Paul Mason: The Paris Commune

“If you haven't read Mason's book, you know nothing...
breathtaking, fascinating, perceptive... Damn, I wish I'd written this”
-Greg Palast

 
Examining the lost traditions of self-organisation of the 19th century working class: from the Paris Commune to the Wobblies, where workers took a DIY approach to capturing and distributing power in the workplace and the community – a tradition that was subsumed when 20th century anarchism, communism and social democracy took their finished forms.

Mason argues that the emerging new workforce of the global south, which he has chronicled for BBC Newsnight in China, India, Kenya and Bolivia, will not simply repeat the patterns of organisation found at the formation of the European labour movement, but are reinventing some of the basic forms of solidarity and individuality we in the west have forgotten about.

Socialist Review says of the work,
“Mason has written a first class book… both the contemporary accounts of labour
organising and the historical accounts come alive because they are often told through the
life stories of the workers and radicals doing the organising… This is a book whose idea has
come.”

“Any activist would immediately profit from spending a few enjoyable hours listening to the
voices Paul Mason has assembled calling out to us over thousands of miles and hundreds
of years.”

Paul Mason is currently reporting for Newsnight from China about ground-breaking industrial
organisation and workers’ strikes there.