Weight: 25% of your final grade Length: 1500 words Due: Upon completion of Unit 4 Instructions This assignment is about conclusions: analytical conclusions on labour and labour struggles in the cotton

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you should understand:

1. How inequalities and injustices embedded into various divisions of labour cause grievance amongst workers.

2. Which sources of collective power that workers might wield in order to improve their conditions.

3. That grievances do not automatically lead to workers’ collective action.

4. The role of collective self-identification instigating collective action.

Required Readings

From The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest  (2009), edited by Immanuel Ness. Wiley-Blackwell: Malden, Oxford 2009, read:

• “Class Identity and Protest ,” by Paul Le Blanc

• “Class, Poverty, and Revolution ,” by Paul Rubinson

• “Imperialism, Historical Evolution ,” by Clifford Conner

Also from The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, please choose four articles from the following list:

• “Anti-slavery Movement, Britain ,” by Jason M. Kelly.

• “Anti-slavery Movement, United States, 1700–1870 ” by Francesca Gamber

• “Brazil, Labor Struggles  ,” by Paulo Fontes & Fernando T. Silva

• “Britain, Trade Union Movement ,” by Mark J. Crowley

• “Britain, Women’s Suffrage Campaign ,” by Harold L. Smith

• “Chartists ,” by Jason M. Kelly

• “China, Protest and Revolution, 1800–1911 ,” by Leonard H. Lubitz

• “Chinese Communist Revolution, 1925–1949  ,” by Pierre Rousset

• “Egypt, Peasant Rebellion of 1824 ,” by Nicole B. Hansen

• “Egypt, Revolution of 1952 ,” by Emin Poljarevic

• “Women’s Movement, India ,” by Soma Marik

• “Indian National Liberation ,” by Soma Marik

• “Indonesia, Colonial Protests, 16th Century to 1900 ,” by Henri Myrttinen

• “Internationals ,” by Michael Forman

• “International Women’s Day ,” by Marily J. Boxer

• “Luddism and Machine Breaking ,” by Immanuel Ness

• “Shipboard Insurrections in the Atlantic Slave Trade ,” by Eric Robert Tucker

• “Vietnam, Protest against Colonialism, 1858–1896 ,” by Daniel Hemery

• “Vietnam, Protest and Second Indochina War, 1960–1974 ,” by Daniel Hemery

Book Review of Ronaldo Munk’s Rethinking Global Labour : Towards a New Social Settlement, by Ingo Schmidt (This reading offers some conceptual guidance in connecting the global labour history presented in the course with labour in times of neoliberal globalization, or better, neoliberal globalization in crisis.)

Shifting the Focus to Labour Movements

Time to tie up loose ends and shift the focus from labour understood as labouring, to the labour movement understood as labourers or workers banding together and taking action to improve their incomes, working conditions, and living conditions. Also, time to connect the past with the present.

The two books you read in Units 2 and 3 provide valuable information about labour movements —Tully’s The Devil’s Milk somewhat more than Beckert’s Empire of Cotton—with their main focus being on the different kinds of labour, divisions of labour, and their changes over time. This includes a look at working and living conditions and reveals various grievances that workers had across the cotton and rubber industries, though each operated under different legal conditions via different technologies in different places. The first unit of the course offered some theoretical concepts, most importantly different divisions of labour and structural and associational power, in understanding how such grievances, if they lead workers to do something about them, could actually force employers to respond—either by giving in to workers’ demands, seeking compromise, crushing workers’ movements, introducing new technologies that would replace unruly workers, or by moving operations to places where they expect to find a more docile workforce.

However, finding such workforces can be quite difficult. Beckert and Tully present a number of cases in which investors found out that the people they thought they could hire for little money had neither interest nor incentive to give up their ways of life to become workers of any kind. Recruiting cheap workers has always relied on forcing people out of their ways of life, by enslaving them by brute force, imposing taxes they could not pay, suckering them into debt-bondage, or forcing them off their lands. If investors—supported by various combinations of military forces, militias, lawmakers, and banks—did not succeed in creating a workforce that had no other options other than signing on to work under capitalist control, be it as waged workers, indentured labourers, or contractors, they turned to slave labour. Slaves, to be sure, did not have to sign on; they were directly coerced into capitalist enterprises.

The history of global labour is very much shaped by private firms seeking cheap labour, resources, and markets to sell their products. Expansion and transformation of the world market are key factors that explain changing divisions of labour between and within firms, and between firms, households, and countries. However, states also played their role in creating the spaces where firms would set up shop or sell their products. This role included the granting of rights to own property, and to contract and participate in political processes to some demographics but not to others. Voting rights, for example, were often granted to the rich but not to the poor, and were then expanded to allow men to vote but not women. States were also key in setting up colonies, thereby suppressing indigenous populations and enabling the trade and ownership of slaves. This is the reason why struggles to improve working and living conditions were often connected to, or even relied upon, political struggles to abolish slavery, a gain in voting rights, and the acquisition of national independence.

As already mentioned, workers’ economic and political struggles play a role in Beckert’s and Tully’s books, but not prominent ones. To shift the focus from the conditions and divisions of labour to labour movements requires foregrounding these struggles with the addition of some theoretical concepts and empirical facts on labour movements, which we will do in the next section. After that, we will connect global labour history to present-day conditions of labour in global capitalism

Foregrounding Labour Struggles

Take a look at the “labour tables” you did in Units 2 and 3. These tables specify various divisions of labour over different time periods, the ways investors or employers control workers, the causes of discontent amongst workers, and the sources of workers’ collective power. As a quick refresher, Unit 1 distinguishes two sources of power, structural and associational, and defines them as follows:

Structural power relies on the position labourers occupy in the labour process. Labourers who can bring the entire process to a halt when they go on strike have a lot of structural power. Wielding that power does not always require strike action, and managers always factor that possibility into their calculations at the bargaining table.

Associational power rests on labourers pooling their abilities to disrupt the labour process, even if the structural power of each individual labourer to do so is limited. Associational power can include articulation of common concerns beyond individual workplaces through rallies, petitioning, supporting pro-labour political parties or, in a more radical fashion, by organizing boycotts or blockades.

What is important to understand is that, in order to wield these powers, workers need a reason to do so. As long as they are content with their conditions, they will not do anything. But even if they do feel discontent with their conditions, they will not wield these powers unless they see an opportunity to change things for the better. As was stated in Unit 1, discontent develops when individuals find a discrepancy between the actual situation they find themselves in, with a situation they think they ought to be in.

Without such discontent, emerging from the gap between the way things are and the way they might be, workers will not engage in any kind of collective action. In that case, workers’ potential power, derived from their position in the labour process, will not be actualized.

Adding Theoretical Concepts

Labour activists and other like-minded people often assume that discontent leads more or less automatically to collective action. They do not always say this openly but, if one listens, it becomes quite obvious that underlying their calls for action is the assumption that highlighting dire conditions will mobilize workers. This assumption was echoed in early scholarship on social movements which also portended that, if conditions are as bad as activists or scholars see them, well, then somebody must do something about it. However, this assumption has been betrayed over and over again. For most workers of the world, working conditions are dire, and depending on what kind of worker one is, collective action is rarely taken.

In order to better understand how workers can benefit from collective power, you should refer to this unit’s required readings, Paul LeBlanc’s “Class Identity and Protest” and Paul Rubinson’s “Class, Poverty, and Revolution.” Rubinson explains why the assumption that dire conditions lead to protest and revolution is wrong and, drawing on some case studies, offers some thoughts about why people get active in the first place, and how such activism transforms them. Using the concepts of class, class consciousness, and identity, LeBlanc further elaborates on the question of why workers who, no matter what they think of themselves or others, find themselves in a certain position within existing divisions of labour. LeBlanc also includes how the hierarchies and exploitation inscribed within these divisions might move workers into action, which depends very much on what workers think of, and how they identify, themselves and others. Keep in mind that “worker” is used in a broad sense throughout the course, and it includes waged and indentured workers, contractors, slaves, and those doing domestic work, such as caring for the young, elderly and sick, preparing food, and cleaning the house. Some of this work is paid, much more now than in the past, but much of it is unpaid and done chiefly in workers’ households, and mostly by women.

Adding Empirical Facts

As Beckert and Tully focus more on the conditions of labour than on labour movements, some empirical facts about such movements—also broadly understood—should be added to our global labour history. Inevitably, these additions will be highly selective. Even if there was more space available in the course to add more facts than we actually do, there is only so much one can do. Not getting all the empirics one could have into the picture may be a bit unsatisfying. But it is also a good reminder how history, as a scholarly discipline, works. Drawing on already existing histories and hypotheses, historians must search for and select empirical support for their own hypotheses. The ongoing refinement of, and exchange between, the larger theoretical framework in which hypotheses are formulated—in concert with the empirical material that supports that framework—produces increasingly rich understandings of historical processes; but even the richest of these understandings will be incomplete. While global labour historians who spend much of their lives researching the topic may know a lot, they also know that there is a lot more that they do not know. It turns out, history is an unfinished project!

At this point we should remind ourselves what professional historians do as part of their job: investigate existing histories, formulate a hypothesis, and find empirical evidence to support their hypothesis. In our particular case that means drawing on Beckert’s and Tully’s books with their focus on divisions of labour to identify starting points to formulate a hypothesis about labour movements. For example, we could try and understand why cotton and rubber workers who appealed to a public beyond the workplace did not always succeed, beginning with the reasons why they were often unable to organize themselves, and how difficult it was to find a public sympathetic to their plight. With this in mind, we not only revisit the books to find parts that support our hypothesis, but we also look for parts that do not support it, and in turn fine tune our arguments.

As the empirical material on labour movements in Beckert’s and Tully’s books is relatively thin, you will need to find more evidence in selected articles listed at the beginning of this unit from the Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Besides the three required articles from the encyclopedia, you must choose four articles from the other list to get a further bead on your own particular topics of interest in global labour history. Glance over each article’s abstract to get a sense what the article is about, and then select which articles are appropriate for your own research interests.

One thing you may have noticed from Beckert’s and Tully’s books—as with most other scholarly material covering global labour history—is that the authors look at global labour movements with a local or national slant. And this is no different from your required reading list from this unit: Of the list of articles from the Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, only two are international in scope. The first of these articles, “Internationals” by Michael Forman, delves into the three international congresses that were to discuss organizing worker across international boundaries from the late 19th century to WWII; and the second, “International Women’s Day” by Marily J. Boxer, reviews how the annual March 8 “IWD” movement began. Prominent to Forman’s article is the Second International that served as an umbrella organization of socialist parties in the late 19th century (and of which the IWD movement was born). Many of those parties, a number of them rebranded as “social-democratic,” are still around today. Also prominent is the Third International as an umbrella organization of “communist parties,” some of which would later become ruling parties in Eastern Europe and points elsewhere; the Chinese Communist Party is, of course, still governing.

As labour is so often equated with unions, you might expect something about international unions in a course on global labour history. Nevertheless, even though international union federations have existed for a long time, they have hardly played any role in union activity that is very much determined by laws on the level of nation-states. The Second and Third Internationals did have an impact on their member parties (the Third more than the Second) which, at various junctures, played significant roles in their respective home countries. However, this was never the case with international trade union federations, which barely played any role in labour movements that were active in different parts of the world.

Global labour is not the same as global unions. However, as empirical material in the books and articles within this course show, local struggles can have global effects. As an example, the American Civil War, which, among other things, was also a struggle over the abolition or continuation of slavery, led to a “cotton famine” in the textile mills in England. Another example is the end of WWI, which saw the explosion of social and political unrest that had accumulated during the war years in many countries; in Russia, for instance, grassroots struggle led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the abolition of capitalism in 1917, and inspired labour movements all over the world. Half a century later, labour and other social movements often lumped together under the label “1968,” ricocheted from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam to Mexico City, Paris to Tokyo, Prague to Rio de Janeiro, and many other places in between. More recently, the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s reintegration into the capitalist world market since the 1990s marked the breakthrough of neoliberal globalization and an accelerated rollback of wages and labour standards of pretty much all workers of the world. These few hints take us back to where we started the course—present day conditions of global labour.

Connecting with the Present

The beginning of Unit 1 of this course claims that the present views on the global labour environment are often associated with images of diversity and colour, whereas the past is portrayed in the black and white imagery of impoverished workers struggling against capitalistic greed. An implication of such images is that, in the past, social classes existed and that labour movements might have been necessary to overcome, or mitigate, class divisions. In today’s world, by contrast, class no longer matters and whatever inequalities and injustices might exist surely have nothing to do with it. The cotton and rubber industries were used as examples in this course to show that labour has always been diverse in terms of the legal forms under which it was performed—and in terms of the tasks that labourers performed, in the gender composition of the workforce, the relations between the workforce working under the control of capitalist investors, and employers and subsistence or household labour done outside such control. Due to the diversity of labourers and divisions of labour, labour movements were never a “pure” conflict between workers and capitalists, but instead have always been crossbred with issues of race and gender, different legal positions of the workers involved in a movement, and divisions between capitalist centres and (neo-)colonial peripheries. Hence, global labour history is not about the transition from conflict between uniform capitalist and working classes to a world of diversity in which class is dissolved. It is, instead, a history in which the diversity of, and divisions within, labour have taken different forms from the early days of colonization. From the establishment of plantations to produce cotton, sugar, tea, and wild rubber to today’s world in which the supply chains from agricultural production and resource extraction to manufacturing and service industries are managed by computer systems, labour movements have, unsurprisingly, also taken different forms: from struggles against slavery and colonization and first attempts to organize unions and workers parties, to present-day efforts to unionize tech-companies or—not much different from the same efforts made by previous generations of activists—farm workers.

Can today’s labour activists can learn anything from the experiences of those who came before them? To answer this, a few things should be obvious from our global history tour: There is no iron law of history, and that the twists and turns we encounter along the way suggest that agency (i.e., worker’s collective action) is what drives history forward (although one does not always know what “forward” means). More often than not, the outcome of collective action has little resemblance with what those who were involved in it thought it would have. For long stretches of time, positive changes seemed impossible and, therefore, any kind of active engagement appeared futile. Generations of slaves gave up the hope to be free. But eventually, slavery was abolished (though in one of the historical twists just mentioned, slavery did exist in various forms even after being prohibited in the countries most heavily involved in the slave trade). In a similar vein, generations of workers toiling in the factories of early industrializing England suffered more defeats than they scored successes in terms of organizing and improving their conditions before generally stable unions and labour laws achieved just that. In the case of factory workers, too, there was a historical turn that brought the same deplorable conditions that marked the textile mills in England to other places in the world. When labour movements did make progress, most of the workers who enjoyed the fruits of such progress never thought of losing them again. Many, in fact, were not even aware that they enjoyed better conditions than other workers because somebody in the past had struggled for them. Gains made at one point were often lost at later points in time. That is why, despite all the technological and political changes that have happened, many of the old stories about labour all over the world sound familiar to at least some workers in today’s world.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this unit, consider the charting exercises and notes from Units 2 and 3 and think about the following study questions:

1. What are the main causes for workers’ grievances?

1. What are the sources of workers’ collective power?

2. What does it take to actualize this power? In other words, what are the triggers for labour movements to develop?

3. What are the relations between class, race, and gender in global labour? How did they change over the course of history?

4. Which role does (neo-)colonialism play in changing divisions of labour and in labour movements?

5. Which phenomena appear over and over again in global labour history? What has changed over time?

6. What can be learned from global labour history to work out labour movement strategies for the future?