Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An important book to get you thinking, 8 Aug 2007
How can you tell the stories of the struggle of the working class in a manner that seemed relevant today? Only by counterpointing present day reportage of poverty and human rights abuses amongst the underclass of people who support our modern society with the unvarnished tales of the battle for working class justice over the part two centuries. Peterloo, the Silk Workers strike in Lyon, the Paris Commune, pre-war German metalworking socialists, China under Japanese occupation, Brzeziny in Poland - all seem populated by aliens to a modern television viewing wired reader. How could civilised people live cheek by jowl with such human rights abuses and downright inhumanity?
We need to learn the lessons of our history - to stop us compounding them. This book deserves to be on every secondary school history teachers' reading list and in every university library. Only by showing the next generation the relevance of the working class struggle can you enable them to build on lessons learnt to improve the present and future.
Paul Mason's book shows how the trade union movement grew, became global and then imploded as it failed to maintain its social contract with the working class. Today in modern service economies with good enforceable `elf and safety and employment laws trade unions seem an irrelevance. In developing countries the trade unions tend either to be part of corrupt kleptocratic establishments or are supporting shibboleths which exclude the poor and unskilled from the very rights which the original trade union organisers fought for.
Paul tells stories about the past to give us some pointers towards our possible future. As far as this goes this is good. But "Live Working or Die Fighting" is only a starting point. It, together with Polly Toynbee's "Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain" form good foundation texts on which we can get young people debating the follow-on questions - How could underclasses be globally protected from abuse in a free market economy?" "What activities could genuinely help foster the failures of all businesses which engaged in cruel, inhuman and unsafe practices against the underclass.?
Read it and think - the solutions are out there. And we owe it as a debt to the brave people who founded the working class movement to finish the story for them in the way they would have wished.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book to die for, 21 Jul 2007
Fantastic research and a work of respect and love for the working class by BBC's Newsnight Industrial reporter, Paul Mason. Essential reading for anybody half interested in the struggles of the working class, internationally over the last few centuries, contrasting conditions then and today, makes me think how litle we have progressed in some areas. Mason does not seem to have a particulary sharp political axe to grind but he does point out in many of the industrial battles and struggles described that the workers were often well ahead of the offical trade union leaders and left political parties. The prose is magic, each chapter moves along at a pace, the detail and research is awesome, if you have any interest in the stuggle of working people for a more dignified and more valued life then this book is invaluable, often shocking and often violent, this is a work of real history. Best thing I have read for ages, buy it, you will not regret it. Look forward to more of the same.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From Peterloo to Michigan, 20 Jul 2008
This book is mostly a history of working-class movements from the early C19th to the start of World War II. It opens with Peterloo, then looks at the loom-workers of Lyon, the Paris Commune, the American Knights of Labour, London dockers, Limoges ceramicists, Argentine conventillos, Wobblies, the pre-1914 German SPD, Shanghai communists, the Jewish Bund in Poland and ends with Turin and Flint car-markers of the 1920s and 1930s. These wide-ranging narratives often use the perspective of an `ordinary' individual caught up in the events to lead into a story of an industrial and social battle. They're gripping and sometimes shocking. The recurring themes interestingly include the conflicts between skilled and unskilled workers, and between workers who wanted merely better working conditions and those who wanted a whole new society. The book describes the development of various forms of resistance (factory occupations, sabotage, sit-down strikes, full-scale insurrections...) and tactics (the Flint auto-workers using half-made cars as barricades); and the varying claims and practices of syndicalists, socialists, communists, anarchists and social democrats. The other consistent factor is the extremely brutal repression by the ruling elites to such resistance - commonly involving use of a nation's troops against its own people and, not uncommonly, mass murder. The `Die Fighting' in the title of the book isn't mere rhetoric.
The author argues that workers firstly tend to `create the new society from within the old' - a pre-welfare-state `union way of life' with services like education and health run by themselves - before confronting corporate power, and predicts a forthcoming global labour movement to match globalised capitalism. Compared to the dramatic historical narratives, the sections dealing with present-day worldwide workers are much shorter and, despite being based on first-hand reporting, seemed a little flat to me. The examples are taken from Shenzhen in China, Varanasi silk workers, Nigeria, Iraq, Bolivia (twice) and New Delhi. If I have a criticism, it's that I'd have liked a bit more about how today's third-world workers are attempting to confront the immense power of multinationals. But, if the book's thesis is right, maybe the most dramatic episodes from that struggle have yet to happen.
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