Back to index of Nerve 15 - Winter 2009

Live Working or Die Fighting
How the working class went global

Paul Mason (2008: London, Vintage Books)

Reviewed by Val Walsh

Paul Mason combines his personal and political roots in an English, northern, white working-class family and community with his political skills and experience as an award-winning broadcast journalist, to produce a book that bursts with the very passion and clarity of purpose he documents through the stories he recounts.

He starts with the fabled story of James Larkin and his part in putting a time capsule into the foundations of the Anglican Cathedral in 1904. (For a full account of this see, ‘Secret in the Stone’ by Ron Noon.)

Mason's text ranges historically and geographically: from the first ever industrial workforce, famed for the Peterloo uprising in 1819, to Bolivia in 2006; from the first May Day in 1886, when 340,000 workers across America joined the strike for the eight hour day, to Wapping, London in 1986, when the power of the UK print unions was broken; from the plight of non-unionised immigrant workers in Canary Wharf, London in 2004; to the exploited, but as yet non-unionised, industrial workers of contemporary China.

Mason pinpoints the emergence of 'class consciousness' and 'class struggle', thereby both clarifying their historical meaning and posing their contemporary relevance. Meanwhile, the price paid by many has been harrowing and should not be forgotten: executions, beheadings, mass slaughter, 'disappearance', imprisonment, industrial injury and curtailment of livelihood.

Marek Edelman, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto, spells out the philosophy of the Jewish Bund at the time:

My idea of socialism is no state monopoly. There should be stress on the subjectivity of the human being. You need good material conditions, a high level of culture, much freedom and friendship.

Mason's book contributes to an understanding of how we have arrived at where we are today, as both workers and political activists, and concludes by signalling two overarching factors in the present and for the future: that 'globalisation has stretched the manufacturing process across continents and time zones', 'with migration altering the demographics of the workforce beyond recognition'. These present our next challenge.

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