do so only if we knew there was a process of historical diffusion from Spain to its former colony which would partly — though obviously not completely — explain Argentine anarchism. The error of contamination would occur if we were unaware of such a diffusion process and Argentina and Spain were regarded as independent units. 18
   

New Concepts

 
We need new concepts. The majority of labour history's core categories stem from the late-nineteenth century and should accordingly be reconsidered. Take, for example, the concept of 'working class'. I have seriously attempted elsewhere to show that this concept is the result of a complex process of social exclusion in which one group of wage earners with a relatively high status distances itself from other groups like self-employed workers, so-called lumpen proletarians and unfree workers.9 19
      The new labour history beginning to flourish in the semi-peripheral countries would appear to contain three important lessons which are also of essential significance for metropolitan labour history. In the first place, the new proletariat of the Third World consists only in part of free wage earners as Marx conceived of them, ie 'free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale'.10 20
      In the periphery, the majority of wage earners do not freely dispose of their own labour power (for example, because they are burdened by debt) or they are not in a formal contractual relationship with their employers. 21
      'Pure' wage workers are abstractions generated by the classical 'labour-movement Marxism'. The semi-periphery makes this clear in a second respect as well, for wage labour there is integrated throughout in households and families whose survival always remains partly dependent on subsistence labour (performed chiefly, but not exclusively, by women), on the independent production of commodities for the market and suchlike. In many cases the 'roles' of the various family members are not permanently fixed, but instead signify a transient social relationship which can be changed quite quickly by other sources of income. Not individuals but households and families are therefore the best point of departure for social-historical analyses. 22
      Thirdly, the new proletariat does not exist exclusively or even mainly in the industrial sector. The agricultural sphere is proportionately more important in that in this sphere rapidly advancing proletarianisation has created a large stratum of agricultural labourers and share tenants. Charles Bergquist is rightly critical of studies that posit 'a separate set of assumptions and predicted behaviour for rural workers (often viewed as "traditional peasants") and industrial workers (the "modern proletariat")'. In his view, this 'clumsy' dichotomy is not applicable to Latin America.
How did one classify, for example, workers in rural Cuban sugar complexes or miners in highland Peru who moved in and out of traditional agriculture? It is only when this conceptual dichotomy, artificial to the history of workers in the underdeveloped world, is set aside and a new category of analysis is put in its place that the meaning of the labour history of Latin America fully reveals itself.11
 The militant movement of workers who occupy the land in Brazil (the trabalhadores rurais sem terra) demonstrates this just as clearly as the struggles in Gujarat and the Philippines. Besides the agrarian sector, services comprise another important element: domestic workers today constitute a more numerous army of migrants whose history has barely yet been touched.		 23
      We may thus conclude that the 'authentic' working class is largely a fiction. The 'classical' proletariat is surrounded by, and intermingled with, a variegated 'semiproletariat' of peddlers, sharecroppers, home workers, prostitutes, self-employed workers, beggars and scavengers.12 24
      The boundaries between the different social segments are fluid, and this also finds expression in their forms of organisation. In India and South Africa, women who work in the informal sector (so-called 'survivalists') have set up their own trade unions aimed at achieving the standard of living of 'real' workers. The great Bolivian Workers' Confederation COB encompasses not just miners (who traditionally supply the general secretary), but also street peddlers, students, peasants and small producers. 25
      The dynamic of the social struggles in the periphery remains incomprehensible if no attention is given to such structural hybrid forms. The social history of the Third World demands that we think again and think rigorously about the concept of 'working class'. Once we have done that, a renewal of metropolitan labour history will become possible as well. It may, for instance, well be, that we need an entirely new periodisation. For example, 'classical' labour history considers the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 as the first instances of temporarily successful large-scale working-class action. But if we use a broadened concept of the working class, which includes unfree labourers, then it makes sense to call the slave rebellion in Santo Domingo in 1791 'the first successful workers' revolt in modern history', as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redeker have recently done in their marvellous book The Many-Headed Hydra.13 26
   

New Infrastructures

 
It is evident that global labour history is in need of new databases. I see here two closely interconnected tasks.
  • On the one hand, the collection of large quantities of quantitative and qualitative data on such themes as the structure of the world labour force, real wages, demographic developments and workers' movements;
  • and on the other, the development of techniques making it possible to compare data gathered from different contexts.

Examples of data collections:

  • Data on prices and wages are among the most important sources of information. The IISH has taken the initiative to set up a network of scholars working with this kind of data and establish a moderated list of data files of historical prices and wages. The long-term goal is to enhance the exchange and use or re-use of these data in order to write truly international-comparative or transcontinental histories of labour markets (and other markets).14
  • Advanced plans to build a database on Indian indentured labourers across the world. Between 1834 and 1937 some 30 million people from British-ruled India moved to other parts of the world. About 80 per cent returned. Hindustani communities now exist in South-East Asia, South America, North America, Africa and Europe. The database is meant to cover this whole diaspora, but with a different precision per region. For some regions (e.g. Suriname in South America) individual datasets can be produced, while for other regions only sets of a higher aggregation level seem feasible at the moment.15
  • Since 1985 the Research Working Group on World Labor at the Braudel Center in Binghamton, USA, set up a database, using the indexes of The Times (London) (from 1906 on) and The New York Times (from 1870 on). Information on the year, type of action, country, city and industry was recorded for every mention of labour unrest anywhere in the world. To begin with all the numerical data assembled in this way for the period 1870-1985 was used in further analyses. The most important results have been published in Beverly Silver's book Forces of Labor. Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (2003). Other scholars are following this initiative. A conference later this year will further develop strike statistics for a large number of countries.

Example of techniques that make comparisons feasible:

  • The HISCO-project, which aims at creating an occupational information system that is both international and historical, and simultaneously links to existing classifications used for present-day conditions. The information system will make available on the Web a historical international classification of occupations (HISCO) combined with information on their tasks and duties in historical settings as well as images on the history of work.16 Currently the HISCO scheme is based on the coding of the 1000 most frequent male and female occupational titles in datasets from eight different countries (Canada plus seven European countries), spanning the period 1670-1970, but mostly from the nineteenth century. The coding of new data is now undertaken in Columbia, New Zealand, Russia and the USA, planned for India, and nearing completion in Portugal and Spain.
 27
   

New Research Questions

 
Global labour history promises to place our local and national histories in an entirely new light and suggests new research questions. Let me give just one example, the so-called global commodity chains. As you know, many finished goods result from the combined labour input of workers and farmers across the world. Take for instance the jeans that I am wearing. The cotton for the denim is grown by small farmers in Benin, West Africa. The cotton for the pockets is grown in Pakistan. The synthetic indigo is made in a chemical factory in Frankfurt, Germany. The rivets and buttons contain zinc dug up by Australian miners. The thread is polyester, manufactured from petroleum products by chemical workers in Japan. All parts are assembled in Tunisia. The final product is sold in Europe.17 My jeans are, therefore, the result of a global combination of labour processes. 28
      One relevant question, especially important from the point of view of trade-union internationalism, would be how these different labour processes relate to each other. One could, for instance, hypothesise that the nearer workers are to the finished product the greater is their interested in a low remuneration for workers in earlier stages of production. Workers in a car factory profit in the short-run if steelworkers receive low wages, because this will increase the profit margin on the cars and results in job security and, perhaps, higher wages. In other words, by studying the historical development of commodity chains, we could develop an empirical and historical theory of the problems and possibilities of international solidarity. 29
      This is, of course, just one example. Many other important questions suggest themselves. 30
   

Conclusion

 
I believe that the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History is exceptionally well placed to become a major player in global labour history. 31
      Firstly, for several reasons Australia and New Zealand have always been very much aware of the larger world: as former colonies, as parts of the British Commonwealth, and as immigration countries. You have never been victims of the illusion that you could study your country's social history in isolation — unlike, for instance, French or British historians. Secondly, for a long time already, you have used a broad definition of labour history, which includes unfree labour, especially convict labour. This very much distinguishes your perspective from the traditional approach in most other advanced capitalist countries. Thirdly, you have quite some experience in solid collaborative projects with labour historians from other countries, in particular of course Canada and Britain. Fourthly, many of you like to travel and to visit other continents and far-away countries. All these strong points make you natural participants in the Global Labour History project. 32


Endnotes

1. For an overview of labour history's worldwide development, see the book edited by my colleague, Jan Lucassen, Global Labour History, Peter Lang, Berne, 2005.

2. <www.ith.or.at>. All URLs cited were correct at 27 September 2005.

3. <www.ialhi.org>.

4. See also the paper that I wrote for the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, on 'Globalizing Labour Historiography: The IISH Approach', <www.iisg.nl/research>.

5. Ira Katznelson, 'Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparison', in: Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (eds), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986, pp. 3–41.

6. International Review of Social History, vol. 45, 2000, pp. 279–308.

7. See also the special issue on Indian labour history, to be published by the International Review of Social History as a supplement in December 2006.

8. Immanuel Wallerstein, 'Societal Development, Or Development of the World-System?', International Sociology, vol. 1, 1986, pp. 3–17, at 9.

9. Marcel van der Linden, 'Working Classes, History of', in: Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elseviers Science, Oxford, 2001, vol. 24, pp. 16579–83.

10. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 272.

11. Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1986, p. 8.

12. For a fuller argumentation, see the debate on the reconceptualisation of the world working class at <www.iisg.nl/labouragain/reconceptualising.html>.

13. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Beacon Press, Boston, 2000, p. 319.

14. <www.iisg.nl/hpw>.

15. <www.nationaalarchief.nl/suriname> is a building block of this project.

16. <http://historyofwork.iisg.nl>

17. Fran Abrams and James Astill, 'Story of the Blues', The Guardian Europe, 29 May 2001.

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