Working Class History, ed., Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion (Oakland: PM Press, 2020)

Is labour history dead? Hard to believe after reading this book. Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion is the latest product of Working Class History (wch), the remarkable international collective that, since its founding in 2014, has amassed over 700,000 followers across its affiliated social media platforms, sharing tweet-sized stories of the struggles of working people in English, Arabic, Farsi, French, Norwegian, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. This book translates wch’s “on this day in history” social media posts into a full-year calendar featuring two events in global working-class history for each day of the year. The result is a treasure-trove of mini-histories that together put forward a truly global, expansive depiction of workers’ history, drawn from all six inhabited continents, spanning (at least) seven centuries, and featuring people from across the hierarchies and spectrums of race, gender, and freedom.

I received my copy in the mail on 18 August, so naturally I flipped first to that date “August 18, 1812. Food riots, primarily led by women, broke out in Leeds and Sheffield, England.” After seizures of foodstuffs and assaults on sellers, “Sheffield flour dealers were forced to reduce their prices to three shillings per pound.” “August 18, 1823. The Demerara slave revolt in the British colony of Demerara-Essequibo, present-day Guyana, saw over ten thousand enslaved, mainly Creole people, go from plantation to plantation, stealing weapons and locking up their masters, even putting some of them in stocks.” Oh, hell yes.

It is not all stories of heroic triumph. Indeed, the entry on the Demerara slave revolt goes on to describe the brutal quelling of the uprising, including the execution of hundreds of participants, but it does not leave readers there. In this entry and many others, the text concludes with some broader, but still easily digestible, historical analysis. “Word of the revolt spread across the Caribbean and back to England, where it spurred the abolitionist movement. Following an even bigger rebellion in Jamaica, slavery was largely abolished in the British Caribbean over the following decade.” Nor does the book adopt a simplistic good versus evil perspective. As the editors note in the introduction, it also recounts some atrocities that were “carried out in the name of making a better world” (for example, the criminalization of homosexuality and violent repression of queer peoples in the Soviet Union after 1933). Explain the editors: “We believe it is important not only to counter dominant narratives that sanitize the history of capitalism and colonialism but also to learn the mistakes (as well as the successes) of those who have fought against them” (4, 244).

I picked up the book again on 29 August to learn about the 1997 unionization of exotic dancers at the Lusty Lady Club in San Francisco, a storey that is also the subject of a wch podcast episode, another branch of the group’s activities. (Subjects of podcast episodes are helpfully marked in the text with a designated symbol.) The hits keep coming. On 14 June 1381: a peasants’ revolt in fourteenth century England; 25 January 1911: the execution of Japanese feminist anarchist Kanno Sugako; 30 October 1944: a line-up of Greek partisans, mostly women, armed to the teeth and fresh off liberating Thessaloniki from Nazi occupation (one of the book’s many astounding photographs). On every page an indignation; on every date an inspiration.

The book opens with a foreword by Noam Chomsky, followed by an introduction by the wch collective, which, to me at least, is especially interesting for its commentary on the group’s overall project and its relevance to the practice of public history. The commentary gives much to consider and admire, in particular, for the readers of this journal who aspire to make their academic work useful, in however modest a way possible, to the real-world struggles of ordinary, working people. Write the editors: “To access this knowledge [of working-class history], we read a lot of history, and we were struck by how many vital lessons there were that could inform our struggles today. Yet while a lot has been written about working-class struggles around the world, much of that writing is inaccessible to most people, hidden in dusty archives or behind online pay walls, or it is online but written in convoluted academic or political jargon.” (4) The project of wch has been precisely to tear down these barriers to access, be they economic or linguistic, by sharing stories of working-class history via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, podcast, and now in this book. There is nothing complicated about their method. No academic gussying-up here. The results speak for themselves – and speak powerfully. Over 700,000 followers. With an audience of more than eleven million each month. Sister pages are available in eight non-English languages. This is an impressive record, and for labour historians, an inspiring one. Rumours of the death of our field have been much exaggerated. There is a broad public appetite for historical knowledge about working people that can help inform contemporary struggles.

But, at the risk of sounding like an easily offended academic (who could imagine such a creature!), I’d like to push back, ever so gently, against the editors’ (implied, not explicitly stated) binary characterization of academic and public history and advance a more ecological perspective. Let us stick with the book and I will explain what I mean. The book contains a reference section that points readers towards further reading on each calendar entry. In keeping with the editors’ objective of accessibility, most of the references are to free, online articles: many from the excellent libertarian-communist website libcom.org, but lots too from popular news sites, online encyclopedias, public history projects, and the like, with only minimal citation of scholarly works. On first blush, it seems as if academic historians have been cut entirely from the equation, with activist-intellectuals establishing a direct line of transmission to the working-class masses – if not through the book, then at least through social media. But start digging into some of the referenced articles, and what you will very quickly find is that many, probably most of them, are based on knowledge produced in the academy. Some of the articles’ authors are themselves academic historians. Others cite scholarly works. Some pieces are informed by interviews with scholars. What this suggests (and here comes the ecological part) is that history (meaning, in this instance, the production and dissemination of knowledge about the human past) is a complex system, whose component parts – from the world-renowned professor to the people’s history tweeter – are interconnected. I do not mean this in any sort of kumbaya, utopian way, but simply to say that the separate-spheres depiction of academic and popular history is reductive. To be sure, some of the knowledge produced in the academy does not get far beyond its walls – or even circulate all that much within them. But plenty of it does scale those walls (or, to use a less dramatic but probably more accurate metaphor, waltz through the open doors) in ways big and small – through teaching, public engagement, and sometimes even academic writing. This academy-produced knowledge has its real-world effects – in public school curricula that, for all their shortcomings, have radically transformed to include much more content about ordinary people from a diversity of backgrounds; in popular understandings of history that increasingly recognize the colonial underpinnings of our society and are decreasingly attached to “great men”; and I submit, in public history projects like wch. Of course, ideas and knowledge travel in both directions.

If I can extend the above reflections into a critique, it would be that the editors of Working Class History, while deeply attuned to working people’s pasts, do not seem to give much consideration to the history of working-class history, and in particular to the decades-long intellectual project to establish the lives, experiences, and labour of ordinary people as serious subjects of scholarly inquiry. It is difficult to imagine the existence of a book like Working Class History without the foundational work of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and the legions of social historians who followed in their wake, including the founders of this journal and so many of its contributors. But this is a minor critique, and one that should not distract from the beauty and brilliance of this volume, the perfect holiday gift for that special leftist in your life.

Edward Dunsworth

McGill University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v89.0028.