| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 61

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

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 neoliberal 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 Fighting is 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 Afterword 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

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