Live Working or Die Fighting By Paul Mason

Just when one thought the end of history had arrived and the working classes of the planet's North had been de-industrialised out of existence, another proletariat pops up. Across the South, the whirlwind of hyper-industrialisation has thrown up a working-class whose demography and miseries dwarf their predecessors. Assembled in a few turbulent decades, around a billion men, women and children toil in the factories and workshops of the South; another billion are warehoused in the burgeoning slums of new mega-cities. Our futures are linked to their fate by complex chains of economic and ecological interdependency.

While the working-class organisations of the first industrial revolution had to contend with nationalist states and police forces, the new working classes must tackle global capital, transnational corporations, international organisations, and all in the face of a consumer culture whose invidious individualism is a solvent of new bonds of solidarity.

Paul Mason's argues that the left in the North has little to offer them. Communism is over, the social-democratic parties have sold their soul to neo-liberalism and the rump of the union movement is managing decline. But it wasn't always so. What the labour movements of the North do have is a long history of extraordinary struggles, inventiveness, courage and honour. Mason, a Newsnight correspondent, offers a lively and impassioned retelling of these stories. It is an illuminating pleasure to be reacquainted with them.

Mason proceeds by juxtaposition. The cruel intensity of today's Shenzhen in China precedes an account of the struggle for rights in the Manchester cotton mills of Georgian England. The plight of Indian textile workers is set against the tale of the Lyon silk weavers and their struggle for control of their livelihoods in the early 1830s. The rise and fall of the first major American union movement, the Knights of Labour, and the great wave of unskilled union organisation before the First World War are recounted with some panache, and paralleled by the plight of Iraqi trade unionists and the migratory flotsam that clean Canary Wharf.

Mason recoils from drawing lessons from his parallels, but the same power logic of numbers is still in force. Don't get mad, get organised. Perhaps the best parts of this book cover the alternative social worlds created by the Bund, the mass party of Jewish Poland, and the wave of factory sit-ins and experiments in workers' control that rocked Italy, France and the US in the interwar era. But the social movements of the South, as Mason makes clear, are already there in the parallel urban universe of Bolivian indigenous peoples and the co-op factories of Argentina.

It is hard to see what the political legacy of these stories could be. At their best the labour movements of the North offer a residue of ideas and ultimately a kind of success - the more equitable welfare capitalism that brought about their dissolution. I take it the absence of Scandinavian social democrats from Mason's book is on the grounds of narrative tedium rather than political efficacy. However, it is unlikely that the new workers of the South will be able to repeat the trick. Just as the pie is getting big enough for a larger slice, ecological catastrophe will lace it with toxins and disasters. Solving this conundrum will need rather more than heroic tales, but Paul Mason has given us a timely resource to sustain us on the journey.

David Goldblatt's 'The Ball is Round' is published by Viking