The Oxford Labour Network’s ‘Workers and Politics Conference’ took place on Friday 12 June. It assembled scholars from across disciplinary boundaries as well as international borders to reflect across an entire day of wide-ranging papers and stimulating discussion. The conference concluded with thoughts on the Network’s development to date, the urgency of thinking about labour today, and plans for future projects.
Several papers reflected on the possibilities, constraints, and ambivalences of coalition-building between workers and other actors within the field of political action. Alexander Beard (University of Oxford) analysed the failure of workers’ movements in the GDR to win meaningful change in the face of the consensual emphases in at the turn of the 1990s. Bruno Settis (Florence) probed how a powerful mid-twentieth century US labour movement, or its leaders, were both able to shape an US Cold War foreign policy and were, in turn, co-opted or weakened by this alliance. Xuan Jin (Zhejiang University)’s paper considered the contexts and long-term consequences of the splintering of a coalition between anti-colonial struggle and socio-economic rights in the struggle for Singaporean independence from British rule.
Periods of transition, rupture, and, at least potentially, paths not taken were also considered by, among other speakers, Ruggero Giovanneti (La Sapienza). Giovanneti characterised the 1996-97 Italian steelworkers’ dispute, as a ‘psychological and political prelude’ to a deregulation agenda. Sandipan Sen (Birla Institute of Technology and Science) complicated periodisation centred on the idea of “Taylorism” by focusing on the context of the 1928 strike at Jamshedpur. Katerina Szylo (University of Oxford) read the collapse of central authority in the Soviet Union through the lens of the Ukrainian coal industry. She noted the irony that, under perestroika, coal miners came to see themselves as autonomous professionals, even as coal lost its primacy as a Soviet energy source.
Paul Csillag (South Tyrolean Museum of Mining) also considered the ambivalence of status and agency in the German mining industry based in Medici territory in the early modern period. He noted how the Master of Mines at Pietrasanta had direct links to the Grand Duke Cosimo, while the voices of miners and ordinary workers remain vanishingly rare in the sources. As a close reading of sources relating to the miners’ diet of local bread revealed workers’ disputes related to visceral, bodily matters of life and death and transcended a simply economic calculus of the “cost of living.”
Other contributions stressed the need for a methodological flexibility, even eclecticism, combined with theoretical rigour in analysing labour and politics. Maya Aldereth’s paper probed the exceptionalism of the US labour movement’s relationship to the state and began by noting a productive tension between sociological traditions that construct ever more objective categories and those which emphasises struggle as the engine for the construction of historical relationships.
One commonality drawn out by several discussants was the political salience of time. Matt Myers (University of Oxford), pressed on the significance, even decisiveness, of the timing of particular moments of action and repression, for example in altering or propelling the rival trajectories of labour movements in the USA, Britain, France, Germany, and Scandinavian kingdoms. Freya Willis (University of Oxford) noted how the pace of change itself could be a factor that, in apparently “revolutionary” moments might overwhelm workers’ abilities to collate, synthesise, and act on information. Time emerged, therefore, as a key factor in analysing groups of workers’ agency in apparently different historical contexts and against radically different state formations. One such state formation that several papers pointed to as worthy of future exploration was the colonial state. Lucas Privet’ (ENS) analysed, through the life and intellectual development of James Thompson Bain, the shifting salience of race in the context of South Africa and the possibilities of cross-racial alliances of labour. This intellectual and materialist approach to labour history might also point to commonalities or contrasts with other colonial contexts and manifestations of the colonial state.
The TORCH Labour Network plan to use the conference’s papers as the basis for a special issue and further conferences are planned in Oxford for next year on the topics of ‘Workers and the Environment’ and ‘Workers and Technology.’ Meanwhile, the UK’s constitutionally unorthodox “Prime Minister in Waiting” launched his leadership bid pointedly in the People’s History Museum in Manchester, an institution which emphasises the winning of ‘democracy’ as a struggle waged by movements of workers. The relationship of Workers to Politics, it seems, has not lost its salience, even less the need for curious and critical interrogation.
