Excerpt--Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global

Introduction to the 2010 EditionAt 5 a.m. on the outskirts of Kibera, a Kenyan slum that is home to amillion people, a human traffic jam begins. A crowd as wide as the roadcomes stumbling and striding out of the narrow lanes just wider thanyour shoulders. They head toward the factory district to pack greenbeans and tulips that will be in Europe’s supermarkets by tomorrow.

Outside each factory gate is a concrete bench, where ten or twentyyoung guys will spend the day spitting and sleeping, waiting for work.The bench is not put there out of kindness: “It’s a key piece of the in-dustrial relations system,” quips a Kibera resident. “You don’t workhard enough, there are always ten guys outside waiting for your job.”

You have probably seen Kibera: it’s the setting for the feature filmThe Constant Gardner and every westerner who flies in to Nairobi getsto stare, with a guilty lump in their throat, at those few packed kilome-tres of corrugated roofs, between which flow shit-filled rivers for chil-dren to play in. Kibera is part of third world iconography. But youhave probably never seen, or thought about, where the people wholive in a slum like this actually work.

Kibera, in the media iconography, is about poverty, not work, andcertainly not “the working class.” To the outsider, these teeming alley-ways full of makeshift soccer-cinemas, hustler churches, standpipes andthe threat of violence seem home to a kind of sub-proletariat.

Yet the world of Kibera and the world of those pristine green beansand tulips in the supermarket are inseparable parts of the same reality.Because they live in hovels where there is no running water, Kibera resi-dents can work for peanuts: wages here are much lower than the $100 amonth a Chinese factory worker would get. Because their main problemis whether some local hoodlum is going to bulldoze their shack, “labordisputes” are secondary and sporadic. Evictions, water-rights and HIV

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awareness are what the self-organized groups struggle over.Yet this is the African working class, part of the three billion-strong

global workforce whose creation is the key event of the period since1989: bigger than the post-9/11 war on terror; bigger than the com-munications revolution. This “great doubling” of the global workforce,as Harvard’s Richard Freeman calls it, is a story that has hardly beentold. It is happening from Kenya to India to China and Latin America.Yet the patterns of resistance and revolt it has called forth are familiarto anybody who knows the labor history of the western world. Unfor-tunately, that does not include many people in Kibera.

I have written this book in order to fill a gap: today the workingclass is bigger than it has ever been, is becoming more truly global. Butits stories and narratives are lost. Lost, in part, because even in the Westthe transmission mechanisms were broken during the defeats that shat-tered traditional working class communities in the 1980s and 90s. Butlost also because they were never truly told.

This book sets out to tell the story of organized labor from theviewpoint of the people who actually built it. And to tell it fresh to anew generation of workers and social justice activists to whom it reallyis all new: people with no geographic, workplace or family link to the200-year story of the labor movement in the developed world.

They are a feisty bunch of people in this book: the Lancashire poet-weaver who thinks it’s blasphemous not to believe in fairies; theMontmartre schoolma’m who cuddles the feet of freezing childrenand then takes her rifle to the barricades; the blond, Jewish freedomfighter who bluffs his way into Treblinka and then out again, back tothe ghetto, to tell the world. Flawed people, too: the union guysnatched by detectives during a rooming-house tryst with his wife’ssister; the guy who knows enough Shanghai prostitutes to turn theminto a distribution network for anti-imperialist leaflets aimed at west-ern sailors. Put them all in a room together and they would have amassive argument, several love affairs and eventually a fist-fight. Butthey would achieve something.

They were dreamers, roamers and drifters the people who turnedthe words “organised labor” into a reality. And history has done them a

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twin disservice. Mainstream history simply ignored them, just as themainstream media at the time they lived vilified them briefly, carica-tured them and then forgot them.

Meanwhile “labor history” for decades treated them like two-di-mensional cardboard characters in a toy theatre. Labor history had big-ger things to worry about than individuals: it was about “forces” andcycles. Revolution and repression, the rise and fall of mass move-ments—always determined, of course, by the even bigger tectonicforces of economic crisis, the rate of profit, the clash of empires.

Those of us who learned our labor history in the decades when thesource material was cream-colored paperbacks printed in Moscow weretaught not just to disregard the individuals, but to disregard our own in-dividuality. The working class may have been designated the “subject” ofhistory, and the “subjective factor” may have been deemed decisive, butthe individual human subject was of little interest unless it was one of thesupreme figures in the Marxist or social-democratic pantheon.

Few of the people in this book had the luxury of a posthumous ha-giography or hero cult so they have, for the most part, been treated as asub-set of something else: a participant in this rising, a follower of thatgreat revolutionary or reformist leader. For example, I found thememoirs of the man who launched the Lyon silk-weavers insurrectionof 1831, and who coined the slogan that forms the title of this book,with its pages uncut in the British Library. It had sat there throughoutthe entire period Karl Marx had studied in that reading room, un-opened.

A third and rapidly resolving problem has been access to thesources. Thanks to online genealogy, digital photography collections,the digitization of out-of-print books and manuscripts we know moretoday than Marx or Bakunin could have known about the Paris Com-mune; more indeed than any single participant could have known.

As our knowledge changes, and the shackles of determinism fallaway, a whole new picture of labor history has opened up. For the first150 years of organized labor, activists did not live in a compartmental-ized world of “industrial work” versus “politics.” They did not live theboring lives described in the Stalinist mythology of worker heroes.

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They lived within a vibrant counter-culture that was their main sourceof education, social welfare and friendship. They fought for humanfreedom, not a series of abstract goals, and their lifestyles scandalizedthe moral conservatives of their own day.

This book tells some of those stories. I’ve made no attempt to becomprehensive: I’ve just picked out some of the major events that hap-pened during great advance of the first hundred years, followed by thecrisis and catastrophe of the inter-war period.

Because the first 150 years of labor history took place in countriesthat were mainly white, and produced trade unions that were mainlymale, this is a story about mainly white, male workers in Europe,America and the Pacific. Because it relies on oral histories, memoirsand the work of academics who themselves rely on these sources, Ihave concentrated on countries where such sources are accessible andtrustworthy. Since the first edition of this book was published, somereaders have expressed frustration that there’s nothing about Russia orthe pre-civil war Spanish labor movement. I can only say I share thatfrustration: It’s a question of sources and resources.

In a departure from the usual ritual in labor history, I have not de-voted much time to the historical context and mainstream politics sur-rounding the events I describe. If you want to know more aboutFranklin Delano Roosevelt, Louis Napoleon or Giovanni Giolitti,there is enough on Wikipedia to start with.

For a long time a book like this seemed unnecessary. When therewere strong labor movements in the developed world, based in stablecommunities with a strong oral tradition, everybody knew the basichistory. The workers I grew up with in an English coal and cottontown seemed to have been—as George Orwell once put it—“bornknowing what I had learned, out of books and slowly.” In any case, allthe best stories had been told.

I was wrong. Leigh, the Lancashire town I grew up in, was not sodifferent in the 1960s as it was when my grandfather went down themine in 1913: It was a world of white, manual workers, devout Sundaymarchers for Catholicism and Methodism, brass bands, rugby and theannual Miners’ Gala. It is totally different now: twenty years of global-


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ization have shorn away most of what was permanent and certain. Theminers’ union was destroyed, manufacturing has moved to China, andif you look for the union activists they are mainly teachers, local gov-ernment workers, healthworkers. In that town right now the socialjustice agenda is about social dislocation and of course, migration.

The labor market in which workers from that town compete startsat their doorstep, where it is newly stocked with high-skilled, low-paidmigrants from eastern Europe; and it ends at a bus station in Bangaloreor a slum in Shenzhen.

In the process of globalization, a culture that took 200 years to buildwas torn apart in twenty. There is no point mourning it, but it is anunacknowledged and universal phenomenon everywhere organizedlabor and working-class social cohesion was once strong.

I’ve found it in Detroit, at the Ford factory, where I was quizzingshop-floor workers at a redundancy and relocation fair. One womanjust broke down in tears at the idea of a life after automobiles andunionized work. “When I think what they did to us, to our people,our union…” she sniffled, and then stopped herself short, as if as-tounded. “Phew! I don’t know where that came from.”

I found it in Clairton, Pennsylvania—a union town—and inElkhart, Indiana, a resolutely non-union town that is the capital ofrecreational vehicle and brass instrument manufacture. It’s as if thereis some kind of great universal grief, unmentionable under therapy,over the death of the solidaristic, decent, highly educated and aspira-tional lifestyle that was the badge of being “working class” during thepost-war economic boom.

If you look at it through a long lens though, the process has hap-pened before. It’s something bigger than one of those cycles of upswingand downturn traditional labor history was obsessed with. It’s more likethe dissolution of a whole era and lifestyle and its replacement withsomething new: similar to what happened to the American unions be-tween 1860 and 1890, when the whole sociology of work changed.

Today, in place of the static local workforce, working in the factoriestheir grandfathers worked in, and drinking in the very bars they drankin, a truly global working class is being created, with high mobility and

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very little in terms of roots.First, because since the collapse of communism the whole world’s

workforce has the shared experience of labouring in a market econ-omy. There is no longer an iron curtain dividing the experience ofworkers in the East from those in the West.

Second, because practice in the workplace is becoming standardizedacross the globe. The F7 key means the same on every computer; thequality circle in an American auto factory discusses the same things asthe quality circle in a Chinese factory, even if the wages and humanrights are different; the process of cooking and assembling a Big Macis, as the old slogan says, “the same the whole world over.”

Finally by pitting the low-waged workforce of the Global Southagainst the high-waged workers of Europe, America and Japan, global-ization has forced labor organizations to begin to think globally—evenif they are slow to act that way.

Objectively, the global working class exists. Subjectively—in theminds of the people on the factory floor—things are more compli-cated. In the Global South millions of peasants and shanty dwellers arebeing sucked into the exhilarating and brutal world of wages, over-time, company dormitories and consumer capitalism. They are goingthrough what the first generation of factory workers went through inmy home town, 200 years ago, but in an economy where informationflows like quicksilver, where consumer culture is global and where thecultural remnants of pre-industrial society have an annoying tendencyto refuse to disappear.

In trying to tell this modern story as a journalist I’ve met Chineseworkers crippled because of inadequate safety standards, Bolivian min-ers working in conditions my grandfather’s generation would not havetolerated; I’ve met Indian garment workers who recognize the labelson the sportswear they sew but who have no idea who their employeris, or when they are getting paid.

This book sets their stories alongside the stories of activists fromprevious generations. In each chapter I start with an episode from thepresent and then flashback to a time in labor history. The aim is not todraw crude parallels, still less to suggest the “lessons of the struggle” are


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somehow directly relevant. The aim is simply to show how scrappyand unresolved history is when you are living it in the first draft, andhow you have to stand back to make sense of it.

Right now in London there are Somali, Kurdish and Brazilian-bornmigrant cleaners trying to form unions inside the headquarters of in-vestment banks—but they are still having trouble with the city’s geog-raphy, let alone its history. They have no idea that the Irish and Jewishmigrants who lived in the same slum streets as they do, one hundredyears ago, had to fight the same kind of battle, or how they won. Andwhy should they? Amid relentless change, we can no longer rely onword of mouth, family, tradition and community to keep the working-class story alive.

As a journalist, I’ve learned that the story you uncover when youlisten to people is always more interesting than the one you thoughtyou were after. If you take the same approach with labor history youget startling results. You find that Lancashire cotton workers at Peter-loo discovered nearly every type of organization and tactic seen duringthe next 190 years. You learn that the “doomed” silk weavers of Lyon,France, were not fighting a hopeless battle against mechanization butdefending a highly efficient and progressive network economy. Youdiscover that the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune were reallyjust boring union officials, opposed to strikes.You realize that the Jew-ish Bund—an organization that disappears from official Marxist his-tory after 1903—went on to create one of the most highly developedworking-class cultures ever seen.

If there is a recurrent theme in these stories it is about control. Po-litically the labor movement has debated strategy in terms of reformversus revolution. Practically, to the frustration of both currents, work-ers have been prepared to go beyond reform but settle for less thanrevolution. Once you understand the deep desire for control withinthe workplace, and for the creation of parallel communities within so-ciety, you can understand better the dynamics of the struggles narratedhere, and their limitations.

The great discovery of the grassroots worker activists was this: thatpower is just as big a question as class. It was a woman with a rifle from

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the slums of Montmartre who warned the world, 140 years ago:“There are millions of us who don’t give a damn for any authority be-cause we have seen how little the many-edged tool of power accom-plishes. We have watched throats cut to gain it. It is supposed to be asprecious as the jade axe that travels from island to island in Oceania.No, power monopolized is evil . . . ”

I decided to end the historical narrative in this book in the year1943: with half the world’s workers living under fascist dictatorshipsand the other half in alliance with American capitalism or Stalinistcommunism. By then many of the individuals Orwell described as the“flower of the working class” had been cut down—if not by fascismthen by Stalin’s secret police or as casualties of war.

When the international labor movement revived after 1945 it was adifferent creature. For the next four decades, unions and socialist partiescommanded a place at the decision-making tables of the westerndemocracies, but much of the gut anarchism and self-taught romanti-cism you will meet among the people featured in this book was gone.

To me, the experience of labor’s great upward surge, when the ide-ologies of republicanism, socialism and anarchism jostled amicablyacross the tables of working-class bars, seems more relevant to the pres-ent than the experience of 1945-89. Maybe understanding it better,and through the eyes of individuals rather than the “historic forces,” isthe best therapy for those still traumatized by what happened to theworld, and the movement, they grew up in.

There is no law that says the workers in the Global South will relivethe long process of organization and self-education described here: theymay be able to fast-forward, skipping whole stages. But they are facedby formidable forces that our grandfathers thought they had left be-hind: organized crime, ethnic rivalry, weird religions and village net-works co-existing alongside robotized production. It’s entirely possiblethat the new workforce of the world will fail to organize themselvesand that paternalistic capitalism, charity and religion become—as inKibera today—the framework around which self-organized groups ofthe urban poor have to survive.

If a new global labor movement does emerge, then the stories in


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this book will turn out to be the pre-history of the working class. Thewhite male rebels staring out from one-hundred-year-old photographswill be seen as precursors to a multi-ethnic movement centred in theGlobal South, which communicates by text message, in real time, andin which women are the majority.

Whatever the outcome, what I’ve tried to show in this book is thatthe people who built the labor movement were human beings, not so-cialist automata or anarchist supermen.

In Kibera, once, I met a woman whose job it was to pack the greenFrench beans that appear on dinner tables in the developed world. “Ihave never tasted one,” she said. “Come on, I said, that can’t be true.”She paused for a moment and then admitted. “Okay, I did taste oneonce, and it tasted good.”

I have a hunch that, for the people who built the labor movement,that’s how it started too. Amid the ashen injustice of hard work andpoverty they had a brief taste of something better and decided, as LouiseMichel once put it, that “all must take part in the banquet of life.”

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3. This Is the Dawn . . .The Paris Commune, 1871

The old world crumbles. The night that covers the earth tearsback its shroud. The dawn approaches . . . Today, with the tri-umph of the people, the era of work has begun . . . Brothersthe whole world over, our blood is flowing for your freedom;our victory is yours; rise up! This is the dawn . . .

Jules Vallès L’Insurgé, 18711

Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005

The man who flags down our van says he’s a policeman. His frightenedeyes peer through the windscreen and he rattles a sawn-offAK-47 to make his point. The driver pulls a disgusted face, looks point-edly at the gunman’s bare feet as if to say “Come off it,” and edges for-ward. The police mount roadblocks every mile along the dualcarriage way that borders this Lagos slum, but they don’t come in this far.

Amukoko is a sea of shacks and alleyways, long terraces of one-storyhuts clustered around improvised concrete “compounds” sometimesfour stories high. A canal spills through the middle, green with vegeta-tion, filthy with excrement and swarming with mosquitoes. Thanks tothis canal, one out of every twenty-five children skipping barefoot inthese streets will die of malaria before the age of ten. Only 5 percentof Amukoko’s homes have running water. “We call it the ghetto,” saysStephen Oluremi. “Those who live here only have money just for liv-ing.” Three million people live here.

At night they sleep eight or ten to a room, and the overspill can befound in corridors, cupboards and stairwells. In the daytime the passage-ways are teeming with family life: a woman is getting a fire going undera cooking pot; kids race around in states of clothing corresponding to

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their age. The very young are naked; school-age boys wear raggedshorts; an adolescent might—if his family has had just one life-changingpiece of good luck—wear the faded football strip of Liverpool or Juven-tus bearing the name of a player famous five years ago.

There are very few old people; Amukoko is a place for migrantworkers. Young mothers control the streets, dressed in the tribal stylesof every part of Nigeria. Hausa women from the north in Muslimscarves fetch water beside Ibo women from the south with bare stom-achs and ornate dreadlocks.

Most of the men are out at work or out looking for work. Butwhere do you work if you come from Amukoko? If you are a child youcan sell things. Every road junction within half a day’s walk is full ofkids from Amukoko, offering the neo-junk of a Third World economy:phone cards, cellphone chargers, rip-offs of self-improvement books inEnglish. One boy proffers a fistful of black electrical cables to a vandriver stuck in a traffic jam; the driver picks one out and then, with thetraffic suddenly unjammed, drives off without paying. The boy’s facegoes into tearful meltdown, but then the adrenalin kicks in and hechases after the van, shouting.

Or you can work as a tailor. This means wandering around Lagoswith a small white cushion on your head, balancing a 1950s vintageSinger sewing machine on top. Once in a while your shout for workwill co incide with somebody’s need for sewing and their ability to pay.The rest of the time you keep your neck gracefully erect and walk thestreets.

For all its printed shawls, red-hot coals and football regalia the over-whelming color in Amukoko is gray. The gutters and the streets arecoated in a gray mud that is not really mud but layer upon layer of toxicrubbish—decades-old plastic bags, last year’s carpet, yesterday’s chickenbones—all ground into a fine dry paste by millions of passing feet. Thesame gray settles on the roofs and, thanks to coarse detergent, thebleaching sun, and polluted rain the gray seeps into people’s clothes.

Tuberculosis, malaria, measles and AIDS are the biggest killers. Ba-bies are delivered by traditional birth attendants whom tradition hastaught to do lethal things. Serene Nigerian nuns, barricaded into their

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compounds at night, glide through the streets by day doling out medi-cine and discouraging condom use.

Amukoko is the classic slum. One billion people live in slums, onesixth of humanity, one third of city dwellers. By 2030, according tothe UN, slum dwellers will number two billion. It is easy to dissoci-ate the world of Amukoko from the world of factories and offices, tothink of slums as one social reality and the modern workplace as an-other, but in countries like Nigeria they are inextricably linked.

Less than two miles from the edge of Amukoko is Ikeja, the indus-trial heart of Lagos. A long straight road bordered by wire fences and arailway takes you past the big names: Guinness, Dunlop, Dulux, BergerPaints, Nigeria Steel and Wire. The men coming out to buy snacksfrom street vendors look tough, dusty, confident. Ikeja looks like it’s ina different century from Amukoko. But the lives of men like StephenOluremi straddle these two worlds.2

Oluremi works in a metal bashing factory, making aluminium potsfor electrical appliances. He is single, in his early twenties with hardhands and scrappy clothing. There are 250 permanent workers wherehe works and 200 casuals. He is one of the casuals:

In this country I don’t know how they get away with it: the casualworks like a staffer but the money is different. You don’t have a con-tract. When you are working you are supposed to collect goodmoney, but for the casuals you are not collecting good money at all.Even though you do the same job as a staffer, you are not paid verywell. That is the casual way.

He earns 5,000 naira a month—£21 sterling and about half the goingrate for a factory worker in China. The hours are bearable—7 a.m. to3 p.m.—and conditions are tough, but he counts himself lucky to beon the production line and not the section where they hand-polishthe castings: “In the ‘village,’ where they are polishing, it’s very hot. If Iworked in that place for just two days I would be sick because they areusing all their power, their strength, their everything, to work.”

Like most big factories in Nigeria his workplace is unionized. Nige-ria’s unions won legal recognition and a compulsory “check-off system,”


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where the company collects union dues from wage packets, in the1970s. Though the government has recently made this voluntary, mostforeign investors, under scrutiny from NGOs, have not felt inclined totear up union agreements. In fact they have lavished company benefitson their core workforce. But Oluremi can’t get into the core workforce.He’s been at the factory four years and, by law, should have been takenon permanently after six months. But he hasn’t, and that is his biggripe—against the employers, the other workers and the union.

People risk their bodies for this work. I am sick—tomorrow I amsupposed to go to the medical center—but if I get signed off sick,they will not pay me. If you are a casual and you go for a medical,you will not be paid. Even if the doctor gives you three weeks foryour illness, you will not be paid. The staff will be paid. If the doctorgives you sick leave more than a week, it is tough for you.

The staff with regular contracts earn double what he earns, plus hous-ing and medical benefits, so he lives in the slum, spending half hiswages on transport and another quarter on the rented room he shareswith another young factory worker. The union leader in his factory isalso a senior manager. To get a job here you need to know somebodyin the management or the union. So why don’t they challenge theunion leaders, if they are so dissatisfied?

People who have worked in the factory a long time are called eld-ers. When the youth are talking, the elders will always be against, sothey don’t unite. We youths will present candidates; the elders willgather themselves. When the elections take place the casuals will notbe there. Only the staff will be at the election, and there are moreelders than youth among the staff, so that is how the union over-comes the people.

The Nigerian labor movement lives in wary symbiosis with the re-cently demilitarized state. It has a heavy presence in foreign-owned in-dustries and the public sector but cannot normally sink roots into thepopulation of a place like Amukoko. The social networks in the slumscome together haphazardly around the mosques, the churches, the


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struggling clinics and the NGOs. Like most workers in the Lagosslums, Oluremi is too busy struggling for survival to think about thewider politics of it all:

After work, for a man like me, you want to go to school. Once I fin-ish work maybe I’ll go to my friend’s place, or to the computerschool to study. I just have to fight for my life, after I finish work. Ihave to fight for my own life, just to survive.

It is only in abnormal times that the Nigerian Labour Congress, themain trade union federation, links up with the passions and prioritiesof the slum dwellers. In 2003 the NLC called a general strike after thegovernment raised the price of petrol. The strike was solid in heavy in-dustry and the oil sector, but when a pro-government union organizeda return to work, youth gangs from the Lagos slums attacked thestrike-breakers with machetes and erected burning barricades. Bynightfall on July 7, 2003, ten protesters had been shot dead by police.In October 2003 the government slashed the price of fuel under thethreat of a new general strike and there has been a sullen truce withthe unions ever since.

Stephen Oluremi’s life is lived across two realities, the lawless slumand the modern workplace. They look like separate worlds, but theyare products of the same forces: foreign investment, the collapse ofagriculture, migration to the cities, corrupt administration and unem-ployment. The labor movement is entrenched in the official economybut almost incapable of playing a role in the unofficial economy. Itsleaders use the strike weapon rarely, because they know it will unleashforces they cannot control.

This is the dilemma for unions across the developing world: how togo beyond the core workforce and organize the poor, the slumdwellers and the casuals without fomenting chaos and drawing downrepression. The same situation faced trade unions in Europe andAmerica in the second half of the nineteenth century, above all inParis. Here a dictator was trying to democratize, a core workforce wastrying to organize and a mass of slum dwellers, pushed to the outskirtsof the city, were, like Stephen Oluremi, “just fighting to survive” . . .


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Paris, April 1867

The age of revolution is over. True, there are still some bearded revo-lutionaries exiled in the bolt-holes of the world but they are hauntedmen, scarred by failure. The uprisings of 1848 in Vienna, Berlin andBudapest are just a memory. In Paris, ancient alleyways have been re-placed with wide boulevards designed to make 1848-style barricadesimpossible and artillery fire lethal—not that anybody expects thiswill be needed. Europe is a continent of strong government, newtechnology and honest work. The age of industrial exhibitions hasbegun.

In a small hall in Paris, the Bookbinders’ Mutual Society is about toelect its delegation to the biggest technology fair ever seen, the Uni-versal Exposition, which has just opened in a palace of glass and ironby the Seine. There is state funding on offer to cover the workers’ costsand some in the hall are in favor of taking it. But the man on the plat-form is against: “If we want to keep our independence, our power tospeak freely about what we see and express our own ideas, we have toreject every kind of patronage and organize the delegation with ourown resources.”3

Eugène Varlin knows something about resources. He brought thebookbinders out on strike two years before in a fight for the ten-hourday; he raised a massive strike fund; he has fought and won. Varlin istwenty-eight years old, with a halo of black hair and a straggly beard,round face and studious eyes. He’s already had a poem written abouthim and launched a workers’ grocery store. He is in all ways a typicalmember of the mid-century labor movement—highly skilled, self-ed-ucated and convinced technology can bring social progress.

He has tried to convince the employers that new technology shouldmean shorter hours and rising wages:

The development of industry should result in rising living standardsfor all. Production is increasing every day due to the increased use ofmachines; the rich alone cannot sustain consumption. The workerhas to become the consumer and, for that, he needs money enoughto spend and time enough to enjoy his possessions.4


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These are not revolutionary ideas; forty years later they will beechoed, almost verbatim, by Henry Ford. And they are not far off thesentiments of the man whose money will back the Universal Expo,Louis-Napoleon, the self-styled Second Emperor of France. He is theman who crushed the revolution of 1848 but he has not ground theParis slums to brick dust for nothing. France is to have world-class in-dustry and needs a world-class workforce. And, since the age of revo-lution is over, the Emperor has legalized workers’ mutual funds andco operatives, though their meetings are banned from discussing poli-tics and have to lodge their minute books with the police.

The bookbinders of Paris vote to decline the Emperor’s money andsend Varlin to the Expo to study the mechanical wonders of the world.All over France skilled workers are electing their delegations: mechan-ics, shoemakers, hatters, brass-moulders. They converge on the Expowearing their Sunday best and carrying notebooks.

It begins with the crowned heads of Europe in attendance and acavalry parade. Inside the exhibition hall every modern wonder is ondisplay—fancy corsets, international weights and measures, fine art—but the star attractions are vast and intricate machines. The Americansbring McCormick’s harvester and Morse’s telegraph; Krupp, the Ger-man steel magnate, presents a 50-ton cannon that can fire 1,000-pound shells; the French unveil a contraption for making hats out ofrabbit skin.

In November the exhibition closes and the workers’ delegates com-pile their observations. These are delivered to the Emperor by civil ser-vants in a state of shock. Instead of a poem of praise to mechanizationthe reports read like a sustained critique of the mid-nineteenth-centurysocial order. “Surely,” asks the shoemakers’ delegation, “machines belongto everyone? Thousands of workers have kept them going. Surely it iscontrary to justice and equity that they have become a monopoly and aprofit to a few individuals?”5

The new division of labor is, they maintain, robbing the workers ofboth their skills and status. But they are not Luddites—all they want istheir fair share of progress:


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The system is basically excellent but fails at the top. And thougheveryone participates in this great productive effort, only a few profitfrom it. Therefore we must join forces, answering strength withstrength and, while respecting the positions that have already beenwon, gradually replace it with an economic system which will bemore profitable to everyone.6

The hatters too are ready to sound a sour note. Granted, the newgizmo—which, they joke, can turn a live rabbit into a finished hat—isa true symbol of industrial modernity, but in the factory it has becomethe symbol of their own worthlessness.

It is put in a small, badly lit room in the remotest corner of the build-ing and, as this precaution is deemed inadequate, it is boarded up withplanks like some supposedly holy image which must be hidden fromthe sight of the crowd . . . It has become almost like a symbol for thepassion, or rather the religion, of every man for himself.7

The mechanics’ delegation leaves in a state of excitement. Machines likethese, they enthuse, could end the need for manual labor altogether. Theminds of men whose workaday world is one of grease and metal filingsleap forward more than a hundred years to imagine robots: “Our aim isto get the machines to do all the material work, and to make them insufficient quantities so that all that will be required will be a few hourssupervision each day.”8

These reports capture better than any rare daguerreotype the wayskilled workers’ minds are turning. Self-education, respectability andbetterment are the recurrent themes. Their vision of social justice isone of a cooperative society based on new technology. Work, skill andrespect will be its core values. Faith in human progress colors the waythe mechanics write about the steam locomotive on display. They seeit not just as a means of transport, but as the basis for a global system ofmass communications which,

by propagating uniform ideas, principles, rights and obligations willhasten the moment when all peoples will finally understand one an-other, and by throwing off once and for all the subservience that


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centuries have imposed upon them, and the yoke of capital and ig-norance, will at last profit in the widest possible way from the seri-ous advantages that machines offer them.9

These engineers, whose only knowledge of the wider world has beenlearned from borrowed books by gaslight, have gazed at the steam en-gine and imagined the Internet.

Louis-Napoleon decides that men capable of measuring microns ona lathe and assembling so politely at the greatest show of capitalistpower on earth can be trusted not to become a revolutionary mob.Social reform will continue. After all, the age of revolution is over.

“Strikes were productive of great injury” The moderation of skilled workers was not just a French phenomenon.Even where there was more political freedom trade unions were usingit responsibly. In America in 1866, still in recovery from the Civil War,iron molders’ leader William Sylvis set up the National Labor Unionrepresenting 60,000 workers. “Strikes,” he concluded, “were productiveof great injury to the laboring classes.”10 The same attitude would beheard at the founding conference of the British TUC.

Moderation was the watchword in every sphere except one: sup-port for faraway revolutions. In a mass act of psychological displace-ment, the skilled working class diverted their revolutionary passiontowards foreign wars against slavery and oppression. The Lancashirecotton workers had supported the Union side in the American CivilWar, even though it meant starvation; New York workers had turnedout in thousands to welcome the Irish nationalist O’Donovan Rossa;the Par isians of Varlin’s generation idolized the Italian liberationfighter Garibaldi, the Che Guevara of the 1860s; and trade unionseverywhere sympathized with the Poles, whose uprising against Russ-ian domination had been ended by mass executions and deportations.

It was the Polish massacre that set in motion the formation of thefirst cross-border workers’ organization in history. In September 1864union leaders in London called a public meeting in support of Polandwith a delegation from the French mutual societies in attendance. The


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venue was St. Martin’s Hall, Long Acre, ironically on a site that is todaythe premises of the clothing company French Connection.

At the meeting, which was chock-full (for there is now evidently arevival of the working-classes taking place) . . . it was resolved tofound a “Workingmen’s International Association,” whose generalcouncil is to have its seat in London and is to “intermediate” betweenthe workers’ societies in Germany, Italy, France, and England . . .11

The reporter here is Karl Marx, cheekily described in the minutes asthe representative of the German working class (his profession is listedas architect). The exiled revolutionary did not speak at the meeting,but was soon presiding over a fractious internal conflict between hisown supporters and followers of rival revolutionary Pierre JosephProudhon. Proudhon was the father of a creed of moderate anarchismwhose tenets had a lot in common with the prejudices of skilled tradeunionists, namely an obsession with workers’ cooperatives and opposi-tion to women’s rights.

Proudhon had said that women should not be allowed to work infactories. “Man is essentially the power of action; woman, the power offascination,” is one of his sayings that you will not find on many anar-chist websites today. In the stateless society he envisaged the familywould be the main source of social order, the “absolute monarchy” ofthe anarchist system. Sexual freedom for women would cause socialcollapse; prostitution was the most terrible social vice.

All this went down well with the union men of the 1860sand was adopted as the policy of the International. The French mu-tual societies were led by Proudhon’s supporters. Varlin was the onlyFrench delegate to vote against the ban on women at work, tellingthe International’s Geneva congress, “To condemn female labour is toacknowledge charity and authorize prostitution.”12 But, like the restof the International, Varlin remained fanatical about co operatives.

“You could get yourself a modest meal, but well presented” Cooperatives were the defining idea of the mid-century workers’movement. They could be producer co-ops like the non-profit iron


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factories Sylvis set up in New York, or consumer co-ops inspired bythe shops founded in Lancashire in the 1840s. The principle was thatyou could opt out of the capitalist system by bulk buying collec-tively, lending at affordable rates, even running the productionprocess without anybody higher than a foreman. Getting the state toprovide capital for cooperatives became the main electoral demandof the workers’ movement in Germany under the leadership ofMarx’s other big rival, Ferdinand Lassalle. The beauty of the coopera-tive strategy was, as Lassalle put it, “the means themselves are ab-solutely imbued with the very nature of the end.” You did not need arevolution to make cooperatives happen; nor was it a pure electoralstrategy. You could combine a highly creative social experiment inthe here and now with the long, slow campaign for parliamentaryrepresentation and state funding.

In Varlin’s Paris, cooperatives were an idea whose time had come.One of the biggest sources of resentment among workers was, ironi-cally, the philanthropy they felt was being shoved down their throatsby the Emperor. The mechanics’ report after the Expo complainedthere were too many “soup kitchens, tenements and churches”: “Whilewe fully appreciate the value of these things, we are partisans of free-dom and we wish to make it clear that we want to run our own lives,and that all we need is the freedom to do so.”13

Alongside resentment there was a persistent worry: that shippingthem out and walling them off from the “Paris of horse racing andlove affairs” inevitably exposed the “respectable” working class to thehabits and morals of the slums. Like all skilled workers at the time theyharbored a deep abhorrence of beggars, criminals and prostitutes. Marxhad called this the lumpenproletariat; on the Paris streets the word wascanaille, which can mean riff-raff, rabble or just plain bastards, depend-ing how you say it.

Victorine Brocher was a shoemaker’s wife from a respectable work-ing-class family. Constantly on the brink of penury herself, she joinedthe International because the doctor treating her baby was a member.By the time the Expo came around she had a view too close for com-fort of what life was like for la canaille:


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I have seen poor women working twelve or fourteen hours a dayfor derisory wages, forced to leave elderly parents and young chil-dren, holed up for long hours in unwholesome workshops whereneither air, nor light nor sunshine ever penetrates . . . On Sunday. . . if her husband is alright he will stay at home after dinner; if he’san alcoholic he will discover that he is the unhappiest man in theworld; that he can’t stand being at home. He will seek consolation atthe local cabaret . . .14

For respectable workers like Varlin and Brocher, the cooperative strategyprovided reassurance on two fronts: it bought freedom from the charityefforts of the rich and it was an insurance policy against a swift transitionto the depths of la canaille, where the high ideals of socialism were im-possible to maintain. On January 19, 1868, Varlin launched a workers’ co-operative cafe called La Marmite (The Stock Pot) with a PR offensivethe likes of which the Paris restaurant trade had never seen:

Workers! Consumers! Let’s not look for the means to improve ourconditions anywhere else but in liberty. Freedom of association, bystrengthening our forces will let us emancipate ourselves from theparasitic middlemen who we see, every day, making fortunes out ofour shopping budget and to the detriment of our health. Let’s jointogether, not only to defend our wages but above all our right to adecent meal.15

La Marmite served cheap, basic food and—though designed to cater today laborers in lodging houses—soon became the haunt of Varlin’scomrades. One remembered,

You could get yourself a modest meal, but well presented—and anair of gaiety around the tables. There were a lot of customers. Youhad to choose what dish you wanted yourself, and write the pricedown on the bill, then give it—with your money—to the comradeon the till. Generally you did not hang around long and, to makespace for others, you left once you’d finished eating. Sometimes,however, some comrades would hang around for longer and chat toeach other. We would sing as well . . .16


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La Marmite became such a legendary venue that, years later, whenmany Parisian workers washed up as exiles in London’s Soho district,they opened a branch there and drowned their sorrows in it nightly.17

For now, backed by 8,000 subscribers, they opened three more restaur -ants in Paris and started a credit union.

But things were about to go bad for the revellers at La Marmite.Noting the growing influence of the International and its involvementin strikes all over Europe, the Emperor declared it illegal. The firstgroup of leaders was arrested in December 1867, the second group, in-cluding Varlin, three months later. At his trial Varlin told the judges,“The International is opposed to strikes on principle. It considers themanti-economical. It declared this at Geneva and has declared it every-where.”18 He was sentenced to three months in prison along with therest. With the International out of the way, Louis-Napoleon felt confi-dent enough to move to the next stage of his social reform policy, thelegalisation of public meetings. By the time Varlin came out of jail Pariswas a changed city.

“Their palace is a slum”When the old alleyways were cleared the workers had been moved tothe hills around central Paris. There was an arc of workers’ tenementareas running from Batignolles in the northwest, via Montmartre, toBelleville and Menilmontant in the east. The city was now divided intoconcentric circles: glamor in the center, then a ring of wide boulevards,then poverty, then the fortifications that marked the city limits. Theworking population had mushroomed from 1.3 million in 1851 to 1.9million in 1870, mainly due to immigration.

This was not a factory city; most people worked in small andmedium-sized workshops. Tens of thousands of women worked athome, sewing or making paper flowers in order to keep themselvesone rung above the underworld of prostitutes and gangsters. Working-class Paris was a world-famous bohemia full of half-starved dreamerslike Louise Michel. A reporter described Michel as “thirty-six yearsold, petite, brunette, with a very developed forehead which recedesabruptly . . . her features reveal an extreme severity. She dresses entirely


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in black.”19 “I am in fact tall,” she would retort.In her head Louise Michel was a poet, novelist and composer. In

reality she was a poverty-stricken schoolmistress in Montmartrewhere, according to prosecutors, “from her lectern in her spare mo-ments she professed the doctrines of free thought and made heryoung pupils sing poems she had written, among which was a songentitled ‘The Avengers.’”20

Michel’s natural element was not the workplace or the co-op butthe slum. She gave free adult literacy classes, organized republican lec-tures, joined the feminist-led Campaign for Women’s Rights. She was amember of the International but, given its position on women, semi-detached. “And so here is Louise Michel,” she would remember later; “. . . she is a menace to society, for she has declared a hundred times thateveryone should take part in the bankt of life.”21

The sparkling ring of boulevards that separated posh Paris frompoor Paris was lined with theaters and dance halls. Here young work-ers could seek solace in drink, dancing and casual sex. This was also anage of live-in lovers; for many young women, moving in with aboyfriend was the only way of avoiding penury. Barred from politicalactivity, workers had created a subculture that fizzed through thesedance halls and bars, celebrating their own misfortune with maudlinballads. There was even a song called “La Canaille” which, during thelast days of the Empire, became a big hit on the cabaret scene.

When Louis-Napoleon lifted the ban on public meetings in June1868 it was like removing the cork from cheap champagne: the twodecades of frustration popped and sprayed. The dance halls, bars andcircuses were transformed into a network of political discussion clubs,with thousands in attendance. There were no minutes of the meetingsbut the Emperor’s police were diligent, producing 900 pages of verba-tim notes. These tell the story of how la canaille became communist.

The first meeting was called at a place called Vaux-Hall. Wasting notime on niceties, the workers joined in the arguments that had been rag-ing inside the International. The event was entitled: “Work for Women”and there was a massive turnout to hear feminist journalists clash withProudhon’s men. The men were ready with left-wing arguments against


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women’s right to work. Left-wing teacher Gustave Lefrançais asked,

What does it matter to working women who ply the needle or theburnisher, or who bloody their fingers in fashioning the stems ofpaper flowers that they are not voters, that they may not administerthe property they do not possess, and that they cannot deceive theirhusbands on an equal basis?22

It mattered a lot. The meeting ended with a vote and the vote wentagainst the International. Women should have the right to work, saidthe majority.

This opened the floodgates. By October 6 the debate had moved onto issues that shocked Proudhon’s old guard:

No law is needed to consecrate the union of a man with a woman.The only sanction this union needs is reciprocal affection. The tri-umph of this system . . . will mean the beginning of a revolutionwhich will change society completely.23

Night after night the workers turned up in thousands. There were933 meetings during the next two years in 63 venues. Titles rangedfrom “Capital and Interest” to “The Art of Raising Rabbits andGetting an Income of 300 Francs” (the latter designed to confusethe policemen who sat alongside the platform). Documentary evi-dence suggests that the audiences were largely local and regular. Youwent to your neighborhood cabaret, you met your fr iends, youcheered the incendiary speeches; the next night you would be inthe same room drinking and dancing with the same set of people. Itwas here, amid gaslight and cheap perfume, that the moderate anar-chism of Proudhon—sacred among the bookbinders and mechan-ics—was subjected to relentless criticism by dirt-poor men andwomen from the slums.

Activists from the International were everywhere in the publicmeeting movement, but they did not get a free run. In the shadows ofMontmartre a different kind of socialism had survived, inspired by yetanother bearded hero of 1848 (and another bitter rival of Marx), Au-guste Blanqui. Blanqui favored terror and insurrection, and if the


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workers weren’t up to the job, a few good men with guns could do itfor them. He had spent half his life in jail and was now in exile. But hisfollowers, who despised co-ops, trade unions and the International,lived a Robin Hood existence in the backstreets, tolerated andsometimes celebrated by la canaille. Theophile Ferré, the Blanquistleader in Montmartre, was Louise Michel’s platonic lover. He told apublic meeting, “I am enough of a communist to want to impose com-munism.”24

In this atmosphere, opposition to women’s work was just the firstidea to be torn apart. Next came cooperatives. A cooperative bank setup by Proudhon’s supporters crashed in the summer of 1868 and theskilled activists who had set up the co-ops now had to rub shouldersin mass meetings with the poor—to whom a shop was still a shop ifyou owed it money, whether it was a co-op or not.

The next big idea to be challenged was the trade unionist’s dis-taste for strikes. Varlin may have gone down the prison steps protest-ing his opposition to strikes but within months of his release therewere strikes everywhere. During 1869 there was a cotton strike, awool-carders’ strike and a big miners’ strike in the Loire with elevenstrikers shot dead. Even Paris was hit, when shop assistants in the de-partment stores walked out. “Up to now,” said one speaker at thepublic meetings,

strikes have not enjoyed good results because they have always beenpartial and not general. All workers should get together and declarethat they are no longer willing to work for current wages, thenyou’ll soon see the bosses going after the workers and agreeing tomeet their demands.25

Now the government began a crackdown on the meetings, arrestingthe most radical speakers and issuing fines. But venues moved, crowdsre-formed, meetings about insurrection were called under ribald titlessuch as “The Rise and Fall of the Crinoline in France.”

For Louise Michel, the instinctive rebel, the two years of the publicmeeting movement had a dreamlike quality. As she walked back frommeetings with her fellow teachers “…we talked about many things. At


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other times we were silent, dazzled by the idea of sweeping away theshame of twenty years.26

For Varlin the public meeting movement was a revelation. He hadargued with Blanquist prisoners during his time in jail, and now, stand-ing alone in the dark corners of the dance halls, he was hearing theirideas shouted out by poverty-stricken workers. In the spring of 1869he wrote, “Eight months of public debate have laid bare this strangefact—that the majority of workers actively engaged in the reformmovement are communist.”27

Louis-Napoleon had tried to bend with the wind but it was blow ingtoo hard. He had pardoned miners arrested during the Loire strike; he hadset up voluntary insurance funds for workers. And where was the grati-tude? By January 1870 he could console himself with only this: there hadbeen strikes, even the odd disturbance, but no mass demonstrations.

Chance and idiocy intervened. During a trivial argument the Em-peror’s nephew, a famous philanderer, emptied his revolver into thechest of a radical journalist called Victor Noir. The next day 100,000people swarmed onto the streets of Paris for the funeral. Louise Michelremembered, “Almost everyone who turned up at the funeral ex-pected to go home again as members of a republic, or not to go homeat all.”28 A young singer from the Paris cabarets, Rosalie Bordas, washauled onto a cart by the crowd and belted out “La Canaille,” thewords of which had been written as a self-effacing joke but now ranglike a declaration of war.

In the old French cityThere’s a race of iron menThe furnace of their fiery soulHas forged to bronze their skinTheir sons are born on strawTheir palace is a slumThat’s what we call the riff-raffAnd well, I’m one of ’em.29

For Varlin it was a symbolic moment. He knew a crisis was immi-nent unless he could tame and direct the energies of la canaille, and he


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spent the day of the funeral arguing against Blanquist agitators whowanted the crowd to storm Paris that afternoon.

A week later the miners and steelworkers at the Schneider plant inLe Creusot went on strike. This was the biggest industrial workplacein France and the boss was, to cap it all, the president of the Emperor’stame legislature. Solidarity with the strikers became the main themein the public meeting halls. Varlin re-formed the Paris branch of theInternational and persuaded the unions to band together into a feder-ation.

Panicked by strikes, panicked by the funeral of Victor Noir, pan-icked by a police report that the International had precisely 433,785French members, Louis-Napoleon called a plebiscite to endorse hisright to rule. On May 8, 1870, seven million people voted to back theEmperor, while one and a half million voted against: essentially Mont-martre and Belleville were outvoted by the French peasantry, whocared nothing for cabarets or cooperatives. The International, which inreality had more like 70,000 French members mainly recruited duringthe strikes, was again banned. Varlin fled to Brussels.

If the Second Empire had managed to reform itself faster, EugèneVarlin might have ended his days a respectable trade union leader. Vic-torine Brocher might have sunk forever into domestic obscurity. LouiseMichel might have spent her life teaching Montmartre children to singsubversive songs. But on July 19, 1870, Louis-Napoleon ensured theywould all face a different future. He declared war on Prussia.

“All these were hollow phrases now” The pretext for the war was who should take over the Spanish throne;the deeper issue was who should dominate mainland Europe. Whathappens next is the stuff of school history textbooks: telegrams, gener-als, dates and battles, dead elephants in the Paris Zoo, dramatic escapesby hot air balloon. The events fit neatly into the five-act structure of atragedy, though the first half could be mistaken for comic opera.

Act One: the French army marches to the border where it is pushedback by a bigger force with better generals. Act Two: Louis-Napoleonmarches to the rescue at the head of a second French army, with


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100,000 untrained troops. Act Three: the Prussian army smashes this ma-neuver, the defeated French surrender, the Emperor is taken prisoner.

Forty-eight hours later Victorine Brocher is part of a crowd pushingagainst a line of police in Paris. They chant, “It’s not just abdicationthat we want, it’s the Republic.” A cavalry officer rides up at the headof his regiment, saber unsheathed, salutes the crowd and shouts, “Longlive France! Long live the Republic.”

Act Four: the war must go on, say the leaders of the new Republic,and the people agree. The International issues an appeal to the Ger-man people: “The man who unleashed this fratricidal war, who doesnot know how to die and who you now hold prisoner, does not existfor us. Republican France invites you in the name of justice to with-draw your armies.”30 The Kaiser declines this invitation and, for manyFrench workers, though they’d initially opposed the war, it becomes alegitimate fight to defend their new political freedom.

Workers flock to join the National Guard, which has been hur-riedly reinvented. Louise Michel and Victorine Brocher both sign up.Varlin joins on his return from exile. But the guns are rusty and so arethe generals. The Prussian army lays siege to Paris for one hundreddays and the giant Krupp cannon displayed at the Expo of 1867 is putto use flattening the outskirts of the city. The people starve.

On January 27, 1871, an armistice is signed, allowing Prussia to removea chunk of territory from the body of France and stage a victory marchthrough Paris. After the parade the Prussian army retreats to the outskirts.

Act Five: the Republic’s leaders call elections. The newly elected as-sembly meets in Versailles. As food begins to arrive in Paris, VictorineBrocher notes that children born out of legal wedlock are given onlyhalf the normal ration. “Poor bastards,” the working women whisper,“they didn’t ask to be born—and this is the Republic?”

The National Guard battalions form a Central Committee to ensure“the working man” will not be sidelined. Varlin persuades the Interna-tional to let him join it. The Central Committee calls a demonstration atthe Bastille, telling left-wing members of the Guard to wear red ribbonsin their buttonholes. Brocher’s commanding officer orders her to wear ablue ribbon. She storms off.


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I left the Company and I would never return . . . I went alone to theBastille demo, it was a giant crowd, highly excited—not the kind ofcriminals and lowlife you heard [when the Republic was pro-claimed]. Everyone was convinced that with a little effort and a lotof luck we could even yet save France . . .31

One day merges with the next. Brocher has to watch with horror asher child falls ill and dies. Like the rest of Paris she is living throughdays of shell-shocked misery.

My head felt absolutely empty of those grand phrases that are sup-posed to animate the human mind: God! Fatherland! Republic! Allthese were hollow phrases now, which could only aggravate ourmisery and destroy the human race: I needed a new ideal.32

The new government can’t wait to return to business as usual. It or-ders all debts run up during the war to be repaid within 48 hoursand sends regular troops into Paris to remove the city’s cannons.These have been paid for through mass subscriptions by the people,who—as a gesture in case the Prussians tried to remove them—hadphysically carried 400 guns into the workers’ districts for safe keep-ing. As the regular soldiers form up at 4 a.m. on March 18, 1871, thefog closes round them like a final curtain. But the drama is not over.

“The splendid deliverance of the dawn” A wiry, dark-haired woman runs screaming down the cobbled streetthat links Montmartre with the boulevard below. It is Louise Micheland she has a rifle hidden under her jacket. The word she’s screaming is“treason.” She’s just seen government troops take possession of theguns lined up in the Montmartre cannon park. Drums are beaten inthe alleyways and soon Michel returns, accompanied by her boyfriendFerré and a motley column of armed citizens.

Montmartre arose . . . In the dawn, which was just breaking, you couldhear the tocsin ringing; we went up at the speed of a charge, knowingthat at the top there was an army in battle formation. We expected todie for liberty. It was as if we were lifted from the earth . . . Crowds at


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Excerpt--Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global

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Transcript of Excerpt--Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global