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For Freedom and Dignity: Historical Agency and Class Structure in the Coalfields of NSW book cover

1st Edition

For Freedom and Dignity Historical Agency and Class Structure in the Coalfields of NSW

By Andrew Metcalfe Copyright 1988
284 Pages
by Routledge

First published in 1988, For Freedom and Dignity is a highly original and sophisticated study of the social history of the Coalfields of the Hunter Valley, renowned as the heart of Australian political radicalism for much of the twentieth century. The book evokes without sentimentality a deep feeling for the lives of the Coalfields people and without false heroism it shows the way in which... Read more

1. Introduction Part 1 — Dependence 2. The dependence of wage-labourers 3. Wage-labour and the mines 4. Miners, wage-labour and slave-labour Part 2 — Opposition: the struggle to be human 5. The challenge to the miners’ humanity 6. The larrikin mode of class struggle 7. The respectable mode of class struggle 8. Reflections on the theory of class struggle Part 3 —Opposition: violence and organisation 9. The significance of violence 10. Towards a theory of group practice 11. Terror and solidarity in the Coalfields Part 4 — Opposition and dependence 12. The dull compulsion of economic relations 13. Conclusion: Society as unmastered history Appendix 1: Organisations in the Kurri – Abermain district, 1927 – 1930 Appendix 2: Characteristics of ALP branches in the Kurri – Abermain district, 1950 – 1981 Appendix 3: A glossary of mining and political terms

Biography

Andrew Metcalfe

Review of the first publication:

"Metcalfe’s is a work of great empirical thoroughness, of impressive theoretical range and reference, of first-rate intellectual grasp and acuity…and gracefully written."

— Clive Kessler  

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