Sian Lazar, How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (London: Pluto Press 2023)

In How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour, Sian Lazar argues that Fordist assumptions about labour and workers’ agency have confined perceptions of labour movements to particular sites and modes of action such as factory floors, unions, and overt social movements. Lazar suggests that, as a result, there exists an intellectual hegemony in studies of labour and worker agency that fails to meaningfully attend to the significance of everyday forms of political struggle found in the individual and collective action of workers, households, and kinship networks. In How We Struggle, Lazar bridges global political economy and Marxist feminist theories of labour to trouble this intellectual hegemony, offering an incisive and engaging meditation on how labour agency might be understood outside of Fordism.

How We Struggle is divided into eight substantive chapters that pull off the feat of tracing the interconnected dimensions of worker agency, political economy, local contexts, and labour processes across eight different economic sectors. Each chapter begins with richly detailed descriptions of the political economy for each sector and pays attentive attention to their interpenetrations and significant changes since the mid-20th century. The chapters then proceed by shifting analytical frames from macro-structural processes to micro-interactional behaviours, deftly employing select ethnographies to tie global transformations to embodied experiences of labour and labour agency.

While the book is not explicitly divided into sections, Lazar’s thoughtful arrangement sees the development of a natural segmentation of the text into three parts, progressing from the prototypical Marxist sites of material production to less traditional anthropological subjects of workers’ agency. Following this pattern, the first three chapters comprise the first part of the text and explore how transnational changes in the flow of capital and labour since the mid-twentieth century have influenced the lives of workers in steel plants and mines (Chapter 1); how the materiality of labour processes interact with gender and racial ideologies in garment and electronics manufacturing industries to produce complex and, at times, contradictory forms of labour agency (Chapter 2); and the relational significance of land concentration and dispossession, labour migration, and plantation economies to the fabrication of persons and communities and, in turn, possibilities for worker resistance (Chapter 3).

The next three chapters constitute the second part of the text and address how immaterial and affective labour shape workers’ responses to exploitation. In Chapter 4, Lazar critically interrogates how intersecting social locations in conjunction with global and local im/mobility influence service workers’ capacity to resist labour exploitation. Chapter 5 is concerned with professional and managerial labour and notes the importance of recognizing that a crucial immaterial result of such labour is the production of subjects who see themselves not as workers but as professionals immersed in a network of affective labour. The chapter continues by showing the significant repercussions this fabrication of self and other has on labour agency. The final chapter in this section examines platform labour and the possibilities of worker agency when bosses are “ephemeral, algorithmic, or hidden” (141) and workers are isolated and dispersed from one another.

The last part of the text and its focus, not so much on material and immaterial production as the reproduction of the social itself, are most provocative. Chapter 7 explores what Lazar calls “patchwork living”, that is, the “multiple labour processes” (167) workers undertake to sustain their lives and those of loved ones. Here, Lazar effectively illustrates the importance of maintaining “networks and relations that enable income generation” for those engaging in patchwork living through such activities as “keeping records of credit arrangements … holding a purchase for a customer to collect later … having a beer with a particular scrap dealer … [or in] the form of collective organisation.” (176) They avoid the reduction of these networks and relations to archetypal sites of work and professional identities, demonstrating their articulations and embeddedness within kinship networks and other relations of belonging or placemaking activities that themselves enable, sustain, or disrupt income generation. The result is an expertly woven narrative that highlights how labour politics for those living patchwork lives is a dynamic process, “changing according to opportunity, desire, and necessity.” (183) The final chapter draws on critical feminist works in the anthropology of care to examine how social reproduction labour articulates with other forms of work discussed in the book. As expected from the topic, Lazar shows readers how the naturalization of particular conceptions of gender and what constitutes labour influences the political agency of those carrying out the labour of social reproduction.

How We Struggle does not possess many shortcomings, and Lazar’s “methodological and political commitment to radical compassion for what people do in real life” is effective at unearthing the everyday efforts workers employ to better their lives and those they care about. One limitation of the book is that there appears to be an almost complete absence of consideration for sexually and gender non-conforming workers. Such an absence is surprising given the significant linkages between these social locations and the need to engage, for example, in patchwork living or platform labour. However, this limitation, as with all works offering rich contributions, provokes many questions and horizons for subsequent explorations.

Overall, Sian Lazar has produced a meticulous exploration of the global-local relationship between political economy, labour agency, gender, and family. A masterful contribution to the anthropology of labour, How We Struggle will be well received in undergraduate and graduate courses and among social activists and policymakers.

Pedrom Nasiri

University of Calgary

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v92.0028.