Alex Macdonald Memorial Lecture.
Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Brisbane Branch.
ETU Offices, 41 Peel street, South Brisbane.
Wednesday, July 1, 2026, 5.30 for 6 pm start.
The lecture takes three lines of inquiry:
- class relations within the garment industry;
- developments in its means of re-production and exchange;
- the necessity for capital history if labour historians are to reclaim history as class struggle.
- A stitch in time – The garment-makers
Ladies fashion changed each Spring and Autumn. This forerunner of the obsolescence planned by market-forces had spread to shop-girls by the 1920s. To meet the rushed demand and limited sales periods, workers were flung in and out of one of the four regiments in the Reserve Army of Labour, over-worked for a few weeks twice a year, backed up by out-workers on piece-rates. Dress-makers found it harder to unionise sweatshops than did women in textile-mills.
The composition of capital in the sector was much as it had been for the entire mode during proto-capitalism in the decades around 1800, with low levels of investment in equipment and the bulk of money-capital outlaid on production goods, including labour-power. Given the use of pedal sewing-machines, most ancillary expenses were for lighting. [Men’s wear was not driven by fashion so that factory-production could be spread across the year with a more stable workforce.]
- The means of reproduction and exchange
The invention of coal-tar dyes from 1857 gave rise to a spectrum of materials in affordable colours, a development which increased the sprawl of seasonal offerings and, hence, the volume of unsold commodities to be let go at or below their cost of production – or exported to the Southern Hemisphere to match our seasons. To contain losses, and in line with the 150-year-long shift towards standardisation across every sector, garment, textile, leather and jewellery firms combined to establish the British Colour Council in 1930, which set three colours for each season, under Royal Patronage, though at some cost to consumer sovereignty.
- Expanding capital history
‘History from the Bottom Up’ has to be applied at both ends of the system. Without capital history, labour history is one-hand clapping. By conceptualizing how aggregate undertakings interact for the expansion of total (social) capital, its historians must offer more than a compendium of company histories. By concentrating on labour-processes in the second-by-second struggle over the rate of our exploitation, labour historians lost sight of the valorisation process and with it the accumulation essential to reproduce and exchange on ever expanding scales. The flow of pasts through the present into possible futures cannot be understood without Marx’s critical analysis of political economy.
Humphrey McQueen, Canberra.
The lecture will be published in the Branch’s Journal in September.