Global labour history - its promises and hazards

Global labour history is a new historical discipline. This new field of research departs from three methodological stands: first, the abandonment of the working class as a guiding category of the labour movement; secondly, the construction of labour history as a process that does not have boundaries, especially national borders; and thirdly, the continuation with the anti-Eurocentric approach to history. The first methodological instrument in particular is quite crucial for it contrasts with the traditional or classical labour history, a discipline that became heavily conjugated with Marxian views of capitalism. Classical labour history was organic to a revolutionary path of social change and considers labour or the working class - the free wage workers or the proletariat - as the engine of social change. Inversely, global labour history considers the working class as principally or quintessentially “Western”. The proletarian is the male factory worker; while the global workforce is gender neutral and exists also outside the manufacture sector. Global labour history assumes therefore that a narrow understanding of the working class is what determined the inability of the proletariat to produce any real or meaningful social change globally, including within the Soviet bloc. By doing so, perhaps invertedly, global labour history inaugurates a new trend in labour studies that is post-neoliberal in essence, for it acknowledges that there is no alternative to capitalism. The working-class history becomes the history of a multitude of subaltern workers that cannot be represented nor led by a minoritarian revolutionary vanguard. As a direct consequence of this, a marginalisation of the trade unions occurs within global labour history. There is almost an abandonment of formal workers’ organisation as protagonists of historical research. The labour movement therefore becomes hard to define, uncapturable, amorphic and polycentric. After all, who is a worker? (Who is a capitalist?). Global labour history is destined to have a future because it is a discipline that deals with the defeated camp in the struggle of capital versus labour, starting from the acknowledgement of such defeat.