Paul Mason, author of Live working or die Fighting (Harvill Secker), spoke to Mark Osborn
Question: What are you aiming to do with this book?
PM: I’m trying to bring some of the great scenes of labour movement history to a new generation of readers. The readers I have in mind are not activists, are highly individualistic, have no party line or much knowledge of real history.
What I’ve attempted to do is to produce a book in a way that parallels my journalism: telling the story through the stories of individuals. It brings the history to life.
In the course of writing the book I found much labour movement history had been buried under schematism and dogmatism — much of it with a Moscow origin.
So much history was titled, “The lessons of Chile”, “The lessons of Portugal”. So, first, I wanted to provide a simple narrative — just to tell the plain story of what happened. And then I’m writing for people who want to know about history for its own sake — it shouldn’t be necessary to have to link history to an explanation of theory, or to drawing out overt political lessons for today.
Q: Sounds like you’re trying to do what No Sweat exists to do: to link class struggle politics to youth who not only didn’t go through the Winter of Discontent and the miners’ strike, but weren’t even born in 1985.
I could imagine giving the book to someone in No Sweat as an introduction to working class politics, the class struggle...
PM: No, it is broader than that. If such people read it — good. But I also want the young person working in Gap’s Social Responsibility department to read this too.
There’s a wider audience to reach and a wider story to be told. I mean a human story, an individual story — the standpoint of this book is humanistic, not left or right.
Q: OK, no doubt there have always been middle class people in professional jobs who have come over to our side by reading socialist propaganda. I’m not against it. That’s fine as a spin-off. But it is a different matter to make that a major purpose of your work.
PM: Who says I am on your side? In any case I’d go further: I’d be pleased if someone in Ian Duncan Smith’s Social Justice Commission read it. The history of the working class movement and, in particular, the history of the individuals in that movement, should not just be the property of the left. Other people, beyond the left, need to hear the stories of the people involved in the key episodes of labour movement history.
So I set out to write this book for two reasons.
The first was personal. I come from a working-class, labour movement (small l) background. My grandad was an activist during the 1926 general strike; I can trace my ancestors back to silk weavers in the 1760s. But I have a strong sense that I was never told the story properly – the story wasn’t passed on, through the generations.
So, I ask myself: look at all the new movements emerging; look at, say, a first-generation worker, with a peasant background, now in a Chinese factory. Where will they find out about the history of the Chinese workers’ movement?
We need to write the history down, make it available, while it lasts.
And second we need to think about the new generation that thinks individualistically, that famously doesn’t join things. The story needs to be told – and in a way that they can hear and understand.
Some of the early reviews of the book have commented that I ignore detailed programmatic critiques of particular individuals. That’s true – I have. You could critique, say, Big Bill Haywood’s political life. Or you could simply tell his story.
Q. I like the book’s format. But there does seem to be a big hole in the book: Stalinism. I don’t mean that some particular, specific, essential chapter of workers’ history has been missed out. But I don’t see how the ideological problems we face can be dealt with without an accounting and understanding of the problem of Stalinism. After all you’ve mentioned the problem of Moscow…
PM: Well, it did occur to me to deal with the Spanish Civil War and the 1953 Vorkhuta uprising in Russia, or take the history of Hungary up to 1968. But other books can do that.
What I wanted to focus on was something different: the striking similarity between the new workers’ movements emerging in the global south and the pre-Marxist workers movements of the nineteenth century.
I find that being a broadcast journalist, and consequently not having a political standpoint to defend, allows me an advantage of simply being able to state what is. I can go into a situation and just describe events, not try to pack what I’m seeing into a preconceived idea of what should be happening. And that’s what I’ve done in Live working or die fighting.
