Locality-Studies and Waged Labour: An Historical Critique

Abstract

The paper contributes to the growing critique of locality-studies by questioning their frequent assumption that the social relations of waged work are fundamental to explanations of society and politics. It argues that, despite recent theoretical developments, locality-studies still tend to conflate industrial, social and political geography by confining their analyses almost wholly to the sphere of waged labour. The paper then turns to a locality sometimes invoked in the literature, the east London borough of Poplar in the 1920s, to contest the idea that the social relations of Poplar's industrial structure somehow account for its socialist local politics. Three aspects of Poplar are considered: first, the political disjuncture between local trade unions and Poplar Labour Party; secondly, the non-class motivations for industrial unrest by local workers; and thirdly, the relative unimportance of waged labour in the lives of Poplar people and the implications of that for the interpretation of industrial action in the borough. Having demonstrated the need to discover if, rather than assume that, the workplace is the source of politics, the paper concludes with some brief notes as to where the roots of Poplar's politics did lie and on the implications of this case study for research on local politics more generally.

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