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Suggestions and Debates: Workers of the World?

Contents

Suggestions and Debates

  • Workers of the World? A British Liberal-Pluralist Critique of Marcel van der Linden’s Global Labour History*

  • Part of:
  • Peter Ackers
  • Journal:
    International Review of Social History / Volume 62 / Issue 2 / 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 August 2017, pp. 253-269
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  • Marcel van der Linden has championed Global Labour History (GLH) as a solution to the decline of Labour History as an academic field. His 2008 Workers of the World (and other writing) strives to transcend methodological nationalism and provides a new global framework to study labour through the ages. This British liberal-pluralist critique argues that Van der Linden’s version of GLH is essentially a re-packaging of Marxism that narrows the conceptual foundations of the field and overlooks both the full political crisis of state-socialism and its limited historical appeal to working people. The article concludes by defending a national approach centred on civil society institutions, as represented in the 2016 collection edited by P. Ackers and A.J. Reid, Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century.