Marcel van der Linden - Workers of The World - Amazon Web Services

477 Pages·2009·4.63 MB·English

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Contents
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Conceptualizations
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Varieties of mutualism
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Forms of resistance
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vi • Contents
Insights from adjacent disciplines
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Acknowledgments
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viii • Acknowledgments
and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues’_B%#0%\’F%)%#’930E;’SYYa‘;’GGA’ZVS[Udl’
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Chapter One
Introduction
Thinking is not building cathedrals or compos-
ing symphonies. If the symphony exists, it is the
reader who must create it in his own ears.
Cornelius Castoriadis
At the beginning of the 21st century, historical
research about the toil, troubles and achievements
of workers and labor movements is undergoing an
exciting transition to a truly Global Labor History.
To understand what is changing, one only needs
to compare the recent perspectives with traditional
ones.
Previously, historians of the working classes pre-
occupied themselves almost exclusively with the
developed capitalist countries and Eastern Europe/
Russia. They interpreted the object of their study
in a very narrow – ultimately Eurocentric – way. A
one-sided paradigm therefore predominated in the
great stream of publications appearing since the
discipline’s pioneering days in the 1840s. The typi-
cal worker studied by the traditional labor historian
was a “doubly free” individual (in the Marxian sense
of “free” to choose one’s employer, and “freed” from
the ownership of capital). This worker was usually
male, and employed in the transport sector (docks or
railways), mines, industry or large-scale agriculture.
In the background, his (or sometimes her) family
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2 • Chapter One
seemed to have mainly a consumptive or reproductive function: wages were
spent on it, and children were raised by it. Labor protests were taken seri-
ously, and analyzed, mainly if they took the form of strikes, trade union activ-
ity or party-political action by left-wing movements.
From the 1950s onwards, many more contributions were made to the labor
history of colonies or former colonies. But initially they fell victim to the
same Eurocentric biases.1 They too concentrated on mineworkers, dockers,
plantation workers etc., neglecting families and household labor. Their main
focus was also on strikes, trade unions and political parties, although the
authors were inspired by many different political perspectives. For example,
J. Norman Parmer’s thorough Colonial Labor Policy and Administration (1960)
on the Malaysian rubber plantation industry (through several decades pre-
ceding the Second World War) looked at workers through the eyes of entre-
preneurs and state authorities. Jean Chesneaux’s classic Le mouvement ouvrier
en Chine de 1919 à 1927 (1962) was written from an of cial Communist posi-
tion. Guillermo Lora’s Historia del movimiento obrero boliviana (1967–1970) was
a Trotskyist work.
Later studies often tried to develop a less Eurocentric approach. Pathbreak-
ing works in this regard include Charles van Onselen’s Chibaro (1976) on mine
labor in Southern Rhodesia and Ranajit Das Gupta’s Labour and Working Class
in Eastern India (1994) on plantation workers, miners and textile workers in
Assam, Bengal and elsewhere.2 In the last twenty years or so, labor history
enjoys growing interest in parts of the Global South. In Latin America and
the Caribbean, John French concluded a few years ago, “the  eld  rst gained
visibility in the early to mid-1980s and has now won recognition as an estab-
1 Already prior to the Second World War, a few important contributions to labor
history in de Global South were published. See for example Das, Factory Labor in
India; idem, Factory Legislation in India; idem, Labor Movement in India; Clark, Organized
Labor in Mexico.
2 These new developments have been covered over the years by a series of col-
lections of essays. Sandbrook and Cohen, Development of an African Working Class;
Gutkind, Cohen, and Copans, African Labor History; Cohen, Gutkind, and Brazier,
Peasants and Proletarians; Munslow and Finch, Proletarianisation in the Third World;
Agier, Copans, and Morice, Classes ouvrières d’Afrique noire; Amin and van der Linden,
“Peripheral” Labour?.
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