The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist (1932-2019) is best known to English-speaking audiences for his clear-eyed dissection of colonial violence in Exterminate all the Brutes and for his account, in A History of Bombing, of the way that techniques and ideologies of extermination, perpetrated on colonial subjects, were reimported to Europe.12 In Dig Where You Stand, recently translated into English for the first time, Lindqvist investigates the hidden history of work; what corporate accounts and the biographies of industrialists omit.3 Taking Swedish cement manufacture as a case study, the book serves as a toolkit using self-education, historical research, and political solidarity to fill the gaps where workers’ lives should be. One effect is to illuminate choices and ideologies that have impacted on occupational health.
Cement dust is toxic—a hazard to workers, known as such since at least the late 19th Century. The particles irritate eyes and skin, and when inhaled cause airway inflammation and pulmonary fibrosis.
The electrostatic filter, invented in 1884, was available as a practical and usable device to remove cement dust from factory air by 1906. Among its earliest implementations was the need, not to protect workers, but rather to clean exhaust fumes which were damaging surrounding orange groves adjacent to a factory in California. The first installation in a Swedish factory was in 1923, again not for health reasons, but to extract potash from the fumes to use as fertiliser. When this proved unprofitable the process was discontinued. It was not until 1940 that the first electrostatic device was installed in a Swedish factory as a health measure, and they were not installed in all factories until 1969. Generations of workers went unprotected from disability and premature death.4
The lives and suffering of the workers disappear, as volatile as gas, but the profits are held on to and accumulate. Profits made from choices that harmed workers—choosing not to improve air quality, not to install guard-rails to prevent workers being crushed, choosing poverty wages and a casual workforce.
It has been 10 years since the Rana Plaza cheap garment factory building in Dhaka collapsed, killing 1,134 people.5 “Who owns your factory? Why?” Lindqvist asks deceptively simple questions, but pulling at these threads is a means to unravel the shroud concealing the accumulations of privilege and power that constitute white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.6 What goes for the factory goes for society. Just as corporations now enjoy wealth accumulated through choices not to protect working people, so our country, our institutions, and the monarchy continue to benefit from the uncompensated sweat and blood of colonial subjects and slaves.
“Can we feel contrition for other people’s crimes?” Lindqvist asks in Terra Nullius, “Can we feel contrition for crimes we have not committed personally but have subsequently profited from?”7
The first step towards justice and reparation must be an acknowledgment of the sources and consequences of wealth and privilege. Not least the ruined lungs and lives.
In Lindqvist’s words: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”
Footnotes
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Competing interests: none declared.
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Provenance and peer review: not commissioned, not externally peer reviewed.