Dig Where You Stand Movement

The Dig Where You Stand Movement, or Dig Movement for short, was named after its central document, a Swedish handbook for industrial workers on how to research the history of their own work and workplace. Written by Sven Lindqvist and published in 1978, it helped create 10,000 ‘barefoot’ research groups in Sweden, Scandinavia, Germany, Austria and Canada. Their results were published in hundreds of exhibitions, books, pamphlets and theatrical plays, and more permanently in 1,300 Swedish ‘museums of working life’ with technical and methodological support by a new national institution, the ‘Museum of Working Life’ in Norrköping.

The idea of ‘digging’ for truth close to home can be traced back to Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote ‘Wo du stehst, grab tiefhinein!’ (‘Where you stand, dig in deeply!’, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Poem 3).

The idea of workers researching their own history emerged during the Russian revolution. Maxim Gorky edited the periodical History of Factories and Workshops. Publication was suspended during World War II and then resumed after the war had completely changed character. Company history was now, in the East as in the West, written by professionals to celebrate company anniversaries.

The original idea of a workers' history of work and workplace resurfaced in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958–61). It was called ‘Dig the Bitter Roots', and the aim was to uncover the hardships and indignities of pre-revolutionary working conditions. The results were published in exhibitions, in newspaper articles and over local radio. Sven Lindqvist became aware of this movement while studying Chinese at Beijing University in 1961.

At the same time, a new interest in the remains of the Industrial Revolution emerged in the UK. Small groups of amateur historians gathered to protect and restore industrial buildings and machinery. The movement got its name from Kenneth Hudson's television programmes and his book Industrial Archaeology (1963). Hudson inspired Gunnar Sillén and other professional protectors of the cultural heritage of Sweden to make their projects include industrial monuments.

For traditional historians, history has, by definition, been the past as recorded in documents written at the time. The lower classes, having left few documents behind, are by definition without history. The Oral History Movement in the UK attempted to fill this gap by systematically collecting and recording old people's memories. Paul Thompson's 1978 volume The Voice of the Past became the central text of the oral historians.

In Sweden, these ideas and their metaphor were combined under the heading ‘Dig Where You Stand.’ The Swedish way of digging differed from similar movements in Britain and Germany in its emphasis on the expertise of the worker. Lindqvist encouraged workers not to be afraid of being experts and to see their own workplaces as a point of departure for their research.

The Swedish movement also differed in its emphasis on power. Business ownership has brought with it the power to decide how company history should be presented and understood. The workplaces of thousands have often been seen from the viewpoint of a few owners and directors. Most workers know little about their forerunners, and Lindqvist makes it clear that it is imperative that this history be uncovered because the impact of this history still influences the present. Such was the message that fired the Dig Movement in the optimistic days of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then came globalization, the economic crisis and the restructuring of European industry. Many jobs were lost; many diggers changed to a nostalgic mood. But [Page 266]others rose to the challenge and continued to ask awkward questions: What happened in those closed rooms where others decided our fate? Was the outcome predetermined? Was there anything we could have done to change it?

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