By Andrew Flinn and Astrid von Rosen.
Sven Lindquist, Dig Where You Stand: How to Research Your Job, tr. Ann Henning Jocelyn (Repeater Books, 2023)
Finally the long-awaited English translation of Sven Lindqvist’s key activist research manual and manifesto Gräv där du står / Dig Where You Stand has arrived! When first published in Swedish in 1978 the book was a critical intervention into the conflict between the competing narratives of workers’ histories and more dominant and pervasive elite histories. Today the book makes for a powerful entry into the urgent and pressing task of critically addressing the increasingly complex, painfully precarious work conditions of human lives in global-local economies, as well as for all “barefoot researchers” working to research and write counter-histories which challenge other dominant and often exclusionary narratives.
Digging as Workers’ Inquiry
The central idea underpinning Dig Where You Stand is that doing history work is a necessary and significant contributory factor in achieving social, political and industrial change, and indeed in fashioning a new world. The book conveys the key idea that everyone — not just academics — can learn how to (and benefit from) critically and rigorously explore history, especially their own. It provides clear, comprehensive and engaging instructions on how everyone can systematically research the history of their workplace and industry, employ a multiplicity of sources (official records as well as more informal oral and personal sources) in a critical fashion and choose research methods relevant to the subject of the research. It instructs the reader how to formulate and pose urgent and critical research questions — questions about power and the lived legacies of the past in the present still relevant today — and provides the researcher with the tools to research and answer those questions. Without a proper question, you are ill-equipped to enter the archive and commence the act of research, warns Lindqvist, and you will get lost. Today, in our global precarious economy, and the resulting indeterminate archives, the warning is more relevant than ever.
Dig Where You Stand prompts workers to become researchers, to follow the money and the power it represents, confers and reproduces. It invites them to take on the role as experts on their job and industry and “dig” out its hidden histories to produce a new picture and understanding of that industry and their position within it as a vital step towards social and economic transformation.
Written in an engaging and clear language that everyone can understand, Dig Where You Stand challenges the arbitrary and harmful boundaries between the public and the academy, workers and experts, “amateur” and “professional” researchers. In so doing, Dig Where You Stand was aligning itself with a long-standing intellectual and political tradition. Lindqvist himself described the roots of workers “digging” being located in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (“Wo du stehst, grab tiefhinein!” / “Where you stand, dig in deeply”) and also in practices undertaken after the Russian and Chinese revolutions (Lindqvist 2014). Digging practice has also strong echoes of the “Workers’ Inquiry” advocated by Marx and the Workers’ Enquiry movement in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the approach encouraged by inter-war Pan-Africanists like Arthur Schomburg for African Americans to dig up their past (McAllister 2022, Wright 2017, Schomburg 1925).
According to Lindqvist, experts (academics, industrial leaders and the likes) are not to be automatically feared and deferred to, because a worker is the expert on their job. Lindqvist concludes his preface, “That is why your own job is such a good starting point for your research. Dig where you stand!” These short and to-the-point sentences neatly capture what we argue is a key distinguishing feature in and for Dig Where You Stand, namely embodied and situated action. Making “your own job” the point of departure in becoming a researcher, Lindqvist firmly grounds and situates the practitioner (in his case, the cement worker) in real life, material space and the human body. When adding the imperative “dig where you stand!”, this research stance is charged with a call to take action, enter the explorative stage empowered as practitioner-scholar, and to do so without shame and fear.
In line with previous as well as current perspectives in feminist research, Lindqvist’s real-life case studies situate, embody and visualise rather than merely describe how workers (and other communities) can on their own or in collaboration with others create this “new picture” and use it as tool for change. His exposition of politically engaged and counter-history-making is still known and acts as an inspiration to many interested in radical history practices within social movement and activist environments today (see for instance the international History from Below network and the influence of Dig, “a mass history movement” (Ball and Box, 2015)).
Starting by looking out from one’s local setting to the world and ending with a vision of the future (set sometime in the 2020s) where activist scholars collaborate with academics to work for social change, the book’s thirty chapters of “materials and methods, which anyone can use to trace their own history and that of their workmates”, together create a montage of possible ways to explore a job and the workplace. History is set in motion in a multitude of dynamic and critically fruitful approaches engaging oral history, visual analysis, archival research, memory work, spatial explorations and critical reflection. The results of such research could be equally dynamic, with Lindqvist warning that “research is not mainly a defensive but an offensive weapon. It’s more suited for conquest than for defence.
