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A motley crew for our times?
Multiracial mobs, history from below and the memory of struggle
Rediker, Marcus http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/a-motley-crew-for-our-times?fbclid=IwAR3J1PUaGzu4_H49waI_7A0gnltLxcIr2CaVX5S4FdYUus4jV2I9W06Le14
Publisher: Radical Philosophy
Year Published: 2020
Resource Type: Article
'Motley crew' is a useful concept for our times. In the eighteenth century, the 'motley crew' referred to a work group, a collective of people whose cooperation was essential to accomplish a particular task.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
In writing The Many Headed Hydra (2000), Peter Linebaugh and I searched for terms and concepts used by people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe collective proletarian subjects and class struggle at the dawn of capitalism – 'motley crew', 'hewers of wood and drawers of water', 'outcasts of the nations of the earth', and, most importantly of all, 'the many-headed hydra'. Classically-educated European rulers cast themselves as Hercules as they built a new global economic system, calling forth great violence against the workers who resisted them. It was no easy task to organise sailors, slaves, indentured servants, factory workers, commoners and domestic workers into a new world capitalist system.
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