The Workers Memorial
It is International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD) on 28th April every year. And every year, more people are killed at work than in wars. I'd encourage people to investigate the event further.
International Workers Memorial Day is an important event that commemorates those who died as a result of doing their job, either by accident or debilitating illness. The event promotes safety at work and seeks to properly value labour in present and future times. We need to raise the profile of this day. We are here because somebody somewhere turned up, put a shift in, and because they still do.
I am honoured to be associated with The Workers' Memorial in my home town of St Helens, and support it elsewhere. This is a universal struggle manifested in the concrete particulars of persons and places. I join with the tribute it pays to working men and women past and present.
I am grateful to John Riley, one of the organisers and trustees of the St Helens Workers’ Memorial, for sharing some thoughts of mine from April 2019 on the St Helens Workers’ Memorial site, when the WM statue was erected in Vera Page Park, St Helens, and for providing links to my further thoughts on this on the WM site.
Anyone interested can follow those links up on this page.
I would encourage them to explore the rest of the site to see what The Workers’ Memorial is all about, and investigate the International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD) further. It is important work.
See also my post on The Workers' Memorial:
I shall simply quote the words of John Riley, which he spoke at the unveiling of the WM statue back in 2019:
Social support can reduce the effect of such a loss and having a public memorial shows such support to affected families.
This monument is about inclusion, it’s to the forgotten, the unsung, those people who have lost their lives because of their job. Those by their toil have made our lives better.
This is a public memorial, this is your memorial. The statue forms part of an international network.
It demonstrates a forward looking community that takes pride in its industrial heritage and looking positively to the future.
The memorial will make future generations aware of our proud and industrial heritage and the dangers in the workplace and the need for safety.
We will provide education and help us learn from our mistakes and not to repeat them.
We are where we are today because of yesterday.
The Workers’ Memorial is about those men and women in the past – and present – whose cries and pleas are often stifled and whose voices often go unheard. John Riley, the organiser behind the Workers' Memorial in St Helens, told me of the stories people told him when he was putting the memorial together and preparing to unveil the statue, stories of work-related deaths and injuries that are seldom told and seldom heard. He further told me that I put into words the things he wanted to say but couldn’t. If people consider the things I say to be putting their thoughts in coherent, cogent form, then I am honoured. I don't speak from the outside, here, mind. I don't speak as an outsider here, however, as an ‘academic’ observing the world of work ‘from the outside’ (to use that horrible term of Lenin’s, favoured by vanguards throughout history). I come from a family of builders, and had a grandfather who was a coalminer. I lost both grandfathers in their early sixties due to lung conditions earned in their years of working. I worked on and off with my father on building sites between 1983 and 1999, and then spent fifteen years to 2021 in distribution, working on foot, door-to-door carrying heavy bags and pulling a trolley in all weathers.
I had some of the happiest times of my life working with my dad on the building sites. He loved his job and was very good at it. I saw the real creative value that there is in labour. Many of the places my dad helped to build are still standing proud.
Building sites are dangerous places, so my dad kept a quiet eye on me, making sure I kept out of harm’s way and didn’t fall from any great heights or down into deep pits, and didn’t do any damage when it came to the trickier jobs. I can remember building horse stables in Knutsford, Cheshire. I must have looked the part, because I ended up being appointed into pole position when we were putting a roof together. As we all joined together for the final assembling, nailing, and raising, with me at the key point holding it all together, my dad shuffled over, slowly and unobserved, to whisper ‘do you know what you’re supposed to do?’ He was just checking that no great disaster was about to unfold, grace of yours truly. I said ‘yes.’ (By which I meant ‘I think so.’) It all went very well. My finest hour (another one). And I’m sure the horses were most pleased with their new home. Nothing fell down. And, despite being a day-dreamer, I was never involved in any disasters and never injured, never fell off anything or down any hole. I was quietly steered away from the wrong direction and into the right direction by my dad’s quiet guiding presence at work. I rather miss that calm, quiet, reassuring presence of someone who knew what he was doing, and wasn’t vocal in bossing and giving orders – just creating the space we could all grow into. That's the best leadership (read the Tao). It’s an age of bossing and ordering. We would be better off if those who led by example were in charge.
My dad worked hard his entire life, both in the building industry and then in retirement, where he dealt daily with the effects of a chronic lung condition and more besides, grace of breathing in all kinds working in the building trade. In all the years I lived with him to the end, I never once heard him complain. He never succumbed to the temptation to feel sorry for himself. He got on with the task in front of him, knowing the difference between a future that can be changed and a past that cannot.
It’s not been an age in which the voice, labour, and culture of the working class has been valued, respected, or appreciated. When was it ever, in a society that rests on the exploitation of labour? We are heirs to a long struggle, and class prejudice dies a slow death, even and especially on the part of those who deny the reality of class. Whenever I have attempted to give a working class view I have been lectured – by people whose social position gives them a dominant voice in contemporary culture - that ‘class’ is an outdated concept. I was once told that class is an ‘antiquated concept that belongs to an “us” and “them” world.’ I responded by saying that we live in such an ‘us and them’ world and those who deny this are complicit in its continuation.
How are those whose skills, experience, and expertise are in labour able to speak back against well-educated people teeming with qualifications?
Ask them to do without labour and see how far they get. The legitimacy of working class experience is quite easily denied, silenced, and suppressed, the working class 'despised.' But Lockdown revealed whose labour was ‘key’ and ‘essential’ to the functioning of society. Would-be universal reformers and educators were shown to be nowhere near as important as their dominant position in culture and politics would suggest.
I’d put those who disdain the working class on a cold building site first thing in a morning and tell them they are going to have to keep coming back week after week, month after month, year after year like my dad did. The legitimacy of working class experience is quite easily been denied, silenced, and suppressed.
I don't remotely make a virtue of labour in conditions of exploitation and subordination. Remembrance can have strange psychological effects upon those who remember by fetishizing the symbol to the neglect of principle, reifying and romanticizing what may well have been a shameful and sordid squandering of human potentials, lives broken and destroyed by early deaths, impaired bodies, and scarred psyches, all testaments to lives having been lived under the shadow of the perversion of the work ethic and its virtues by monetarist imperatives. If I celebrate labour, then I don't varnish it, not in the form of the involuntary breaking of bodies and minds at the various coal-faces of modern society. That breaking offering a tangible reproach to a society that continues to demand its human sacrifices to its new monetarist idols. Work of this kind can be bad for your health.
I’ve seen it and lived through it. I'm all about revaluing labour, in work, life, culture, and politics.
It is a travesty when remembrance can take precedence over a true remembering and a learning of lessons to be acted upon in the here and now, enlisting the voiceless dead in a ritual that ensures their successors come to suffer the same fate. Remember the workers dead and fight for – and, importantly, with - the workers living.
On The Workers’ Memorial site, organiser John Riley writes:
“I came across this article online, written by Peter Critchley, a St Helens born academic and philosopher. I think it reflects the values of The Workers Memorial and I reproduce part of the article.”
It does, and it should. I wrote from experience, particularly with respect to my dad, who was a builder. The article is my tribute to working men and women. The sign that something somewhere has gone badly wrong – that politics has become detached from ‘ordinary’ folk – is the cynical meme shared by many, to the effect that “socialists want everything you have except your job.” The implication is that socialism is all about free gifts and socialists are workshy grifters. There is a need to clarify terms here. And to set the record straight. It may well be that both the ‘socialists’ and the anti-socialists involved in this political war are both false friends of the workers, neither having any connection to working people, and even less respect. So-called leftists may now ‘despise’ the working class (to use the title of Paul Embery’s book), but those concerned to point out the hypocrisies here have proven themselves to be no friends of the working class in the past. They are more concerned with scoring cheap political points against their political enemies than actually valuing the men and women who turn up for work and put a shift in. I have no time for any of them. There is no socialism here. It is the capital system that is parasitic on labour and nature, helping itself to both as free gifts. The tragedy is that leftist politics has been colonised by a liberalism in a decadent phase, with liberals/progressives being parasitic on the capital system they purport to criticize. Whilst such people may indeed be hypocrites, they are decidedly NOT socialists. They give the impression of wanting to end the world of production and deindustrialize, eliminating the working class voice it clearly scorns and disdains once and for all. Such liberals/progressives don’t want your job for the very reason they don’t much want those jobs in the first place. They look down on certain jobs, scorn the idea of there being any virtue in labour, and look forward to automation as a form of industrial euthanasia. I don’t trust such people.
I am a socialist precisely because I work for the society in which labour of all kinds will be properly valued and rewarded. And my article was written as a tribute to all those working class men and women whose lives were impaired or cut short because of hard, backbreaking labour, my dad included.
There has been an assault on working class culture, politics, and people in recent decades. The working class have been abandoned by supposedly leftist politicians, academics, intellectuals, and activists. Indeed, protest groups appear to have been given a free-pass in waging a war of attrition on working people. ‘Ordinary’ people want a focus on core issues, gut concerns arising from within life's necessities, bread and butter issues, not ephemera associated with middle-class issues remote from the world of work, employment, and housing. We need to take politics back to the things that move and motivate 'ordinary' folk. Should we be able to do that, and there will be a landslide, because this social system is empty. Unfortunately, intellectuals, ideologues, and activists are absorbed in ephemera. The problem is that leftist politics has succumbed to a form of liberal reformism in a technocratic age. The result is a turbo-charged vanguardism, an elitist reformism on steroids. It is the credentialed and the certified who constitute the dominant voice in culture, politics, and society:
When the last men who have driven and cared for steam locomotives retire - it will not be long now — and when engine-drivers will be little different from tram-drivers, and sometimes quite superfluous, what will happen? What will our society be like without that large body of men who, in one way or another, had a sense of the dignity and self-respect of difficult, good, and socially useful manual work, which is also a sense of a society not governed by market-pricing and money: a society other than ours and potentially better? What will a country be like without the road to self-respect which skill with hand, eye and brain provide for men - and, one might add, women — who happen not to be good at passing examinations? (E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984, pp. 271-2).
Such a view can be dismissed as slavish. There is no virtue in work, the modern-day heirs of Diogenes say; work should be left to machines, giving us all time to develop our creative abilities at our leisure. Whilst the release of free time as a result of automation seems broadly reasonable, employing machines as energy slaves, labour is itself integral to human creativity and fulfilment, something which is not to be supplanted by machines without a certain dehumanisation ensuing.
I don't think I am guilty of a nostalgic labourism here. I am hardly romanticising the hard work that damages the health and shortens life-spans, quite the contrary. At the same time, I am keenly aware of the extent to which working class culture, especially that involving manual labour and physical skill, has been deemed inferior and subordinated to bourgeois culture. This has political consequences. We are now witnessing the bourgeois openly appropriating leftist terms - such as ‘system change’ - and perverting them to their own ends (a system preservation that entrenches and expresses particular social interests and concerns). So presumptuous are they of their right and privilege that they are not even aware that they are doing it. They engage in protest and call themselves 'rebels.' It is bourgeois reformism on steroids and it has squat to do with socialism and the working class experience.
I am here to reassert the working class voice.
There is a war of attrition being waged on the international workers of the world at the moment, and it is being waged from several sources on several fronts. We have been living through the greatest transfer of wealth to the now super-rich in history, but are afflicted with a politics that is looking elsewhere. I put a proper value on labour, not as an abstract category of political economy, but as someone rooted in flesh-and-blood communities of working class practice and character.
I gathered up my scattered articles on the working class past and present and published them in book form under the title of “Revaluing Labour, Rebuilding Jerusalem.”
The book presents a hard-hitting - and accurate - analysis of the social and political idiocies of the current age. At the heart of the book is the systematic assault that is being waged on the working class, financially, socially, and culturally, identifying the forces behind this and showing what needs to be done by way of resolidification and resolidarisation. 'Progressives' are riding the latest wave of capitalist accumulation, yet think themselves 'left' when they are, in fact, complicit in the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. They perform the psychological and political feat of presenting themselves as an enlightened advance guard whilst being agents of the greatest transfer - and concentration - of power and resources in history. Of course they despise the working class. If there is hope, Orwell wrote, it lies with 'the plebs.'
The opening chapters concern the revaluing of labour in an age in which 'ordinary' people have come to be despised.
The first chapter concerns my involvement in The Workers' Memorial, and shares my experiences of working on building sites with my dad. The photographs on the front cover are of my dad at work. They are not romanticised and idealised images of labour. I helped dig those trenches and foundations - it was hard, back-breaking, and dirty work. The images fit the themes of the book - valuing those who perform the hard, back-breaking, dirty work upon which 'society' depends. We live in a topsy-turvy world which values the most inessential and ephemeral 'voices' of those who live in abstraction from production, labour, and reality. Health will not be restored until we restate the importance of those who put a shift in, day in and day out, and learn to pay zero attention to those with the most free time on their hands and the loudest voices to go with it.
The photos of my dad on the front cover are set against the background of my dad's building plans and drawings. We live in an age dominated by certified elites. The idea is that only those with a university education and degrees are entitled to a view. What tommyrot! I've been to a number of universities and hold three degrees. It's a world of miseducation, producing people who are experts by way of nothing other than their own prejudices. The impression is often given that the working class are stupid and uneducated, capable only of working with their hands. You should come and see my dad's building plans and drawings - they are precise, detailed, and accurate. The things he built stayed up because he got his sums right.
Remember the workers dead and fight for – and, importantly, with - the workers living.
I say little on social media. It's a superficial world. I pull no punches in my written work. And I don't suffer the certified fools who are making a mess of the societies we live in - every issue that now confronts us can be traced to elites of one kind or another. I spent long enough in universities to know that very many people are nowhere near as intelligent as the letters before and after their names would suggest. They usually pull rank on 'ordinary' people on account of their lack of education. With three degrees, from a first degree to masters and PhD, I can call them out. I was always a top performer in the universities. The building sites were harder, and more essential, work. This is a special book for me, one of great personal significance. This is a book about labour, work, hard and dirty work, the working class, now abandoned by mainstream politics, culture, and media. I know which of the two are sane, decent, honest, and healthy. Having worked on the building sites as well as in distribution, on foot, all weathers, I write as a fully paid up member of the working class. And should 'progressives' dismiss me as uneducated and inexpert, I shall laugh in their face. I never had any trouble hitting top grades at every university I attended.
Revaluing Labour, Rebuilding Jerusalem: Change and Continuity in working class culture, politics, and experience
Table of Contents
1 REVALUING LABOUR: REFLECTIONS ON THE ST HELENS WORKERS’ MEMORIAL 1
2 REBUILDING LABOUR’S FOUNDATIONS: RESOLIDIFYING 26
3 THE LABOUR METAPHYSIC AND THE REDEMPTIVE MYTH OF WEALTH 36
4 ANOTHER FAREWELL TO THE WORKING CLASS 51
5 ANSWERING THE ‘WHO’ AND ‘WHAT’ QUESTIONS OF THE WORKING CLASS 68
6 THE MAKING AND RE-MAKING OF THE WORKING CLASS: THEMES AND PROBLEMS 82
7 THE 1945 SETTLEMENT 109
8 REFORMISM AS THE DELIBERATELY EVASIVE FICTION OF THE MANAGED ECONOMY 118
9 THE UNRAVELLING OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY FROM THE 1960S ONWARDS 132
10 THE CLASS WAR ON THE WORKING CLASS – THE 1970S 155
11 THE CHANGING FACES OF CAPITAL AND CLASS 160
12 THE DISSOLUTION OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY INTO CULTURAL NEO-LIBERALISM 164
13 THE CHANGING DEMOGRAPHIC OF LEFTISM 196
14 THE ESSENTIAL AND THE USELESS 213
15 WHICH ROAD TO THE NEW JERUSALEM? 236
16 TORY SOCIALISM 243