JSTOR Journey: Episode 1: The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History
For this post, I chose to review the article the "The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History" from the journal International Labor and Working-Class History. I had previously found the papers in this journal to be high-quality, and unsurprisingly, I found this paper to be a well-written exploration of important questions. Labor history is essentially the history of the working class, and this paper elucidates a methodology in which that history could be understood globally. One argument in the paper I found interesting related to the definition of work, given that the wage-earning relationship in a capitalist society is a fairly recent development. In order to expand on that definition, the paper suggests defining work as any relationship within which the labor of a class is exploited for the uses of another entity. This analysis covers both coerced and 'uncoerced' forms of labor, which I think is useful. Slavery and feudalism are often thought of as arrangements in which an owner or lord claims a right to labor without the permission of the laborer, but in capitalist societies, many are forced by material or situational factors to work in a certain job. In fact, even the self-employed could be considered 'coerced' in the sense that they are dependent on specific clients. However, the paper also suggested expanding the definition of work to relations in which the worker owns the means of production. I personally think this is an oversight, as in less industrialized countries where yeomen can engage in subsistence farming, they are able to freely sell their surplus produce to the market. The paper also questions why workers have not consistently taken labor actions on an international scale even though workers in developed countries produce commodities using the materials created by workers in developing countries. I think that political power and national hegemony is an incredibly significant part of that. For example, during the 'revolutionary wave' of 1917, more radical labor protests in Germany, Italy, and Spain were crushed either by the peasantry or the supporters of reformist parties. Workers also may have focused on national as opposed to internationalist causes because the exploitation of those in developing countries through more coercive labor arrangements enabled wage earners in Western nations to have higher living standards. Overall, I think this article was incredibly rich, and I will likely take another blog post to evaluate/respond to its propositions before sending my feedback to the authors.
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