sexta-feira, 24 de setembro de 2010

Paul Mason on Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global


The Census Bureau’s latest report shows that the numbers of Americans living in poverty and without health insurance have skyrocketed. 43.6 million people—about one in seven—lived below the poverty level of $22,000 for a family of four in 2009, pushing the national poverty rate to a fifteen-year high of 14.3 percent. We speak with British journalist Paul Mason about his new book, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global.
http://www.democracynow.org/ 

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Live-Working-or-Die-Fighting
The stories in this book come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child laborers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America’s Wild West, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War I.

It is a story of urban slums, self-help cooperatives, choirs and brass bands, free love, and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world, it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism, and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

About the author
Paul Mason is an award-winning journalist who reports regularly on labor rights and social justice stories as economics editor for BBC World News America and BBC Newsnight. In addition to Live Working or Die Fighting, which was shortlisted as a 2007 Guardian First Book Award, Mason is the author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (Verso Books).