One-dollar books and why reading history matters

S.W.Welch, my favorite neighborhood bookstore, had tables and tables of $1 books during our recent street festival. I bought these:

• Jasmine
• The Middleman and other Stories
• Wife
• The Oxford book of Irish short stories (Ha! See that?! They’re selling it for $55!)
• Chechnya: A small victorious war
• Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe 1648–1789

Why? I’ve always meant to read some Bharati Mukherjee, the Irish are cool and short stories are my favorite, 1650 is about the time my ancestors decided, all at once and en masse it seems, to get the hell out of Europe, and I’m especially interested in reading history these days. So I’m loving Orlando Figues’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. This summer, I read it to Liam at night before bed. How do I get my teenager to listen, you ask? Trust me: plenty of blood and guts in here to keep any 13-year-old happy.

Then, one day, while I’m reading this…

…I see these bits:

As students of Karl Marx and of history, China’s party leaders will know that labour movements can begin with economic grievances and end in political revolt. By concentrating people in one place, Marx argued, factories turn a crowd of strangers into a “class”: conscious of its interests, united with each other and against the boss. But workers in China’s coastal factories have hitherto shown little class-consciousness. They migrated from all over the country, jumped from one plant to another and retreated to their villages when times were bad.

Their new assertiveness may reflect a labour law introduced in January 2008, which gave workers more contractual rights. The strikers at Honda were better educated than the average rural migrant and also trained together, which may have given them the social glue to organise their protest. The malcontents may also represent a generational shift among migrant workers. According to John Knight and Ramani Gunatilaka of Oxford University, they no longer compare their lot with the rural folk they left behind, but aspire to urban standards of living. (The rising power of the Chinese worker, The Economist, July 29, 2010)

…as well as this:

And although their wages are increasing, their aspirations are rising even faster. They seem less willing to “eat bitterness”, as the Chinese put it, without complaint….In truth, Chinese workers were never as docile as the popular caricature suggested. But the recent strikes have been unusual in their frequency (Guangdong province on China’s south coast suffered at least 36 strikes in the space of 48 days), their longevity and their targets: foreign multinationals. (The next China, The Economist, July 29, 2010)

Wow. I’ve read this before — different country, different century. But so familiar. See for yourself. The following bits are from A People’s Tragedy, from the section where Figues is describing the rapidly shifting personal and class identity and aspirations of peasants going to work in urban factories in during the industrial boom in the 1890s.

The desire for social betterment was very often synonymous with the desire to leave the village and find a job outside agriculture. Becoming a clerk or a shop assistant was seen by the younger peasants as a move up in the world. (p.109)

[T]he experience of the city transformed the way most peasants thought — of the world, of themselves, and of the village they left behind. (p.110)

Most of them supplemented their factory incomes by holding on to their land allotment in the commune and returning to their village in the summer to help their families with the harvest. … In this way they were able to keep one foot in the village, whilst their economic position in the city was still insecure. (p.110)

As they developed their own sense of self-worth, these workers demanded more respectful treatment by their employers. (p.114)

[S]trikes became the principal form of industrial protest and they required the sort of disciplined organization that only the most urbanized workers, with their higher levels of sills and literacy, could provide. (p.115)

Self-improvement was a natural enough aspiration among skilled workers, like Kanatchikov, who were anxious to rise above their peasant origins and attain the status in society which their growing sense of dignity made them feel they deserved. (p.116)

You see? Pretty cool, eh? I showed it to Liam. He, sadly, was somewhat teenagerish and blasé about the whole thing. Meanwhile I was going on about it like a wierdo.

Ughghghhgh. So many books and so little time.