Labor history (discipline)

Last updated

Labor history or labour history is a sub-discipline of social history which specialises on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity and other factors besides class but chiefly focus on urban or industrial societies which distinguishes it from rural history.

Contents

The central concerns of labor historians include industrial relations and forms of labor protest (strikes, lock-outs), the rise of mass politics (especially the rise of socialism) and the social and cultural history of the industrial working classes.

Labor history developed in tandem with the growth of a self-conscious working-class political movement in many Western countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Whilst early labor historians were drawn to protest movements such as Luddism and Chartism, the focus of labor history was often on institutions: chiefly the labor unions and political parties. Exponents of this institutional approach included Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The work of the Webbs, and other pioneers of the discipline, was marked by optimism about the capacity of the labor movement to effect fundamental social change and a tendency to see its development as a process of steady, inevitable and unstoppable progress.

As two contemporary labor historians have noted, early work in the field was "designed to service and celebrate the Labour movement." [1]

Marxist influence

In the 1950s to 1970s, labor history was redefined and expanded in focus by a number of historians, amongst whom the most prominent and influential figures were E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. The motivation came from current left-wing politics in Britain and the United States and reached red-hot intensity. Kenneth O. Morgan, a more traditional liberal historian, explains the dynamic:

the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions’ winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party. The new history was often strongly Marxist, which fed through the work of brilliant evangelists like Raphael Samuel into the New Left Review, a famous journal like Past and Present, the Society of Labour History and the work of a large number of younger scholars engaged in the field. Non-scholars like Tony Benn joined in. The new influence of Marxism upon Labour studies came to affect the study of history as a whole. [2]

Morgan sees benefits:

In many ways, this was highly beneficial: it encouraged the study of the dynamics of social history rather than a narrow formal institutional view of labour and the history of the Labour Party; it sought to place the experience of working people within a wider technical and ideological context; it encouraged a more adventurous range of sources, ‘history from below’ so-called, and rescued them from what Thompson memorably called the ‘condescension of posterity’; it brought the idea of class centre-stage in the treatment of working-class history, where I had always felt it belonged; it shed new light on the poor and dispossessed for whom the source materials were far more scrappy than those for the bourgeoisie, and made original use of popular evidence like oral history, not much used before. [3]

Morgan tells of the downside as well:

But the Marxist – or sometimes Trotskyist – emphasis in Labour studies was too often doctrinaire and intolerant of non-Marxist dissent–it was also too often plain wrong, distorting the evidence within a narrow doctrinaire framework. I felt it incumbent upon me to help rescue it. But this was not always fun. I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff...when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues. [4]

Thompson and Hobsbawm were Marxists who were critical of the existing labour movement in Britain. They were concerned to approach history "from below" and to explore the agency and activity of working people at the workplace, in protest movements and in social and cultural activities. Thompson's seminal study The Making of the English Working Class [5] was particularly influential in setting a new agenda for labor historians and locating the importance of the study of labor for social history in general. Also in the 1950s and 1960s, historians began to give serious attention to groups who had previously been largely neglected, such as women and non-caucasian ethnic groups. Some historians situated their studies of gender and race within a class analysis: for example, C. L. R. James, a Marxist who wrote about the struggles of blacks in the Haitian Revolution. Others questioned whether class was a more important social category than gender or race and pointed to racism, patriarchy and other examples of division and oppression within the working class.

Labor history remains centered on two fundamental sets of interest: institutional histories of workers' organizations, and the "history from below" approach of the Marxist historians.

Despite the influence of the Marxists, many labor historians rejected the revolutionary implications implicit in the work of Thompson, Hobsbawm et al. In the 1980s, the importance of class itself, as an historical social relationship and explanatory concept, began to be widely challenged. Some notable labor historians turned from Marxism to embrace a postmodernist approach, emphasizing the importance of language and questioning whether classes could be so considered if they did not use a "language of class". Other historians emphasized the weaknesses and moderation of the historic labor movement, arguing that social development had been characterized more by accommodation, acceptance of the social order and cross-class collaboration than by conflict and dramatic change.

United States

Labor history in the United States is primarily based in history departments, with occasional representation inside labor unions. The scholarship deals with the institutional history of labor unions and the social history of workers. In recent years there's been special attention to historically marginal groups, especially Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous workers. [6] The Study Group on International Labor and Working-Class History was established: 1971 and has a membership of 1000. It publishes International Labor and Working-Class History. [7] H-LABOR is a daily email-based discussion group formed in 1993 that reaches over a thousand scholars and advanced students. [8] the Labor and Working-Class History Association formed in 1988 and publishes Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas .

Prominent scholars include John R. Commons (1862–1945), [9] David Brody (b. 1930), [10] Melvyn Dubofsky, [11] and David Montgomery (1927-2011). [12]

Historiography

Kirk (2010) surveys labor historiography in Britain since the formation of the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1960. He reports that labor history has been mostly pragmatic, eclectic and empirical; it has played an important role in historiographical debates, such as those revolving around history from below, institutionalism versus the social history of labor, class, populism, gender, language, postmodernism and the turn to politics. Kirk rejects suggestions that the field is declining, and stresses its innovation, modification and renewal. Kirk also detects a move into conservative insularity and academicism. He recommends a more extensive and critical engagement with the kinds of comparative, transnational and global concerns increasingly popular among labor historians elsewhere, and calls for a revival of public and political interest in the topics. [13] Meanwhile, Navickas, (2011) examines recent scholarship including the histories of collective action, environment and human ecology, and gender issues, with a focus on work by James Epstein, Malcolm Chase, and Peter Jones. [14]

Outside the Marxist orbit, social historians paid a good deal of attention to labour history as well. [15]

Addison notes that in Britain by the 1990s, labour history was, "in sharp decline," because:

there was no longer much interest in history of the white, male working-class. Instead the 'cultural turn' encouraged historians to explore wartime constructions of gender, race, citizenship and national identity. [16]

See also

Notes

  1. Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840-1940, Routledge, 1994, p. 1. ISBN   0-415-07320-0
  2. Kenneth O. Morgan, My Histories (University of Wales Press, 2015) p 85.
  3. Morgan, My Histories (2015) p 86.
  4. Morgan, My Histories (2015) p 86. online at JSTOR
  5. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963. ISBN   0-14-013603-7
  6. Daniel J. Walkowitz and Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, eds. Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756-2009 (2010)
  7. See Study Group on International Labor and Working-Class History Archived 2015-05-18 at the Wayback Machine
  8. See H-LABOR website
  9. John Rogers Commons, Myself (1934), his autobiography.
  10. David Brody, "The old labor history and the new: In search of an American working class." Labor History(1979) 20#1 pp: 111-126.
  11. Melvyn Dubofsky (b. 1934), Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (2000) excerpt
  12. David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1980) excerpt
  13. Neville Kirk, "Challenge, Crisis, and Renewal? Themes in the Labour History of Britain, 1960–2010," Labour History Review, Aug 2010, Vol. 75 Issue 2, pp 162-180
  14. Katrina Navickas, "What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain," Social History, May 2011, Vol. 36 Issue 2, pp 192-204
  15. John McIlroy, "Asa Briggs and the Emergence of Labour History in Post-War Britain." Labour History Review 77.2 (2012): 211-242.
  16. Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, eds. A Companion to Contemporary Britain: 1939-2000 (2005) p. 4

Further reading

Canada

United States

Europe

Related Research Articles

Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%).

Marxist feminism

Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations.

Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which latter coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression. Socialist feminism is a two-pronged theory that broadens Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Socialist feminists reject radical feminism's main claim that patriarchy is the only, or primary, source of oppression of women. Rather, Socialist feminists assert that women are oppressed due to their financial dependence on males. Women are subjects to male domination within capitalism due to an uneven balance in wealth. They see economic dependence as the driving force of women's subjugation to men. Further, Socialist feminists see women's liberation as a necessary part of larger quest for social, economic, and political justice. Socialist feminists attempted to integrate the fight for women's liberation with the struggle against other oppressive systems based on race, class, sexual orientation, or economic status.

Sheila Rowbotham is a British socialist feminist theorist and historian.

<i>Past & Present</i> (journal) Academic journal

Past & Present is a British historical academic journal, which has been a leading force in the development of social history. Founded in 1952, the journal is published four times a year by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Past and Present Society, a British historical membership association and registered charity. The society also publishes a book series, and sponsors occasional conferences and appoints postdoctoral fellows.

International Lenin School

The International Lenin School (ILS) was an official training school operated in Moscow by the Communist International from May 1926 to 1938. It was resumed after the Second World War, run by the CPSU and continued to the dissolution of the USSR. The ILS taught both academic courses and practical underground political techniques with a view to developing a core disciplined and reliable communist political cadres for assignment in Communist Parties around the world.

Kenneth O. Morgan

Kenneth Owen Morgan, Baron Morgan, is a Welsh historian and author, known especially for his writings on modern British history and politics and on Welsh history. He is a regular reviewer and broadcaster on radio and television. He has been an influential intellectual resource in the Labour Party.

Orestis Stamatopoulos, also known as John Saville, was a Greek-British Marxist historian, long associated with Hull University. He was an influential writer on British Labour History in the second half of the twentieth century, and also known for his multi-volume work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography, edited in collaboration with others.

(Edward) Victor Gordon Kiernan was a British Marxist historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. He was recognised as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians. While his middle name came from British imperialist, General 'Chinese' Gordon of Khartoum, he emerged as one of Britain's foremost ideological warriors against empire.

Dona Ruth Anne Torr was a British Marxist historian, and a major influence on the famous Communist Party Historians Group. Aside from her translations of many Marxist classics into English, she is perhaps best known for her unfinished biography of the important labour activist, Tom Mann, Tom Mann and his Times.

The Plebs' League was a British educational and political organisation which originated around a Marxist way of thinking in 1908 and was active until 1926.

John Fletcher Clews Harrison, usually cited as J. F. C. Harrison, was a British academic who was Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of books on history, particularly relating to Victorian Britain.

Craig Heron is a Canadian social historian and public intellectual with a broad interest in labour and cultural history. A former president of the Canadian Historical Association, he is a professor emeritus at York University.

Hilda Kean is a British historian who specialises in public and cultural history, and in particular the cultural history of animals. She is former Dean and Director of Public History at Ruskin College, Oxford, and an Honorary Research Fellow there. Kean is a visiting professor of History at the University of Greenwich and an adjunct professor at the Centre for Australian Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Eric Hobsbawm British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the "long 19th century", The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions".

E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

A subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to "history from below" from 1946 to 1956. Famous members included such leading lights of 20th-century British historiography as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel and E. P. Thompson, as well as non-academics like A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce.

Communist Party of Great Britain Communist political party in Britain (1920–1991)

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist party in Great Britain between 1920 and 1991. Founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist parties, the CPGB gained the support of many socialist organisations and trade unions following the political fallout of the First World War and the Russian October Revolution. Ideologically the CPGB was a socialist party organised upon Marxism–Leninist ideology, strongly opposed to British colonialism, sexual discrimination, and racial segregation. These beliefs led many leading anti-colonial revolutionaries, feminists, and anti-fascist figures, to become closely associated with the party. Many prominent CPGB members became leaders of Britain's trade union movements, including Jessie Eden, Abraham Lazarus, Ken Gill, Clem Beckett, GCT Giles, Mike Hicks, and Thora Silverthorne.

Marxist historiography

Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. While Marxist historians all follow the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism, the way Marxist historiography has developed in different regional and political contexts has varied. In particular, Marxist historiography has had unique trajectories of development in the West, in the Soviet Union, and in India, as well as in the Pan-Africanist and African American traditions, adapting to these specific regional and political conditions in different ways.

Lise Vogel American Marxist-feminist sociologist and art historian (b. 1938)

Lise Vogel is a feminist sociologist and art historian from the United States. An influential Marxist-feminist theoretician, she is recognised for being one of the main founders of the Social Reproduction Theory. She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston. In her earlier career as an art historian, she was one of the first to try to develop a feminist perspective on Art History.