BOOK REVIEW

“Live working or die fighting” Book Review by Paul Mason

“Live working or die fighting” Book Review by Paul Mason

Introduction

This publication is an determined attempt to bring some of the large events from employed class annals to a new lifetime of youth. Paul Mason argues that as the working class in the “global south” has expanded, so new workers' movements are emerging with strong similarities to those that arose during the first wave of globalization, which began in the 1870s.

Review

BBC reporter Paul Mason has in writing a well liked history of the global employees' movement. Mason's work has taken him from Bolivia to India and from Canary Wharf to China. The familiarity of the employees across these countries are given a voice in reside employed or pass away Fighting. Thankfully, the voices we here are not the tightly edited snippets that typify up to date report coverage. We do not discover what the newspapers desire us to hear. We hear instead what Mason wants us to hear - the voice of workers who are either steeped in struggle or who see the need to struggle but have not yet found the means of organizing themselves.

The up to date situations are generally founded on Mason's own first-hand investigations as a Newsnight journalist. The chronicled demonstrations come from a wide reading of labour history. The result is highly readable book, even where some of the parallels are a little forced - and even where strictly, some were not really part of the first wave of globalization at all.

Acharacteristic characteristic of the publication is the way Mason tells tales of collective activity through the lives of those who commanded them. Thus we learn about Samuel Bamford's role in worker organizing - including military-style drilling - building a movement during the infancy of the English working class. The Peterloo massacre is also commemorated by Shelley's poem, which advised employees to “rise like lions” because “Ye are many - they are few”.

Jean-Claude Romand, who coined the saying “live employed or die fighting”, is the principal figure in the Lyon revolt. In the Paris Commune, bookbinder Eugène Varlin and teacher Louise Michel are the centered characters. In the US action for May Day, Martin Irons and railworker Terence Powderly are the primary figures. Irons remarked that it was the principle of solidarity, that “an injury to one is the concern of us all”, which turned him from a drifter into a militant union organizer.

In the fight to organize unskilled workers before the First World War, Tom Mann, Victor Griffuelhes, Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn are the key actors. This section summed up what it intended to be part of the “union way of life”, in Griffuelhes' phrase. The developed employees' of the World (IWW) drive for “one large-scale union” encompassed the article of the 1912 US textile employees' hit, which coined the demand, “We desire baked bread and Roses too”.

The socialist way of life in the million's powerful German SPD and its successors is told ...