Bad Dust:
A History of the Asbestos Disaster
By Tom White (Repeater)
This book is about asbestos, the erstwhile miracle material for its fireproof qualities that is highly unsafe to life in any of its forms. Titled as a history of the disaster, and billed as a social history, it is more specifically a labor history, focused on those working with asbestos and its manufactured derivatives, and the fights that workers have had for protection from or compensation for the harms of asbestos, something that there is no safe amount of exposure to, with an industry looking to minimize or ignore the risks and then to evade the responsibilities, despite it being something where the deadly nature of the thing was known early.
The book is plain about the ongoing nature of the disaster. The outline of the story is familiar to things like tobacco, lead, and global warming, and has an unfortunate tendency to lend credence to the anti-science thinking that proliferates in the current administration when you see how many lies have be policy, backed by the government. Outside of people whose prior exposure is still leading to negative health effects, asbestos’ bans in the UK, US, and Europe have only led to industries relocating in the poorer sections of the world. The inherent risks of asbestos remain in place, since the usual method for dealing with things was to encapsulate it, giving decaying buildings a sort of time-bomb nature.
Other than rectifying the somewhat forgotten nature of the disaster, the good thing about the book is the focus on the people and organizations fighting the good fight for safety and accountability. It is empathetic without falling into maudlin, and does a good job of providing the narrative history while keeping to the human. The only point where this slips up is that, being a labor history of a century plus, the list of organizations and their abbreviations is formidable and requires some effort to track.
The weakness here is that the book keeps swinging for homers instead of landing the easy singles and doubles. The author wants to make asbestos into an exemplar for everything in global Capitalism. This is a savvy move at points. A good example is the history of the NHS. Since the problem with asbestos-related health matters existed at the point of its coming about, the story of what happened to those health matters in the formation, as well as what could have happened, is instructive for thinking about the process in general: a microhistory that creates a teachable form of the macrohistory.
But the book wants to make it about capital T-Theory. There is a certain ‘Q.E.D. Marxism’ when the author takes a historical event and uses it to establish things far outside of the facts at hand. It was done more coherently and honestly than the last rightward take like this that I reviewed, but it remains as useless when the book already has an interesting enough project. Once again, authors, I urge you to resist the temptation to make your history sexy.
My thanks to the author, Tom White, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Repeater Books, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 