A New Political Generation: Post-2008 U.S. Social Movements and The Revival Of Union Activism

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This article analyses the emergence of a new political generation of progressive activists in the U.S. since 2008, and documents their growing engagement in labor organizing. It is argue that this development has inverted the dynamic Alain Touraine wrote about in the 1980s: rather than the new social movements learning from the traditional workers' movement, activists with experience in those movements are building on those political experiences to revitalize and transform the labor movement. I also suggest that this new political generation may embody the ‘return of the actor' that Touraine envisioned in the 1980s.