Paul Mason: Madison to Tehran: The Great Unrest - Then & Now
Wednesday, March 16 · 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Haymarket Pub & Brewery
737 W. Randolph, at corner of Halsted & Randolph
Chicago, IL
THE TWO HUNDRED year story of the global working-class and its many struggles for justice comes to life in this book 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, from Mason's interwoven reportage from the frontlines of contemporary labor disputes in the global south; to current events from Egypt to Wisconsin, this living history of defiance, idealism, and self-sacrifice is still with us today.
4 blocks west of Clinton Green/Pink line; 6 blocks south of Grand Blue line; #8 Halsted Bus, #56 Milwaukee, www.haymarketbrewing.com
6:30 pm Drinking and Writing Theater opens for food and drink
7:00 pm Presentation begins
FREE
PRAISE FOR LIVE WORKING OR DIE FIGHTING
"Brilliant.” —Ken Loach, filmmaker, The Wind That Shakes the Barley
"By relating a series of struggles for worker and human rights over the past two hundred years and comparing them to current struggles, Mason has produced a history of the struggle against the excesses of capitalism. There's a bit of anarchism in this book. There's also socialism, communism, syndicalism and plain old unionism...No matter what Mason is writing about: the workers' culture created by the Bund in early 20th century Germany; the May 4th Movement in China from around the same time, or the silk weavers' revolt in Lyon, France, it is the regular folks that star. Anger is present in the histories told here and so is hope." —Counterpunch
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Living Working or Die Fighting features chapters on the Paris Commune, the IWW, antiwar unionists during WWI, and many more subjects of mass, creative, working-class revolt, including Chicago's own Haymarket martyrs and the movement for the 8-hour day.
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PAUL MASON is an award-winning journalist and blogger who reports regularly on labor rights and social justice stories as economics editor for BBC World News America, BBC Newsnight, and his popular blog, IdleScrawl. 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).
Read an excerpt, "This is the Dawn," on the Paris Commune at Scribd.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34329382/Excerpt-Live-Working-or-Die-Fighting-...
Watch an interview with Mason on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/24/paul_mason_on__live_working
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, contact Sarah Macaraeg, sarah@haymarketbooks.org
Live Working or Die Fighting
How the Working Class Went Global
By Paul Mason
ISBN 9781608460700
320 pages
http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Live-Working-or-Die-Fighting
