Terry Irving was co-author of Class Structure in Australian History (1980, 1992) and became a prominent labour historian. He edited the journal Labour History, 1990-1998, and was President of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH), 1999-2004. In 2003 he received the Annual History Citation awarded by the History Council of New South Wales for his contribution to the study of labour and political history in Australia. Terry writes: "I delivered this address, 'Labour History and its political role - a new landscape', almost two years ago at a centenary issue forum for the journal Labour History. There were about 30 academics present, none of whom in the discussion that followed even alluded to the political role of labour history. Were they interested in my paper's discussion of the political history of the journal? Nope. Were they interested in the fact that the paper referred to the way the leading international scholar of the field, a frequent visitor to labour history events in Australia, has redefined the field? Nope. Were they interested in the new concepts for labour history suggested in my paper? Nope. Were they interested in my suggestion that the journal's subtitle should be changed to 'a journal of global labour history'? Nope, although there was a counter suggestion: that it should be 'a journal of business and labour history'!!! I should not have been surprised, because after all I did predict it in the address, but I had hoped that in this academic gathering, with a history to look back on and a future to ensure, we would embrace our distinctive radicalism. Alas, we acted like careerist intellectuals, more concerned about the journal's 'ranking' than about its social purpose. Luckily, as I also said in the address, politics has not disappeared from the pages of Labour History, nor from the community formed by the branches of the ASSLH. That community is a valuable resource for radical historians. It's a pity that more of them don't make their existence known at forums like the one I attended. Terry Irving, 25 March 2013."
Labour
History
and its political role – a new landscape
A
contribution to the 100th issue round-table discussion
(29 April 2011 )
Terry
Irving
As I
was thinking about what to say today I read an article on Manning Clark and
found something that made me pause. It was a description of our venerable
journal, Labour History, but
characterizing it in terms that none of us would use, at least not in public.
Instead of describing our field, our sources or our methods, our long list of
illustrious contributors, it said that Labour
History was the journal of Australia
Well,
this was in Wikipedia – but
nonetheless it struck me that, yes, this is a truth I am prepared to accept.
I’m sure there others here today – editors, contributors, readers - who share
my acceptance. While I was editor of the journal I assumed it was part of a
cluster of left-wing journals, and of course its founding editors were quite
clear about its left-wing purpose. And yet, in academic gatherings today labour
historians rarely talk about themselves as left-wing.
To
use a very tired metaphor, left-wing politics is our elephant in the room. If
that is so, perhaps with a bit of imagination we might get our gear together
and move into a new landscape.
As a
term, labour history is redolent of politics – of the sweat of unfree work, of
unpaid housework, and of wage slavery; of the fear-drenched sweat staining the
shirts and blouses of demonstrators facing guns and water cannon; of the smell
of smoke-filled rooms and dusty convention halls; of the breath of the agitator
and the after shave of the pin-striped politician. It recalls for us the
mobilization of voters as well as politics outside the liberal democratic pale;
it smells of the corruption, broken promises and electoral fetishism that have
discredited liberal democracy. Sometimes it is the fresh breeze of the future;
at others it is the musty past.
When
academic labour history took off in the early 1960s, its proponents had
far-reaching ambitions. They were going to reinvent social history ‘as a way of
writing the history of movements and societies as integrated wholes’. This was
a political ambition because it would require the naming of that integrated
whole as capitalism. In the meantime they would insert labour history into the
university curriculum as stand-alone courses, and this was political because it
would bring the masses into the classroom. But by the time Verity Burgmann
wrote ‘The strange death of labour history’ in 1991, these dreams had faded.[i]
The
retreat of labour history into a mere topic in courses on employment relations
or social history, or into the specialized world of higher degree supervision –
the retreat from politics in the teaching of labour history – was also a theme
of Burgmann’s essay. In fact she placed it in a broader context, the strange
death of politics in mainstream history teaching and research, especially in
social history, which ironically our journal adopted as its sub-title just a
decade before.
So
let us remind ourselves that for a long time now there have been almost no
dedicated courses in labour history for undergraduates in British, New Zealand United States
But
there is some good news. Despite its retreat in teaching, politics has not
disappeared from the pages of Labour History,
nor from the labour history community formed by the branches of the Australian
Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH). Of course, when I say ‘politics’ I don’t mean just the history of the
Labor Party and its members, or even the broader understanding required to
write the history of power relations in all aspects of workers’ lives, but as
Janis Bailey and Ross Gwyther said in Issue 99 of Labour History, I mean the exposure
of ‘unequal power relations’ and the promotion
of ‘new social orders’. I mean the writing of socially engaged history by
political intellectuals of the left. Incidentally, as they point out, the same
political definition may be applied to environmental history.[ii]
Issue
99 is a beauty from this point of view, and it is a fitting tribute to Greg
Patmore, whose last issue as editor this was. But let me take you back to issue
number 1. It appeared at a time of apparent stasis in labour’s progress after
the years of heady post-war advance, and of a conservative intellectual
backlash against the radical-nationalist history that intellectuals of the
labour movement had been developing over the previous fifty years. The first
generation of academic labour historians were responding to both these
challenges when they formed the ASSLH. The words ‘labour history’ were
inscribed on their banner because they wanted, as Bob Gollan said in the first
issue, to ‘be of immediate practical value to the labour movement’. There was a
second reason, best expressed in Eric Fry’s words, to make Australian history
‘a popular pursuit, a study, and a part of ordinary people’s lives’. Labour
history would be useful history, in both a narrow and a broad sense.[iii]
If
Bob Gollan and Eric Fry were alive today, wanting as socially engaged
intellectuals to write a useful history, would they choose the words ‘labour
history’ to express their intention? Should we
use those words to express our intention? The answer depends on what it means
today to be left-wing. To the extent that working people still manage to
organize within the diminishing range of the social state I would like our
history work to be of use to them. Being of ‘immediate practical value to the
labour movement’ still seems a worthwhile project.
But
the extent of the labour movement’s grip on the lives of ordinary people today
is much less than it was in Fry and Gollan’s day. Trade unionism is in decline,
the Labor Party has an aging and diminishing membership, and work itself has
changed. So what would it mean to make labour history ‘a part of ordinary people’s
lives’ again, to find (in Fry’s words) ‘new ways and new people’ to ‘change the
world’.
The
answer is not unrelated to the question of reformulating the subjects and
conceptual underpinnings of labour history, a task that has been led by Marcel
van der Linden. He has urged labour historians to break with Eurocentric and
nationalist frameworks. At a time when national union movements and parties of
labour within the nation state are
declining this is a logical move, and I think we in Australia
(Before
leaving this point I notice that Marcel includes Australasian labour historians
among those guilty of Eurocentric prejudice. If this is true we need a bit of
self-criticism, but more importantly his characterization suggests we have
failed to develop arguments to show how our labour institutions, our class
structure and state, our form of settler capitalism have produced a version of
labour history different from that of Europe.)
If
labour history’s empirical focus needs to change, so do its concepts, and
Marcel’s recent writings discuss the necessary foundations for a global history
of labour. His discussion of the two-fold meaning of labour – as toil
undertaken in consequence of the commodification of labour, and as creative
work – brings out the problems of applying this Western concept to the global
South. Then, and most interesting for the purposes of my argument today, he
questions the use of the term ‘working class’. It is its 19th
century European connotations that he finds limiting. He insists that there
have always been a range of forms of commodified labour – he points to slavery,
indentured labour, and share-cropping, but we would of course want to include
convictism – and that consequently we need the idea of ‘the extended or
subaltern working class’. He says: ‘it is the historic dynamics of this
multitude that we [labour historians] should try to understand.’[v]
For
producing a new direction for labour history, these ideas (the multitude, and
the binary concept of labour) may prove as significant as was E.P. Thompson’s
idea of class as a relationship in the ‘Preface’ to The Making of the English Working Class.[vi]
Van der Linden’s argument is based on the history of labour; mine today is
based on its present – a present that labour historians must consider if they
wish to remain left-wing. Where are the struggles of labour to be found today?
Or more accurately, where are the struggles of the multitude – the extended,
subaltern class of workers? Where will they be found in the future?
It
would take more time than I have at this session to answer those questions
adequately. I would however like to refer to two recent studies. In New Left Review, November-December 2010,
Michael Denning’s article on wageless life shows how social democracy through a
compact with state organizations in the twentieth century constituted a normal
subject, the wage earner, and by so doing made ‘much of capitalism’s multitude … unrecognizable to the labour movement’.
[my italics] He means the multitude of workers who lived and still live outside
typical employment and unemployment – for example, women working in their own
households, people living in communities stigmatized by ethnic or racial
prejudice, or devastated by de-industrialization, and in the US, agricultural
labourers, and so on.[vii]
The ‘atypical’ work done by the multitude has always existed, and it is not
disappearing but increasing as casualisation, sub-contracting and
self-employment spreads. Today, its growth is an object of neo-liberal economic
theory and state policy. The I.L.O, reports that at the beginning of the 21st
century, ‘non-standard, atypical work’ comprised 30% of over-all employment in
15 European countries, and 25% of total employment in the United States
And
there is resistance among these workers. It is part of the story of global
labour history, as important as the struggles in the South told by Van der
Linden. Here I would like to refer you to the journal Antipode. Self-described as ‘a radical journal of geography’ it
regularly carries a section headed ‘Interventions’, and in the September 2010
issue this section dealt with autonomist politics and activism over the past
decade. Autonomist political activity refers to both the anti-globalization
‘movement of movements’ that has been developing since the Seattle
demonstrations against the WTO in 1990, and to the myriad self-managed
experiments by unwaged communities in the capitalist North to meet actual
rather than market-generated needs. Of course much of this activism involves
people not connected to labour organizations, but many unionists share their
concern for social and ecological justice.
More central to our argument, the editor points out that all of this
section’s articles ‘in different ways address the issue of labour and work’.
They begin from an awareness of the way work has become more precarious and
instrumental, and they rely on the binary concept of labour recommended to us
by Van der Linden and Denning. In particular John Holloway grounds the theory
of autonomism in the difference between ‘labour’ that is externally imposed and
experienced, which autonomists reject, and ‘doing’ that is freely chosen and
pushes towards self-determination.[ix]
To
sum up: here’s what I think we should do:
- We should drop the present subtitle. ‘Social history’ no longer conveys anything radical or intellectually challenging. As a new subtitle, ‘A journal of global labour history’ would be both.
- We should pay more attention to the theoretical debates about working class, multitude and subalternity that have the capacity to extend our range of historical topics, and of the ideas of ‘survival, self-management and the commons’ [Chatterton, 2] that together offer a new radical utopia for working people, and hence for our writing about them.[x]
- We should be more
politically engaged, encouraging the submission of articles that shine the
light of history on contemporary struggles by working people, whether
through the labour movement or not.
[i] Verity
Burgmann, ‘The strange death of Labour history’ in Bede Nairn and Labor History, Sydney, Pluto Press and the NSW
Branch of the Australian Labor Party, 1991, pp. 69-81.
[ii] Janis Bailey and Ross Gwyther, ‘Red and Green:
Towards a Cross-Fertilisation of Labour and Environmental History’, Labour History, 99, November 2010, p. 1.
[iii] R.A. Gollan, ‘Labour
History’, Bulletin of the Australian
Society for the Study of Labour History, 1, January 1962, p. 3; Eric Fry’s
words are from Peter Love, ‘An Interview with Eric Fry’, Hummer, 31/2, March-Aug 1991.
[iv] Marcel van der Linden, ‘Labour History Beyond
Borders’ in Joan Allen, Alan Campbell and John McIlroy (eds) Histories of Labour: National and
International Perspectives, London
[vii] Michael Denning, ‘Wageless Life’, New Left Review, 66 Second Series,
November-December 2010, pp. 84-6.
[ix] John Holloway, ‘Cracks
and the Crisis of Abstract Labour’, Antipode,
vol. 4, issue 4, September 2010, pp. 909-23; and Paul Chatterton, ‘
Introduction to: Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-management and the
Common Organizer’, Antipode, vol. 4,
issue 4, September 2010, pp. 897-908.
