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A Chinese woman pushes her way to the front of a hiring queue outside a factory in Shenzhen…. A Bolivian miner, without light or ventilation, crawls deep inside a deserted mine… A group of Somali cleaners files into an investment bank in London’s Canary Wharf…

Globalisation has created a whole new working class – and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s to its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s. Along the way he provides a ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ for the anti-globalisation movement, uncovering startling parallels between the issues that confronted the original anti-capitalists and those who have taken to the streets in Seattle, Genoa and beyond.

Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today’s front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London’s Docklands – and how they’re being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot.

The stories come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child labourers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America’s wild west, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War One. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Contents

Introduction

1. Rise like lions

The Peterloo Massacre, Manchester 1819
Shenzhen, China, 2003
Manchester, 1819

2. Everything connected with beauty

The silk weavers' revolt, Lyon, 1831
Varanasi, India, 2005
Lyon, France, 1830

3. This is the dawn…

The Paris Commune, 1871
Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005
Paris, April 1867

4. Every race worth saving

How American workers invented May Day
Basra, Iraq, 2006
Philadelphia, USA, 1869

5. A great big union grand

Unskilled unionism goes global, 1889-1912
Canary Wharf, London, 2004
London, 1889

6. Wars between brothers

How German workers tried to stop the war
Huanuni, Bolivia, 2006
Germany, 1905

7. Totally ignorant labourers

The birth of the Chinese working class
New Delhi, India, 2005
Shanghai, China, 1919

8. Heaven and earth will hear us

Jewish workers fight for cultural freedom
El Alto, Boliva, 2006
Brzeziny, Poland

9. Joy brought on by hope

When workers controlled the factories
Neuquén, Argentina, 2006
Italy, 1920
France, 1936
Flint, Michigan, 1937

Afterword: Louise Michel with fairy wings

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

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England in the long eighteenth century has often been regarded as a deferential society under aristocratic leadership, or more recently, as a society whose internal tensions were dispersed by the persistant experience of war. This book takes a different view. Drawing together the implications of recent work on demography, labour, and law, it seeks to re-explore the power relations in English society and the ongoing struggles over popular entitlements and elite privilege.

Focusing primarily on the experience of England's lower orders, Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers accord new significance to the decline of customary rights and claims, and to the triumph of market forces and the law, showing how the paternalism of the first half of the century gave way to the sharper class articulation of the second, culminating in the birth of a working-class radicalism in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

'Shuttles', to a squire or great landed patrician, meant trade, manual work, the stain on those who were not, and could never be, gentlemen. To a small master weaver, and his journeymen and apprentices, they were a proud symbol of 'the Trade', a skill and a claim to legal rights, against all those outside it.

Swords, the emblems of gentlemanly status, were still commonly worn in the streets of London in the early eighteenth century. But even when fashion made them less common, they remained an essential element of male formal dress among the upper classes, as long as the duel also remained central to the code of honour. In the eyes of the middling sort they were more likely to be either risible, or carry connotations of privilege or even tyranny. The labouring poor, increasingly through the century, and especially at the end of this period, looked up at swords in the hands of mounted soldiers and propertied volunteers as the state turned more to coercion. In 1819 at least eleven men, women, and children died of sabre wounds or were trampled to death when the yeomanry, directed by the magistracy, attacked the mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field, Manchester. Over 400 were wounded at 'Peterloo', many of them maimed for life. The government congratulated the perpetrators.

Contents

Preface

1. Landscapes and Perspectives

2. Hierarchy

3. The Politics of Love and Marriage

4. Political Order

5. Harvests and Dearth

6. Custom

7. The Disruption of Custom, the Triumph of Law

8. New Populations

9. The Power of the People

10. War and Peace

11. Popular Beliefs and Popular Politics

12. Class and Power in Hanoverian England

Notes

Chronology

Figures

Select Bibliography

Index

This text is an updated version of that originally issued by Past Tense.

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This volume brings together a wide-ranging and seminal debate about the nature of English rural society in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries. Previously published in The Journal of Peasant Studies, the contributions challenge many of the existing premises of rural historiography. Together with major new contributions by the editors, the collection will be essential reading for all interested in rural England in modern times.

Contents

1. Class and Conflict in Rural England: Some reflections on a Debate

Mick Reed

2. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850

Roger Wells

3. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850: A Comment

Andrew Charlesworth

4. Social Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside in the Early Nineteenth-Century: A Rejoinder

Roger Wells

5. The Wells-Charlesworth Debate: A Personal Comment on Arson in Norfolk and Suffolk

J. E. Archer

6. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: The Use of the Open-Closed Village Model

Dennis Mills and Brian Short

7. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: A Comment

Mick Reed

8. Peasants and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Rural England: A Comment on Two Recent Articles

Dennis Mills

9. Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside, 1700-1880

Roger Wells

10. An Agenda for Modern English Rural History?

Mick Reed and Roger Wells

Consolidated Bibliography