By Paul Mason
Guest Review by Melody Kemp

In 2007 businessman Henry Liu, writing for Asian Times Online, called for a global working class coalition to counter to global corporatism. That a businessman should do this might surprise some, but Mason’s new and fascinating book challenges many shibboleths related to working class history. In it Mason describes the vibrant counterculture which was flirting with emergent feminism, democracy and republicanism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and which was integral to shaping factions in the global conflicts of the 20th. This is a history which should inspire all trade unionists, labour activists and scholars.

Parallels are what this book is about. He plays out the contemporary lives of industrial workers in China, India, Central and South America and Africa, then lays them against their historical peers, going back to 18th to 19th-century Europe where working class movements began to evolve into trade unions and then into working class republicanism. Ironically, independent handloom weavers and spinners who were the fathers and mothers of trade unions are, in modern parlance, informal handicraft workers, and excluded from mainstream labour organizing.

The history of the working class evolved as Mason says into ‘worlds within worlds’. They developed parallel institutions such as financial systems (Manchester Unity insurance was founded by the Manchester strikers). La Marmite was not an icky brown spread, but a cafeteria serving nutritious food for French workers created by worker cooperatives. Solidarity and conversation were served with the food. After a 12- to 14-hour day, workers would sit down to political and social education classes, debating alternative social and political systems, long before the economic ideologues like Marx and Hayek formulated their ideas. Sadly as Mason says, labour history seems to insinuate that everything workers did before 1848 was merely a fill-in until the arrival of Marx.

At the base of the self-governing worker communities of Mason’s history was the trilogy of self-betterment through education and skills improvement, workplace dignity and autonomy, and democratic rights which would include women. Wages hardly ranked a mention.

In this age of stern gender advisers, it is fascinating to know that the Manchester weaving and spinners union (the majority of whom were men and who defied a ban on trade unions) gave the vote to women in 1819, 100 years before the British Government granted them suffrage. In those opening years of the nineteenth century, women’s trade societies sprung up with the aim ‘to instill into the hearts and minds of our children, a deep and rooted hatred of corrupt and tyrannical rulers.’

The anarchists later marginalized women.

This well-researched book is meant to help labour activists rediscover history, not, as he says, ‘to piously learn lessons’, but to see where activism leads, what reactions various patterns of revolt bring. He notes that when work becomes humane, fair and representative, the red fire tends to be quashed. If only more would listen. It took only 20 years to dismember this 200-year-old carefully built community of working class skill, intelligence and foresight. In its shadow has been built a management class, international production and the new activism that was blooded in the streets of Seattle in 1999.

Mason is no turgid, ideology-driven academic; he covers industrial affairs for the BBC and is clearly in sympathy with the working class. Towards the end he refers to his own working class roots. And can he write! One is immediately hooked into vision of James Larkin planting a time capsule in the basement of a church being built in 1904 and the pace hardly slackens. 

It reads like a thriller. The murder happens and I realized what had been lost. Mason, a true journalist, went to the places, smelled the sewage and saw the squalor. Under the global barbarism of modern industrial culture, the sweatshop mentality has taken us back to the factory culture of post-Industrial Revolution Europe.

While the modern labour movement has real-time text messaging, the modern-day worker has been largely bought off by the promise of riches; neatly shifting the focus from dignity, control and political representation, to the instant gratification of wages.

Mason’s fear is that with all the technological gizmos and Powerpoint presentations, the Global South could be let down by its lack of intellectual breadth and depth and reliance on educated elites who have never been skilled industrial workers. Workers’ rights are dissociated from the broader political context and from the bigger issues facing the world. 

In this era of stagnation, recession and economic entropy, it is wise to remember that by the mid-1900’s, a metalworker was predicting the internet and Valrin was making acute economic observations about consumption. That the bosses didn’t listen, that greed has replaced dignity and pride, is a loss to us all.