Impressive

I found the topic intriguing and thought perhaps the final element of people getting self esteem from work and being in the workplace as important then unfortunately we might face people getting their self esteem from social media and not wanting to go in. Work might just take an unexpected turn

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Geeky, interesting

You will enjoy it if you liked Sapiens or Guns Germs and Steel. Long but interesting

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Labour history, a window on the world

I really enjoyed this book. Labour history since the development of capitalism, and the likely fracture points in the future, are well trodden paths for me. It is the chapters covering the development of labour in early human societies, the rise of the early states, the development of slavery, the use of religion and so on that really shine, for me. Earlier scholars, like V Gordon Childe, attempted to bring the cutting edge sciences of their time, in respect of archaeology, epigraphy, anthropology etc., to a wide audience. The vast computer databases that scholars can use now, as well as huge leaps in methodology, have revolutionised our understanding - this is clear from the material Lucassen presents here in really easy to understand chunks.

In terms of the later periods, with probably the largest sections dealing with 1800 to the present, bearing in mind this is a generalist treatment, the author puts the key developments in labour and economic history into their chronological order. He introduces a number of theorists from the ancients to Marx and Weber, onwards to Friedman and more recently Bas van Bavel and at particular moments their insights are discussed. For me, this left a feeling of mild superficiality and occasionally a sense of telos - that the author was treating the development of the modern economic systems as inevitable. This isn’t the kind of inevitability as seen in the “end of history” brigade. It is milder. Nevertheless, forks in the path (say, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia) and even the significant labour protections won at the high point of the social democracies, are treated like they inevitably go wrong.

Compare this to Adam Tooze’s masterful Wages of Destruction which exposes in great detail the economic rationale behind Nazi decision making, its relationship to political ideology and the very contingent reasons for its failure. The horrifying possibility is that it would have succeeded, that the slaughter of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, disabled, Communists and other minorities in order to secure food for the German homeland and as part of efforts to build an economic and military counterweight to the United States might have been seen retrospectively as necessary for a “greater good”, that the murder by forced labour of hundreds of thousands of POWs might have been commemorated as necessary to save “European civilisation”. Lucassen seems to regard the failure of Nazism as inevitable.

The same can be said of his treatment of the USSR. Superficiality also reigns in his counting of China as communist, without bothering to consider what distinguishes communism from capitalism, beyond a dictatorship that has the name “communist party”. Early on the author openly eschews ideology-laden terminology such as class and status. Yet the power of class (and no doubt Weberians may argue the same of their cherished “status”) is precisely in explaining why these possible choices exist, in how states manage labour. Each type - laissez faire, social democratic, totalitarian, Stalinist etc., and the gradations between - reflects a real struggle over the creation, ownership and control of value. My view is that it is better to understand each on their own terms - as Tooze has - than to lazily suppose that time will simply prove what works and what doesn’t. This is a supposition I feel is shot through almost any aspect of the 20th Century dealt with by the book.

That there’s a chapter at the end which briefly discusses some theories as to the end of the market economy almost seems like an accident, as a consequence of this pervasive mild sense of inevitability. This is interesting, but again superficial. Whereas the mechanisms for early social change in much less populous, less developed societies with much weaker states are openly postulated in the book, to good effect, by the time we reach late capitalism, there’s really no discussion of what mechanisms bring about social change. Sea changes like the Western shift in 1980 are discussed. A few theorists are cited. Dangers of the rise of the “identitarian right” (term coined by Piketty, who is cited) are noted as being a consequence of the decline of the working class parties of the left. One looks in vain for any serious reasoning as to why any of this is the case.

For me this is because the author has deliberately chucked out the baby of “class” with the bath water of much of the truly dire historiography built upon it. Without class, social change, particularly in the field of labour history is all but unintelligible, it’s mechanisms disappearing into the black box of public opinion and its Brownian motion. The author clearly acknowledges that labour and capital are two distinct forces with distinct interests, this is clear most especially in the discussions of the 19th century, and even with the question of how the state is used mostly by one side to shape labour relations, but alas this sharper perspective fades into the near-triumphalist commentary on general strikes in South Korea and elsewhere, gains from which are eroded over time. The sense left is of some inevitable middle way, where the extremes of labour slavery (Nazis, Soviets, dictatorial regimes) or labour dominance (the height of the social democracies - and no, I don’t believe these were examples of labour dominance) will converge. Perhaps this is some echo of modernisation theory.

My own personal internal arguments with the author, that raged while listening to the book, are a good demonstration that the book will make you think. It is accessible. It will teach even intermediate readers in these subjects new things and introduce new thinkers to add to your reading/listening lists. The narration is confident despite the odd random gaffes of pronunciation. It tells the story of human history in a much more engaging way than lists of dates and kings and battles, followed by lists of dates and inventors and landmark laws or court judgments. I strongly, strongly recommend it.

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