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book Review

classrooms in Maharashtra and we grasp of emotions, it frightens us about the the world in which a book of this kind
what sense children make of a narrowly regime of Nazi-like acculturation of young will meet its implied readers. And in this
defined – both in a functional and an ide- minds, into internalising a vision of sense, Benei’s work stays clear of the
ological sense – curriculum. Hers is an ­aggressive nationalism. business of education, its preoccupation
agenda to reveal the collective cognition, with shaping the world, and not just stud-
with reference to the nation, its freedom Conclusions ying it, or at least preventing it from head-
and the history and goals of that freedom. The book does evoke a question about the ing towards violent disasters. Though it is
She pursues this agenda by tracing the sociology of its own knowledge, its pro- about education, it belongs to the safer
emotional contours of socialisation which duction and reach. One cannot imagine and subtler spheres of human existence
occur when the teacher’s own identity that the book will find even a limited where the music of ethnographically ac-
and personality bring the given body of reader­ship in teacher training institutions cumulated knowledge can be heard and
knowledge home to the child, and indeed, which form the underworld of the enjoyed. The inhabitants of those spheres
closer to the child’s home world. It makes academia. Some of them have contributed have sensibilities rather different from
a sense to respond to such a book both indirectly, through the shoddy training of those of the teacher who toils amidst ele-
intellectually and emotionally. the teachers whose classrooms Benei mentary schoolchildren, elucidates badly
In the intellectual sphere, it reminds us o­bserved, these institutions are unlikely produced textbooks whose contents hide
how poor the system of education in to be its recipients or interpreters. This is the venomous fuel which accelerates
Maha­rashtra really is, in terms of the partly because of the nature of the market social disintegration. Veronique Benei is
teacher’s pedagogic training, the design- of academic knowledge in India, and partly deeply anxious about this destiny and
ing of the syllabus and the textbooks and because of the institutional structures and she has given us a remarkable means to
the quality of administration and supervi- arrangements involved in the production contemplate it.
sion. It lets us see how little a difference and processing of knowledge in once
has the economic and industrial develop- c­olonised societies. Krishna Kumar (anhsirk.kumar@gmail.com)
ment of the state made to its educational The worlds of the teacher and the is with the National Council for Education
planning. At a­nother level, in the sphere teacher educator are rather far apart from Research and Training, New Delhi.

Bread, But Roses Too “Stop violence, restore justice, and protect
our human rights” (p 3). He then compares
this demand with the one made by Man-
chester spinners and weavers of 1819 for
Xavier Dias “unity and strength, liberty and fraterni-
ty” (p 7). Bringing you back to the plight of

B
eneath the Anglican cathedral in Live Working or Die Fighting: How the
our weavers d­y ing in Varanasi (­p  25)
Liverpool lies buried a time Working Class Went Global by Paul Mason which he then parallels with the French
­capsule that may never see the (London: Harvel Secker Random House), pp 320, £ 12.99 silk-weavers’ 1830 fight “for liberty and
(paperback).
light of day. In 1904, the night before the the republic” (p 35). Then comes the ques-
king of ­England was to lay the foundation tion to the reader: Has anything changed?
stone of the church, workers buried it Has Anything Changed? “Contract labour, Japanese manager,
there. In it they placed “press-clippings of M­ason uses the narrative as a format and baton charges, special economic areas”
news­papers and a message written by a analogy as a mode of inspiration. Taking that the Honda workers in Gurgaon, Delhi
self-taught worker”. stories of present-day workers and juxta- revolted against in 2005 was a similar con-
In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul posing them with anecdotes in history, dition under which the workers in C­hina
Mason writes, “It talked of wage slave he has produced a remarkable work of lived in 1919, and revolted against. “Op-
­labour; mocked the hypocrisy of the popular working class history. The social pose Japanese beating people” read a ban-
Church, who while dedicating the h­istory and biographies that emerge ner in February 1925 of the cotton mill
­Cathedral to the worship of an unem- are inspiring. workers in Shanghai (p 187).
ployed carpenter, exploits workers His first-hand accounts of a visit to The 299 pages of the book take you to
­building it”. The time capsule stressed Shenzhen China in 2005 describe the and fro in time, contextualising how “the
that the message was written, “on trust conditions of migrant workers. “Twelve very existence of a class-struggle, as the
produced p­aper with trust produced years in jail is the standard punishment central threat to social order was an as-
ink to tell ye all, how we today are at for trying to form a free trade union”. The tonishing new idea” (p 40). A period
the mercy of trusts” (p ix). Mason De Coro plant there has reduced wages by where workers responded to their new
writes that the power of trusts then 20%. Its Italian managers humiliate situations by
can be ­compared with t­oday’s global and victimise the 10-man delegation. self-learning, mobilising, organising, raised
corporations. Workers respond with a strike demanding their political consciousness, giving to us

Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   january 2, 2010  vol xlv no 1 27


book Review
some of the ­r ichest forms of social relations, 16-year girl child worker, Gurley Flynn, results. The “dance halls, bars, circuses
demo­cracy, trade unions, strikes, commu- “the socialist leaders were ...(Professionals) were transformed into a network of politi-
nity organisation, militia, workers newspa-
and we wanted something more militant... cal discussion clubs, with thousands in
pers, organisational structures with rotating
leadership, etc. so we flocked to the Wobblies” (p 134). a­ttendance” (p 61). All this later led to an
event entitled “work for women” where “a
An era way back (1830) that saw “a Damage to Women’s Rights vote taken went against the Inter­national”.
black African silk dyer, Etienne Stanislas” Moderation was not the only issue that Mason calls it “the story of how la canaille
fight along the Paris weavers (p 38), and a d­ivided the intellectuals and the workers. became communist”.
Syrian boy getting killed as he fought When trade unions became instruments Amidst all this volatility, there was “a
along with the white majority in the of power, women’s rights suffered collat- small group of socialists living in a com-
­United States (US) (p 144). eral damage. In September 1864, immedi- mune on the edge of Paris and practising
ately after its formation, the Working free love” they were the Paris Commune,
Establishment of Wobblies Men’s International Association ran into a the most talked about story in the history
We then hear about the Herculean tasks “fractious internal conflict”. On the one of revolution. Dressed in habits that make
workers of the present US went through to side, was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a die- them look like clowns, they structured
establish the knights of labour, starting as hard rival of Karl Marx, who said, “that themselves as an alternative church, until
early as in 1905. How the American women should not be allowed to work in they “discovered the workers”. From
­Federation of L­abour (AFL), by barring the factories” (p 56). The Campaign for where one of its “fathers” Enfantin was
unskilled workers (the periphery),­ W­omen’s Rights took to other ways to then compelled to declare, “for us theo-
“de facto barred black people, women and break this ban. Through adult literacy retical politics are now finished. The life of
millions of immigrants” (p 133). The classes, health work in the slums of Paris, practical politics begins” (p 41).
­miners’ union then responds to this dis- poetry, lectures, theatre, and above all, a
crimination by forming a wider organisa- sub-culture of pubs, dancing bars, casual Concessional Bargaining
tion, the Industrial Workers of the World sex, etc, women fought back. In their infancy and at the very onset of
or the “Wobblies”. It was not that simple, Buried in this history are the writings of capitalism, we see the proletariat/worker,
however. The supe­riority complex of white Louise Michell, a remarkable woman from challenging the logic of capital. Their de-
immigrants was not easy to break. When Paris, who feeling absolutely disgusted by mand for “democratic rights proceeded
Simon Legree, a Wobbly union activist, the transformation of comrades to aristo- the basic issue of wages” (what we today
spoke of them performing slave labour, crats, wrote “power monopolised is evil” call concessional bargaining). Through
they rebuked and resented it, as it made (p  xiii). But the work of these women this dynamics they were able to bring
them into Uncle Toms (p 143). Yet, at a amidst the canaille, the most wretched of about a transformative politics. But then
time when that country was being shaped the workforce of Paris slums, brought comes one of the strongest statements in
by the mafia, it was “the Wobblies who
built up the union way of life” (p 135).
Conflicts between the intellectuals and
workers run right through these histories.
With the former attempting to impose
“moderation” on unionised workers. W­illiam
Sylvis, when setting up the N­ational
­Labour Union in the US, wrote in 1866
that strikes “were productive of great
­injury to the labouring classes” (p 55). In
A­rgentina, around the same time, differ-
ences of perception between the party-
line and the workers were also visible. In
the words of Eduardo Gilimon “a preacher
of the non-existence of god” (p 109) who
in 1907 wrote, “those who reduced the so-
cial question to the problem of poverty –
thinking that only hunger can drive
people to acts of resistance” were taken by
surprise when Argentina was rocked by a
number of strikes paralysing the country
(p 129). Some of these conflicts between
the socialist leaders and the proletariat
come to us through writings like that of a
28 january 2, 2010  vol xlv no 1  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
book Review

the book “a culture that took 200 years to introduction “Our today’s movements are a slogan “We Want Bread and Roses Too”.
build, was torn apart in twenty” (p xi) – a emerging unconscious of the stories of the The book offers us this rethink. Not to see
serious indictment that needs to be taken past and patheti­cally some of their oldest workers’ rights and organisations as ex-
seriously. If you try to understand these legends tell of a day in Seattle in clusive from social issues and social move-
stories from a trade union or labour per- November 1999”. ments. I am very sure that Louise Michell,
spective, the above statement of Mason is The collapse of that particular form of without even knowing an Indian language,
not only true, but upsetting. But if you try trade unionism does not signal the de- would hit the ground running, if today she
to understand it as a social history of so- struction of the working class movement could enter Gurgaon or Tirupattur.
cial movements, it is illuminating. or the surrender of the toiling people. For What I, however, failed to understand
Considering the depressing times we this reason I see the book as a history of was the selection of the book’s title. In my
are in, as far as political thought and transformative social movements rather opinion, it does not fully represent the
organi­sation go, one may be quick to as- than a labour history. Mason is aware of ­significant history the book speaks of.
sume that nothing has changed. Capita­ this when he writes “the social revolution ­Irrespective of its specific relevance as a
lism has improved the conditions of life in did happen, but it happened in people’s slogan of the Lyon silk workers’ movement
all those countries where the history, lives and from the bottom up” (p 70). in 1830 (p 37), politically it reduces the im-
which this book talks of, unfolded. But the In India, for far too long social move- portant historical correlation of working
cost was borne by the very countries ments, in particular those considered at and fighting to an either/or option.
where this history has yet to unfold and in the periphery, were either ignored or seen Mason with his roots in the coal mines
which Mason sees the hope for tomo­rrow’s as auxiliaries to the labour movement. of Britain witnessed the good as well as
labour emancipation. On the other hand, Louise Michel puts it well “everyone should the end-days of the National Union of
the character of capitalism has changed take part in the banquet of life” (p 60). In M­iners that Margret Thatcher destroyed
denying the democratic rights of the work- 1912, in Massachusetts, 40,000 mill work- in 1984, 25 years ago.
ers to justice. More so, by marketing a con- ers went on strike. The AFL declared the
sumer culture, it has also denied our peo- dispute unjustified. The employers turned
Xavier Dias (reachxdias@gmail.com) worked
ple access to the sour­ces of knowledge, in to Harvard University, the home of the
with the unorganised contract workers in
particular the knowledge of those histo- ­local militia, who let loose crushing vio- the mines of Jharkhand and is currently,
ries. While the book is not meant to be a lence against the strikers. The same Gurley the spokesperson of Jharkhand Mines Area
political thesis, its style of juxtaposing his- Flynn tells us that the women dreamed up Coordination Committee.
tories, without this analysis could be mis-
construed. For Mason does not walk on
this line, he makes you do it. I compliment
him for this non-intrusive style. Staying
clear of polemics, he lets the actors of
those histories speak, gently enabling you
CD-ROM 2006
to draw your own conclusions. The digital version of Economic and Political Weekly is now available for 2006 on a single disk.

Absence of Black Contributions This electronic edition contains the complete content of all the issues published in 2006. The CD-ROM
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too revolted and contested their oppres-
sors should be included. I think that it is Circulation Manager,
the absence of this fusion in Left thinking Economic and Political Weekly
that has paralysed labour activism and 320, 321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel,
Mumbai 400 013, India
transformative politics. A wake-up call
that Mason poignantly brings out in the
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   january 2, 2010  vol xlv no 1 29

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