Ordinary Working People Research Articles

Ideologies as conceptual networks: towards a data-intensive approach

ABSTRACT This article introduces a data-intensive approach to visualizing political ideologies as text networks. The methodology combines network theory with collocation analysis from corpus linguistics. Its similarities and differences to Michael Freeden’s morphological approach are highlighted. The prospects are examined by focusing on the case study of Finnish socialism in the early 20th century. Primary sources consist of printed labor newspapers, handwritten newspapers produced by ordinary working people, and parliamentary speeches. The empirical part demonstrates that the network approach is useful for (1) locating key political words based on centrality in the network, (2) identifying clusters of words related to each other more strongly than to the rest of the network, and (3) seeing the structure of an ideological network. The main contribution of the article is methodological for the approach can be applied to other machine-readable sources, both at small and large scales, to automatically extract information on the linguistic patterns characteristic of a political ideology under investigation.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Secularization, Modernity, and Belief Shaping: Night School and Livelihood Education at the Chinese YMCA in the Early Twentieth Century

In the early 20th century, influenced by evangelicals in the United States, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) launched the “Four Movements” in response to the “Four Maladies” of Chinese society. Among the four movements, “livelihood education” is used to help raise productivity and save people from poverty. Research on the YMCA in modern China rarely focuses on livelihood education, and even when it does, it does not focus on educated adult civilians or explore how the YMCA has changed the course of their lives. Based on fieldwork and detailed analysis of historical documents, this paper traces the formation of three night schools that have adopted various forms of “Christianized” and “secularization” practices and sheds light on the lives of two typical students whose experiences in YMCA night school were still less known. This study will demonstrate and analyze the role of livelihood education in introducing Western civilization and Christian ideas to China’s labor class. YMCA night schools not only helped ordinary Chinese working people acquire basic livelihood skills on a secular level, which enables them to enter a higher class in society and exert influence, but also reshaped their beliefs.

‘At 20p – It Can’t be Bad!’

Live Theatre Newcastle was established as a working-class collective in 1973 in order to make theatre about ‘life as ordinary working people live it’. In this essay, I argue that Live Theatre self-consciously developed an amateur aesthetic in its early years (1973–8) by using self-deprecating jokes and highlighting the low cost and low production values of its own work. The cultivation of this amateur aesthetic was useful to the company because it allowed for a radical reimagining of the performer–audience relationship that was both politically purposeful as a form of participatory democracy and also alert to issues of class. The essay draws upon materials from the Live Theatre Archive, which was accessioned to Newcastle University in 2017, and supplements these with ethnographic and conversation-based research with early company members. I argue that the amateur aesthetic developed by Live Theatre during these years was a socio-political strategy designed to engage audiences actively and ideologically, but also with sensitivity and respect.

History Below Deck: An Interview with Marcus Rediker

History Below Deck:An Interview with Marcus Rediker Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) and Marcus Rediker The factory, whether in the Midlands of England making cloth or the Midwest of the U.S. making steel, seems the quintessential institution of the rise of capitalism, and those toiling in it the archetypical worker. Marcus Rediker calls attention to a less visible realm of labor, the sea, telling about those who worked on ships, particularly sailors and pirates, during the age of sail on the Atlantic. Rediker first staked out this history in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (1987), and expanded it in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, co-authored with Peter Linebaugh (2000). Alongside those, he also collaborated on Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 1 (1990), which shifted the focus from founding fathers in conventional histories to the movements of working people who shaped history. Rediker's investigation of the age of sail led to his pathbreaking account of the vehicle that made slavery possible, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), which describes the various people who staffed, invested in, and were human cargo on those seagoing "factories of capitalism," as he puts it. Complementing that book, in The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2012), he unpacks one of the few successful resistances of those enslaved. Throughout, Rediker has foregrounded such moments of resistance. His Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (2004) and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (2014) focus especially on pirates, and The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017), shines light on an unlikely eighteenth-century pacifist hero. In addition, Rediker has co-edited two books on the Atlantic during the age of sail, and written a film, Ghosts Of Amistad: In The Footsteps Of The Rebels, with Tony Buba (2014). [End Page 547] Born in 1951, Rediker attended Vanderbilt University and Virginia Commonwealth University (BA, 1976), doing his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1982). He has taught at Georgetown and the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History. This interview, conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, took place in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 6 and 12, 2019. Jeffrey J. Williams: How would you encapsulate the kind of history that you do? Marcus Rediker: I do "history from below." It focuses on the people who have been left out of the narratives of the past, especially those based on the nation-state. It's not just a matter of having sympathy for their lives but about how ordinary working people have made history and how their collective actions have frequently shaped history. A lot of the history I write has been hidden. I try to recapture lost voices and get close to the experience of unknown, frequently anonymous people. The great difficulty of doing this kind of history is that the people I study didn't usually create any documents of their own, so this work requires reading many different kinds of documents that were usually produced by the ruling classes and their allies, and reading them against the grain. Sometimes you're reading the archive of repression, but I'm especially interested in the active agency of unknown people in shaping both the archive and history. JJW: Your first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, gives an account of sailors and sets out your project. It's a history of the working class, but it's not about a factory as we usually think of them. One of your points is that we conceive of the sea as an empty space, but the sea was the prime conduit of capitalism as it developed in that era, and sailors were its chief workers. How were you drawn to study sailors instead of other workers? MR: Actually, when I went to graduate school in 1976, I intended to be a...

Anti-politics and Global Climate Inaction: The Case of the Australian Carbon Tax

Action on climate change has enjoyed popular support in most Western countries. Despite this, successive governments have struggled to implement policy to tackle this issue. Using the case of opposition to the Clean Energy Act, passed in Australia to establish an emissions trading scheme, this paper argues that a growing and broad sentiment of distrust in political elites, described as ‘anti-politics’, can explain some of this contradiction. Particular forms of climate policy, in particular emissions trading schemes, have been successfully framed as policies that appeal to the interests of a new class of liberal elites while hurting ordinary working people. This frame was used successfully in Australia by conservative forces to oppose the Clean Energy Act. While used cynically by political leaders in this case, the paper argues that anti-political sentiment reflects genuine concerns about the detachment between the state and voting population. This detachment is reflected in neoliberal climate policies. Through briefly examining the cases of the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Gilets Jaunes protest movement, the paper argues that while formulating climate policy we must consider anti-political sentiment, developing responses to the climate crisis from a bottom-up rather than top-down approach.

Voices of Scottish Librarians: The Evolution of a Profession and Its Response to Changing Times

Voices of Scottish Librarians: The Evolution of a Profession and Its Response to Changing Times

Attenuation of human herpesvirus 6B reactivation by aging.

There has been little research on human herpesvirus 6B (HHV-6B) in healthy adults and prevalences in different age groups have been unclear. Therefore, the major objective of this study was to evaluate seroprevalence to HHV-6 antibodies in ordinary working people and examine the effect of aging on seroprevalence. Also, as HHV-6B is reactivated in saliva, another objective was to investigate an association between age and HHV-6B reactivation based on measured salivary HHV-6 DNA levels. Our subjects were 77 ordinary office workers who underwent a health checkup. In this population, we measured anti-HHV-6 antibody titers using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and salivary HHV-6 DNA levels. In addition to examining an association with age, we examined associations with body mass index, smoking habit, and alcohol consumption as confounding factors. There was a significant decrease in the seropositivity of HHV-6 antibodies in subjects of 50 years and older, and age was significantly negatively correlated with anti-HHV-6 antibody titers. Age and salivary HHV-6 DNA levels were also significantly negatively correlated but there were no significant correlations with other factors. Our results suggest that HHV-6B reactivation is attenuated by aging. Thus, HHV-6 antibodies steadily decrease in the body with aging.

Julia Reichert and the Work of Telling Working-Class Stories

Julia Reichert's 50 year career as a documentarian crests at a moment of triumph with American Factory, an Oscar-short-listed film. As a feminist, socialist filmmaker, she has consistently focused on the lives of ordinary working people in the U.S. She has also started and supported major institutions in documentary film. Yet her career has been neglected in the scholarly community.

Tanti non emo, Sexte, Piper: Pepper Prices, Roman Consumer Culture, and the Bulk of Indo-Roman Trade

AbstractIn contrast to other Indian exports, black pepper was widely available throughout the Roman World, and affordable for ordinary working people. The relatively low price of black pepper indicates that Indo-Roman trade goods was not just pitched at the very wealthy, but benefited a much broader segment of the population. This throws new light on the scale and cultural impact of Indo-Roman trade, which appears to have exploited Rome’s burgeoning non-elite “consumer culture” in the early imperial period. The scale and cultural impact of Indo-Roman pepper and other trade is evidenced by a wide variety of Western sources and ancient Indian texts.

What Was the Industrial Revolution?

At some point in the first half of the 19th century per capita GDP in the United Kingdom and the United States began to grow at something like one to two percent per year and have continued to do so up to the present. Now incomes in many economies routinely grow at 2 percent per year and some grow at much higher “catch-up” rates. These events surely represent a historical watershed, separating a traditional world in which incomes of ordinary working people remained low and fairly stable over the centuries from a modern world where incomes increase for every new generation. This paper uses Gary Becker’s theory of a “quantity/quality trade-off,” consistent both with Malthusian population dynamics (quantity) and with demographic transition (quality), to identify a limited set of forces that were central to this revolution.

Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship by Robert Bussel

Reviewed by: Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship by Robert Bussel Max Krochmal Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship. By Robert Bussel. The Working Class in American History. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 244. Paper, $32.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08104-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03949-2.) In Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship, Robert Bussel uses a joint biography of two union leaders to explore the role of organized labor in the larger communities that surround them. The two protagonists, one white, one black, both hailed from working-class families in coal country, and both wound their ways through the non-communist Left of the 1930s and 1940s before landing together in Teamsters Local 688 in St. Louis. Bussel follows the two organizers as they dug in deep in their adopted local union and city, the white Harold Gibbons as the organization’s head and the black Ernest Calloway as his right-hand man. Together, the two nonsectarian socialists developed the concept of “total person unionism,” which held that gaining power at the workplace through collective bargaining was not sufficient to protect the interests of ordinary working people (p. 5). Gibbons and Calloway instead sought to engage workers when they were away from the factories, warehouses, retailers, and taxi and transportation firms that employed them. Doing so would allow the Teamsters to build power and bargain collectively in the community writ large, not just in electoral politics but also in a broad [End Page 227] range of local decision-making arenas. In the process, the union would protect its members and the larger working class and, more important, transform ordinary workers trained in deference to managerial and political elites into full-fledged citizens. The duo proved remarkably successful in reaching this broad, democratic vision. In 1957, Bussel contends, the union led the charge in defeating a proposed amendment to the city charter that would have shielded downtown developers and their political allies from the messiness of participatory, ward-based politics. The Teamsters achieved victory in partnership with the local branch of the NAACP, of which Calloway was also a frequent officer. Indeed, fighting racism represented an integral part of Gibbons’s vision of total person unionism. As union chief, Gibbons pushed white rank-and-file members to understand the importance of creating a democracy that included all people. Throughout the 1960s this egalitarian stance translated into a series of largely successful local campaigns. Yet Bussel cautions that the duo’s success in modeling total person unionism ultimately fell short. Technological innovation undermined Teamster jobs, while white flight undermined their vision of community organizing. More important, Gibbons became embroiled in the national Teamsters union’s corruption scandals and then faced a counterinsurgency among members in Local 688 who claimed that his desire to build community and electoral power came at the expense of concerns on the shop floor. Gibbons’s disavowal of the Vietnam War only added fuel to the fire, ending in his removal from the union’s presidency. Meanwhile, Calloway increasingly lost traction in the city’s civil rights movement after a series of ideological, tactical, and generational conflicts with dissident members of the NAACP and of the Congress of Racial Equality. Bussel connects the two activists’ demise by arguing that both suffered when they strayed too far from the democratic principles that had animated their earlier organizing efforts. They lost touch with their respective members, dooming their more innovative campaigns and eventually their own leadership careers. Overall the book is a captivating must-read for historians of postwar labor and civil rights movements as well as for present-day union officials and community organizers. My only quibble is that I would have liked more sustained engagement with the recent, well-regarded books on urban and civil rights history in St. Louis by historians Colin Gordon and Clarence Lang, both of which focus closely on labor, the working class, race, and politics in the very same communities. While Bussel ably recovers Gibbons and Calloway from obscurity...

Migration, development and security within racialised global capitalism: refusing the balance game

Within international labour migration, received wisdom holds that the migration-development and migration-security couplings co-exist in discord. The migration-development-security relationship is perceived to swing like a pendulum. In this article I reject the simple pendulum formulation which suggests security stands at odds with development. I examine the ways in which migration controls occur through and reproduce racialised global capitalism. Capitalist development and security work together to undermine the resistance struggles of those designated migrant labour. Students of labour migration must refuse the game of balance and instead entrench our analytical efforts within the creative self-activities of ordinary working people.

Historical Note: The History of Taxation is Written in Letters of Blood and Fire

Tax, war, democracy and rebellion intertwine down the ages. In this paper I introduce readers to the reasons why tax history is important and the concepts underpinning later articles. The four tax history articles that will be published in total over the next four issues (from September 2016 to June 2017) will look at history from the Magna Carta to Australia today through the prism of tax. A key theme is the role ordinary working people (peasants, artisans, workers for example) play in protests against oppressive taxes and how that anger can spark rebellions and revolutions. These rebellions and revolutions often have democracy as their main demand.

The Rising Tide Economy: Lessons from the Squeezed Middle for Progressive Economic Policy

For all its rhetorical potency, the policy implications of the ‘squeezed middle’ are yet to be fully explored. This article looks at what the phenomenon means for the design and prosecution of progressive economic policy. It argues that any progressive government today needs to adopt a new first order goal of economic policy: ensuring that the material wellbeing of ordinary working people rises when the economy grows, a project referred to as ‘building a rising tide economy’. This objective would sit in addition to the traditional goals of sustained GDP growth, high employment, low inflation and poverty reduction. It would have real implications across a range of important policy areas.

Occupy Passover Seders and Easter Gatherings

Occupy Passover Seders and Easter Gatherings

HP Sauce and the Hate Literature of Pop Art: bill bissett in the House of Commons

HP Sauce and the Hate Literature of Pop Art: bill bissett in the House of Commons Ryan J. Cox (bio) The minister, the Government and its vehicle, the Canada Council, are weak and full of fear—fearful of not appearing avant garde, fearful of being labeled culturally illiterate. Robert Wenman, MP Fraser Valley West (PC), 13 December 1977 they got a sause calld houses uv parliament for meat at th tabul hp sause it sure tastes shitty too bill bissett“in nova scotia th peopul call shit houses housus uv parliament” Taken at face value, the bissett affair of 1977–78 seems rather mundane, hardly worth noticing. A group of mostly opposition MPS, headed by Bob Wenman, the Tory member for Fraser Valley West, attempted to take the government to task for, in their eyes, the fiscal irresponsibility of the Canada Council for the Arts, a semi-autonomous Crown corporation. This irresponsibility was evident in the fact that Canada Council was funding “what anyone in [parliament] would term as offensive and demeaning pornography” (Canada 1845) and, as Hugh Anderson, the Parliamentary [End Page 147] Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries, put it, “a degradation to the printed word in Canada” (Canada 4084). It had the potential for great political theatre, linking as it did excessive government spending and morality—Jake Epp, another Tory MP, falsely alleged that certain unnamed publishers, likely alluding to bill bissett and his blew ointment press, had received “in excess of $100000 to publish poetry which … the average Canadian would call pornographic”1 (Canada 4989)—but the scandal never materialized and the stated goal of Wenman and company, the review of the Canada Council’s mandate, was never accomplished. The bissett affair has all the hallmarks of a by rote political scandal. There is little new in the way it attempts to tear strips off the Trudeau government’s hide and gain votes, primarily in conservative areas of the country. The moral panic angle—the poetry of bill bissett at the centre of the scandal is described as “evil,” and Wenman suggested that the government had an “obligation to fight” this evil lest it negatively affect the Dominion (Canada 1845)—had been played numerous times before. In the late 1940s and 1950s, E. Davie Fulton—a Conservative MP for Kamloops—made his political bones by joining Dr. Fredric Wertham’s campaign to control the publishing of crime and horror comics on the grounds that they were a threat to the youth of the nation and lead to juvenile delinquency (Bell 94–98, Palmer 187). Fulton went on, partially in thanks to this crusading, to the position of Minister of Justice under Diefenbaker and eventually ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. Interestingly, the bissett affair wasn’t even the first time in the 1970s that a poet would become a lightning rod in the House of Commons. When bpNichol won his Governor General’s Award in 1970, it provided MPS with an occasion to remark on what they perceived as government subsidizing of Marxism, pornography, and obscenity, which, as Caroline Bayard establishes, is at its core a thinly veiled attack on the counterculture by the establishment (112–13, 304). The other angle, focusing on government arts spending as misappropriation and waste, is also a common trope in Canadian politics. Wenman’s charge that not even “one half of one percent of the Canadian people would say [bissett’s work] is acceptable” and “Common sense judgment says that taxpayers’ dollars not be used to support such work” (Trueman), while allowing him to neatly sidestep the issue of censorship echoes the comments [End Page 148] of Prime Minister Stephen Harper about cuts to the arts in the run-up to the 2008 federal election. There Harper stated that “when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up—I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people” (Benzie, Campion-Smith, and Whittington). Harper’s “ordinary working people...

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign: Australia's ‘most sophisticated political campaign’1

The Australian labor movement faced an unprecedented challenge to trade union and workers’ rights when the conservative coalition government introduced the Work Choices legislation in 2005. The unions’ Your Rights at Work campaign became the most significant political campaign mounted by a non-party political group in Australian history for its blend of television advertising, mobilizing and grassroots organizing, web-based campaigning and televised national days of protest. The unions’ strong campaign influenced public opinion powerfully against the laws, and in response the government mounted a fierce attack on the legitimacy of unions as ‘bullies’ and unrepresentative of ordinary working people. The contest had high stakes for the future of unions in Australia and for the 2007 federal election. This article examines the unions’ campaign strategies, with a particular focus on their use of information communication technologies. It argues that the significance of the campaign was its hybrid nature, combining innovative media-based campaigning with traditional organizing through communities. The campaign was a major influence over people's votes and the Australian Labor Party's victory in the November election.