Industrial Capitalism Research Articles

“Soft Gold” Before the Gold Rush: Sea Otter Pelts in the “Competitive Expansion” of Merchant Capitalism and the Creation of a Pacific Ocean Economy

Objective/Context: In this article, we examine how Chinese demand for pelts—of sea otters and other marine mammals—fueled the eighteenth-century competitive expansion of European and later American merchants and explorers in the Pacific islands and along the Pacific coast of North America. Sea otter pelts were a commodity directly linked to the creation of a Pacific Ocean economy, and California’s colonization resulted from imperial dynamics to which this trade gave rise. Methodology: Using both primary and secondary sources, we examine how these merchants’ quest to supply the lucrative Chinese luxury market with furs—“soft gold”—brought them into contact with indigenous peoples whose livelihoods and commercial networks would also be recruited into this global market but on quite unequal terms and with devastating consequences. Originality: The growth of this Pacific trade throughout the eighteenth century fueled geopolitical rivalries that led to the colonization of California with a system of missions and military garrisons (presidios) and, eventually, to a new ecology as a result of plants and animals brought from New Spain before the Gold Rush and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Many, including Marx and Engels, have claimed that the Gold Rush contributed significantly to the dynamics of industrial capitalism; nevertheless, we argue that its conditions of possibility were laid out centuries earlier via the complex geopolitical and ecological connections through which this Pacific economy was articulated. Conclusions: During the eighteenth century, the Pacific’s products were extracted and commodified in circuits whose demand center was China. It is precisely the prior existence of these global markets—centered on silver and “soft gold,” or sea otter furs—that explains the presence of Europeans and Americans in California eager to prospect for the yellow metal in 1848.

플랫폼은 인지자본주의를 어떻게 강화하는가

“The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence” analyzes artificial intelligence from the perspective of a combination of data and artificial intelligence in terms of the connection between cybernetics and cognitive capitalism. The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence] discusses cognitive capitalism, focusing on the keywords of mechanical subjugation and social subordination and the cyclical causal relationship between individuation and disintegration occurring in the digital environment. Cognitive capitalism and the way it develops based on its critical perspective helps to form a critical perspective on the impact of artificial intelligence on human existence and life. In this paper, “The human condition in the age of artificial intelligence” is centered on the three keywords of cognitive capitalism, platform, and divided entity, and the way to recognize the essence of the AI era and the mechanism of artificial intelligence, as well as the human perception and understanding of it. Discuss how to respond.
 Cybernetics, which presented the basis for independent automated machines that adapt to environmental changes through automation and feedback, evolved in the form of artificial intelligence and shifted control initiative between humans and machines from humans to machines. The daily use of the Internet and smartphones and the development of artificial intelligence inevitably speed up the inter-transformation between data, information and knowledge and promote automation of the transition. Platforms have become the backbone of cognitive capitalism, which sees information and knowledge as a source of new wealth. In industrial capitalism, if factories that produce products were the main foundation of the economy, in cognitive capitalism, platforms take their place, establishing a system in which most of the labor of workers is also performed through platforms. The foundation of cognitive capitalism is a mechanism built by platforms, big data generated through platforms, and algorithms that combine big data into meaningful information to transform it into concrete profits.
 The platform seeks coexistence with state power by accommodating access by state devices for specific purposes. The ruling system built on the basis of a mixture of mechanical subjugation and social submission causes people's class consciousness or critical social consciousness to change into other forms. It is not the confrontation or contradiction between capital and labor as before, but takes the form of subjectivity combined with consumer consciousness formed in the life world. The platform automates individual thoughts and actions while repeating divisionalization, which reduces individual actions to numerical values, and fragmentation, which returns the data set of divided figures back to the individual.
 The reason why platform companies can grow with high profits lies in the accumulation of various contents produced and shared through voluntary participation and interaction of individuals and the data generated in this process, but platform companies conceal this as much as possible. It is because the platform plays the role of ‘platform rent price’ that it can build a dual accumulation system that receives unlimited data on the results of users’ activities while maximizing their own profits by minimizing responsibility for workers. A platform company is a digital landlord that realizes a dual accumulation system that accumulates both rent profits through land capital and profits using industrial capital. In the end, cognitive capitalism as platform capitalism is maintained through the dual accumulation system of platform rent price. Therefore, a more specific discussion is needed on how to activate the will of individuals to escape from the platform and attempt to recover from a divided body to a substantial body.

Tropospheric ozone (O3) pollution in Johannesburg, South Africa: Exceedances, diurnal cycles, seasonality, Ox chemistry and O3 production rates

Ground-level ozone (O3) is an air pollutant of major health and environmental concern. The Johannesburg-Pretoria megacity in South Africa is the industrial and economical capital of the country with more than 10 million inhabitants experiencing poor air quality. In 2004, the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) began monitoring trace gases to assess ground-level O3 pollution. Here, we use CoJ’s publicly available air quality data, and present the first long-term data analysis of O3, nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), NOx and carbon monoxide (CO) in the City from 2004 to 2011 at three air quality monitoring sites: Buccleuch, Delta Park and Newtown. We quantified CoJ’s South African National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) exceedances for O3 and NO2, and demonstrate the City’s substantial O3 and NO2 air pollution problem. O3 mixing ratios peak in the early afternoon as expected due to photochemical production. To estimate O3 production rates, we summed O3 and NO2 diurnal profiles to obtain Ox mixing ratios at each site. This analysis provided insight into missing volatile organic compound (VOC) reactivity as well as primary NO2 emissions information necessary for developing tropospheric O3 pollution mitigation strategies. Furthermore, CoJ experiences high O3 mixing ratios on weekends due to lower NOx traffic emissions titrating the O3, thereby providing evidence of a VOC-limited regime for O3 production. Seasonal peak O3 occurs in the austral spring, a maximum that we link to increases in water (H2O) concentrations which in turn increases radical chemistry leading to O3. In addition, wintertime VOC and aerosol emissions from biomass burning over the winter add important precursors for O3 formation once radical chemistry is initiated during the first rain events in early spring. In all, this study will help inform air quality modelling and policy work on air pollutants in the City of Johannesburg, South Africa.

The environmental and economic utility of the third-party governance of environmental pollution in China—an analysis based on the business registration information of enterprises

The third-party governance of environmental pollution (TEG) is a market-oriented mechanism designed to attract social capital to participate in ecological environmental protection. Can this mechanism result in positive and significant environmental and economic effects in developing countries? This paper examines the practical effectiveness of China’s pollution governance system reform by analyzing data on the registered business capital of the environmental protection industry in 285 prefecture-level cities during the period of 2003–2019. The study finds the following: TEG can effectively curb urban pollution emissions and improve the urban green total factor productivity (GTFP) of cities; heterogeneity analysis shows that specialization, marketization, and enterprise nature exert important impacts on its effectiveness; mechanism analysis shows that TEG can restrain pollution emissions by strengthening the tendency toward urban green technology progress; and its effects of releasing the industrial production capacity can be leveraged to improve the quality of economic development.

FEATURES OF THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF FORMATION OF INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL OF DOMESTIC ENTERPRISES IN THE ENGINEERING SECTOR UKRAINE IN THE CONDITIONS OF DIGITALIZATION

The purpose. The article examines the specifics of challenges and opportunities for the formation of intellectual capital of domestic enterprises of the machine-building sector of Ukraine in the conditions of digitalization. Industries are of key importance for the economy of Ukraine, indicators of its functioning are the main factor of the country's social and economic development. In particular, mechanical engineering is one of the basic branches of the Ukrainian economy and a strategically important branch that affects the development of the technological potential and competitiveness of the Ukrainian economy as a whole. The level of development of mechanical engineering is one of the main factors that allows to ensure the sustainable development of the Ukrainian economy, the development of the country as a whole depends on its level and dynamics of development. Therefore, the study of the current state of the machine-building industry, the efficiency of the machine-building enterprises, the identification of current problems will allow to determine the tools for the recovery and further sustainable development of the machine-building enterprises, as one of the key branches of the national economy. In the modern concept of economic development, it is intellectual capital that becomes a decisive factor in the growth of national wealth, competitiveness of the country, region, business entity, and quality of life. Despite the existing degree of study, today the issues of specific challenges and opportunities for the formation of intellectual capital are in dire need of continuing a deeper study and scientific justification, because this category is extremely dynamic. The analysis of digital transformations in the context of the formation of intellectual capital, trends of changes in the work of personnel management in the conditions of the digital economy is also given, an overview of the need for human resources in the conditions of the development of the digital economy is given. The rapid development of digital technologies and IT spheres lead to the automation of production processes, which determines the tendency for the disappearance of some professions. In the near future, many professions that are necessary now will lose their demand, the number of jobs will decrease, which threatens to increase unemployment if modern professionals do not have the skills necessary for work in the realities of the digital economy. This will significantly change the management of aggregate intellectual capital in the future, which determines the relevance of this article. The work analyzes publications and research on the formation and development of the main components of intellectual capital in the conditions of digitalization. On the basis of the research, conclusions are formulated about the need to apply mechanisms for effective management of the intellectual capital of machine-building enterprises in the future. Today, Ukraine is on the way to becoming an information society and the corresponding type of economic relations. Informatization of industry, the service sector, the entrepreneurial sector, science and education, and state institutions is a priority goal of the development of the economy of Ukraine. Information and knowledge are not only an effective catalyst for the transition to the sixth technological order, the basis of which is scientific research and development, but also its strategic resource. Informatization of scientific and research activity in the field of mechanical engineering is an important factor in the formation of modern information infrastructure of scientific and research organizations and the creation of a single information space, which is relevant in the conditions of the development of the information society, the network economy and the transition to the knowledge economy. The state of modern mechanical engineering was analyzed, the main trends and problems of the industrial complex in modern economic conditions were identified, and recommendations were made to solve them in order to ensure the sustainable development of mechanical engineering enterprises and increase the level of the economic potential of industry in general. The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the works of Ukrainian and foreign scientists, economists and experts on the study of the intellectual capital of an industrial enterprise. In the process of researching the intellectual capital of the machine-building industry, conclusions and proposals were made under the prism of the specifics of the formation of its constituent elements in the era of the formation and development of the digital economy. The leading vector of the further development of the intellectual capital of enterprises in the conditions of the digital economy should be the issues of classification, measurement and transformation of knowledge capital, as well as the development of tools for transferring its elements into materialized and innovative assets of the enterprise.

‘Neoliberalism is dead’: Traversing neoliberal planning education is an exigency

Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic ideology that has fundamentally transformed planning over the last four decades. Neoliberalism has significantly restructured pre-existing organisations, such as universities that were initially expanded during the period of industrial capitalism. From Foucault’s perspective, universities work as components of the dominant control apparatus to subjectively normalise people to docile bodies in the capitalist society. In planning schools, new planning students are introduced to the discipline and its values, norms, knowledge, and practices. This article explores how neoliberalism has changed planning education and subsequently practice in favour of the market operation by detaching planning from its intellectual and theoretical context, and used planning as its scapegoat to conceal its failures. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 and the global pandemic of COVID-19, several thinkers, economists and politicians have declared that ‘neoliberalism is dead’ and pointed to the necessity of a new doctrine to address the adverse side effects of neoliberalism that include social inequality and climate change. Planning was initially developed to address the environmental issues and social inequality that resulted from industrial capitalism. This article suggests that planning education should traverse neoliberalism by retrieving its critical and theoretical knowledge to redefine its role in the post-neoliberal era.

Состояние основных производственных фондов и обеспечение промышленной безопасности

The level of accident rate at hazardous production facilities is largely determined by the degree of moral and physical depreciation of the fixed assets in the fuel and energy industry. Depreciation factor of the fixed assets is almost always present among the causes of accidents at hazardous production facilities in the modern-day Russia. Fixed assets are large blocks of the industrial safety foundation. Accident rate and injury rate, as inevitable and tragic costs of industrial production, originated in the industrial era, do not disappear in the post-industrialism, and become problematic in the crisis of industrialism. To assess the state of safety at hazardous production facilities, an up-to-date risk-oriented map is required related to the creation, availability, use and maintenance of the fixed assets of industrial production. The information is considered in the article concerning the fixed assets of the Russian industry from the middle of the 20th century to the present, which was obtained according to the statistical data from the official sources of the Central Statistical Office of the USSR and the RSFSR, the State Statistics Committee of Russia, Rosstat, and Rostechnadzor. Despite the stabilization of the asset renewal, in the last 15 years there is a tendency to accelerate the depreciation of fixed assets at hazardous production facilities. With an average renewal rate of 6% per year achieved over the past decade, the fixed assets of industry, including buildings, machinery, and equipment, should work for almost 17 years until they are replaced. In general, over the thirty years of post-Soviet reforms, underinvestment in the fixed capital of the Russian industry amounted to more than 98 trillion rubles, or 24.7 thousand tons of gold, which is more than 10 times the country gold reserve in 2023. Almost half of the «residual resource» was exhausted from the industrial material and technical funds. The current volume of the market for industrial safety expertise of technical devices is sharply incomparable with the scale of the task effectively solved by the economic management on underinvestment in fixed assets in industry of more than 1.5 trillion US dollars for the period from 1991 to 2022. Imported economic management was unable to ensure long-term conservation of the material and technical base of the Russian industry. On average, up to 70% of the equipment used at hazardous production facilities worked out the standard service life. Degree of the depreciation of fixed assets of the fuel industry in Russia in the early twenties exceeded the average industrial level by almost 7 percentage points, while in 2015–2021 the share of completely worn-out facilities in the extractive industry increased by 7.3 percentage points. The functions of supervision over the safe reproduction of industrial fixed assets must be responsibly transferred to the sovereign structures of risk-oriented ensuring of industrial safety in Russia.

Fabricant, It's What's for Dinner: Tracing Industrialized Slaughter through Upton Sinclair's The Jungle , Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties , and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Abstract: In the contemporary epic novel Cloud Atlas (2004), David Mitchell creates fictive worlds spanning hundreds of years to reveal the consequences of industrial capitalism on a global scale. The dystopic near-future section of the novel, where most of the earth's natural resources have been obliterated due to mass nuclear explosions, explores a consumer class society fueled by late-stage capitalism that fabricates nature to survive—even if that means recycling the human body. Sonmi-451, an Asian female clone, narrates the story of a nightmarish fantastical world where present-day factory farming practices manufacture human bodies instead of animals. In this paper, I draw parallels from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) to trace how slaughter has been perceived in relation to dystopian imaginings of meat production.

Cyber-Physical Social Media Platforms and Their Market Influence

Based on theories of political economy, this essay will examine existing power structures, which are based on proprietary strategies of industrial capitalism and have been transforming into a proliferating networked information economy, decentralizing individual action [1]. Over this course, the author will explain how infrastructural rearrangements modified markets from a considerably static manifestation towards multi-sided platforms, giving social media platforms power over intellectual property and trading informational goods on a transnational scale. In the second part of the essay, the author argues that, first, living in a neoliberalist system also embraces potential and liberal forces, affirming that technology is not the only influencing force in society [2]. However, the main focus of this part insists on resisting the dominance of platforms by exemplifying the far-reaching cultural, political, and institutional impacts of social networks on society. Finally, the author proposes possible future solutions of resistance to find an ethical and democratic way of balancing institutional, political, and cultural aspects to guarantee human freedom and development.

Work and Identity in Early Modern England

AbstractHow did work shape people's identity before industrial capitalism? It is a question that early modernists have never really got to grips with. Thanks to decades of research by social and cultural historians, we now have a much better understanding of how people in the past saw themselves and labelled those around them. But until recently scholars of early modern England have had surprisingly little to say about how a person's working life – their occupation, trade, vocation or livelihood – influenced their social identity. This essay is therefore an attempt to synthesise recent research on the subject into a more explicit historiographical intervention. Early modernists need to broaden their research to consider ‘working identities’ as a whole, rather than merely the narrower concept of ‘occupational identities’. By exploring how work influenced a person's self-image and social role, we can reshape our understanding of broader social relations in this period and challenge some of the ‘grand narratives’ of early modern social and economic change.

The Aesthetic Rift

The development of industrial capitalism led to a reconfiguration of the social function of culture. A commodification of Western culture and fetishisation of art emerged that was inseparable from the expansion of this world system. This historical process consolidated insofar as it produced a series of material and imaginary rifts between interconnected spheres. In this article we analyse the way in which these rifts operated within aesthetics, economics and ecology, positing an eco-Marxist critique of the exhibition space and its associated social experience. Our analysis focuses first on the dawn of industrial modernity, highlighting the colonial and imperial matrix of this Eurocentric project. Secondly, the article underscores how contemporary art and the Great Acceleration of the ecosocial crisis are linked due to an exponential increase in the infrastructures of cultural industries. By exploring these connections, we show how the spatiality of contemporary art is linked to the dynamics that characterise the political, economic and cultural global system, interacting with the accumulation of ecosocial crises in which we are immersed.

The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden

Reviewed by: The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden Christian Rogowski The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder. By Paul Dobryden. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. Pp viii + 208. Hardcover $120.00. ISBN 978-0810144972. The late nineteenth century saw concerted efforts in Germany to mitigate the destabilizing effects of unfettered industrial capitalism, such as environmental pollution and the unsanitary living conditions of an immiserated urban working class, by seeking to optimize efficiency in production (for instance, by reducing harmful waste) and by aiming to improve working and living conditions (primarily in order to maintain a productive workforce). In his introduction to this fascinating book, Paul Dobryden outlines how the medium of cinema that emerged during that same period can be viewed as an “apparatus of modernity” (10) that participated in this pursuit of “hygiene,” defined broadly as a conglomerate of practices that “strove to produce a kind of order, which in turn was meant to stabilize social life” (14). The multiple crises that followed the defeat of Germany in World War I confronted Weimar-era [End Page 320] cinema with the challenge of counteracting “environmental disorder” by contributing toward reestablishing psychological, social, and political stability—hence the book’s somewhat enigmatic title and subtitle. The author’s highly original, eclectic, and thought-provoking approach, combining sophisticated theoretical reflection with impressive archival research, enables him to address a dazzling multitude of fascinating topics in the book’s five chapters. In a brief review such as this, it is impossible to convey the full complexity of the book’s multi-layered and nuanced overarching argument. The first chapter is dedicated to the connection between the moralizing concerns of the Kinoreform movement and debates over the design of exhibition spaces during the transition from storefront movie theaters to large-scale picture palaces. The close proximity with other people in the insufficiently ventilated and poorly lit cramped spaces of early storefront cinemas exposed moviegoers to multiple “threats”—to their physical health, to their moral fortitude, and to their political reliability (as spaces of collective experience that potentially engendered politicized solidarity). The cinema thus became “a site where experts in design, architecture, traffic, and urban planning articulated a narrative of hygienic modernization and demonstrated hygienic ways of thinking about, perceiving, and acting in the spaces of everyday life” (38). The second chapter discusses the quasi-documentary genre of the Kulturfilme, educational films that sought to transform audiences into communities of self-regulating “hygienic subjects” functioning optimally within an existing social order. Such films, Dobryden rightly points out, largely adhered to patriarchal and ableist norms. For instance, women were generally relegated to the domestic sphere, with housewives instructed in using the ergonomically designed “Frankfurt Kitchen” to maintain order at home, while public spaces were primarily construed as arenas for the circulation of able-bodied working males, with the “unproductive” parts of the population (children, the elderly, the physically or mentally handicapped) sequestered in special spaces that purported to best meet their specific needs. Chapter three reads F. W. Murnau’s film Faust (1926) as a kind of double allegory—of the environmental pollution wrought by unregulated industrial capitalism and of the redemptive power of the cinematic imagination. Smoke and vapor fill the screen, visualizing disease and the devil’s shape-shifting magic in a manner that, through visual distraction, makes possible a distinctly modern cinematic magic. The fourth chapter applies ideas about disability and aging developed in chapter two to a discussion of two canonical Weimar-era feature films. In Dobryden’s readings of Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street, 1923) and Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), the modern urban environment emerges as the site that mercilessly excludes those who do not or cannot any longer conform to the “hygienic” logic of moral self-regulation or to discriminatory standards of workplace efficiency. The final chapter discusses key leftist films from the late Weimar period, such as Phil Jutzi’s [End Page 321] Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (1932). Rather than participating in efforts to mitigate the detrimental effects of exploitative industrial capitalism, these films shift the focus to...

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Review: Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox, by Greg Hall

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox, by Greg Hall Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox. By Greg Hall. (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2022. 276 pp.) Gigi Peterson Gigi Peterson State University of New York at Cortland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 302–303. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.302 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gigi Peterson; Review: Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox, by Greg Hall. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 302–303. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.302 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search Writing for leftwing publications, Jay Fox sometimes created fictional characters to humanize and articulate questions and issues that working people faced. Attentive to this literary strategy, Greg Hall artfully employs a real-life character—Fox—to illustrate conditions and choices as capitalist industrialization transformed labor and lives, and “wageworkers confronted class in American society” (p. 8). Fox chose anarchism to inform his work in this confrontation, as a wage laborer, union organizer, author, and editor. He participated in and wrote about many pivotal developments in U.S. labor history from the late 1880s through the 1930s. Praising Fox’s ability to make “complex ideas and events” (p. 3) accessible to readers, Hall does the same in this “microhistory of the radicals, utopians, revolutionaries, and union men and women with whom [Fox] associated, debated, and supported” (p. 8) during his long life from 1870 to 1961. Some associates were famous, from Emma Goldman to William Z.... You do not currently have access to this content.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Amid a journalist killing spree in Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared 2022 as the Year of Ricardo Flores Magón. Among the best-known Mexican journalists of all time, Flores Magón, as well as a cadre of like-minded colleagues, unleashed a far-reaching revolution that threatened dictator Porfirio Díaz's rule as well as US investments in Mexico. While AMLO's administration has used Flores Magón's history to legitimize its vision of a government that works for all, it struggles to deal with the country's unrelenting violence. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans could not have come at a better time, and while we can debate the effectiveness of AMLO's use of Flores Magón to gain popular support, Hernández's book on him and his colleagues is hard evidence of Flores Magón's far-reaching influence on Mexican and US history. It lays out clearly the reasons why Flores Magón remains a compelling historical figure.Engagingly written without sacrificing archival evidence, Hernández's book details the early twentieth-century Magonista revolutionary movement focused on ridding Mexico of Díaz to effect transformational change. She re-creates the vision and plotting, strategies, challenges, and real outcomes of Magonismo in both Mexico and the United States. Among the many lessons of Bad Mexicans is how social revolutions take constant perseverance and commitment, even when the bulk of the membership has lost faith. Visionaries such as Flores Magón, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Librado Rivera, and others who risked everything day in, day out were labeled “bad Mexicans” by Mexican and US government officials. Such labeling had bloody consequences and reveals the centrality of rhetoric and discourse in enacting so-called progress and development through violence. Bad Mexicans reminds of how labeling people remains a dangerous tool too often used to promote both fringe and mainstream political ideas that marginalize and justify keeping certain populations out of the country (in both Mexico and the United States).Díaz's regime had grown strong, affecting every single aspect of life. Magonismo's concerns with the Díaz government's abuse of power were legitimate. Local jefaturas led by unscrupulous jefes políticos often sexually abused women as they wielded regional control. On a more national scale, Mexican agents wooed foreign investors with endless natural resources, access to cheap, readily available labor, and guarantees of a safe environment for US capital investments. This alliance went a long way. As Hernández explains, besides aiding Díaz in his quest to make Mexico modern, the safeguarding of US interests in Mexico yielded high returns. US agents worked to keep unruly, “bad” Mexicans such as Flores Magón at bay. Flores Magón and others had no other option than to take their movement underground, even while serving prison sentences in some of the period's most notorious jails. The silencing of movements by discrediting their leaders through labeling involved extensive transnational state collaboration and constant surveillance. As Hernández aptly points out, the Mexican state grew stronger as it sought collaboration with the United States to track these individuals who threatened the stability of both countries. Such alliance was further solidified with cooperation from newly formed departments like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Hernández is quick to remind us, however, that while intricate transnational networks of state power could threaten democratic visions, grassroots networks rooted in alliances of workers, writers, and individuals seeking a dignified way of life—on both sides of the border—remained a constant threat to government officials. In the end, no strong transnational surveillance state could contain Magonismo's vision of a new and more equitable world. As the movement inspired many to demand land, women's, labor, and political rights, it also witnessed internal fissures, competing personal agendas, financial crises, and the continuation of a transnational crackdown on suspected rebeldes. As landed regional elites including Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza eventually served as president of Mexico, Magonismo meshed, clashed, or revived under new sociopolitical banners. As Flores Magón took his last breath and the revolution became institutionalized, Magonismo left an indelible mark on the growing Latino community in the United States. This legacy's importance sets this book apart from many others on Flores Magón. Bad Mexicans centers the way in which Magonista ideals shaped US residents and workers. Whether via labor collectives such as the Industrial Workers of the World or community-based efforts to end racially based lynching in Texas and other states, Hernández shows how Mexican and US history have always been entwined. Magonismo was a movement that countered a transnational vision of order and progress that favored industrial capitalist development over the lives of ordinary people; it not only sparked the beginning of one of the bloodiest revolutions of the twentieth century but uncovered the brutality with which US state and federal agents handled suspected revolutionaries, making clear its profound influence on contemporary ideas shaping immigration policy, law enforcement practices, and race relations.

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

“Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s–1930s by Christine Bold (review)

Reviewed by: “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s–1930s by Christine Bold Cecilia Morgan Bold, Christine–“Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s–1930s. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. 377 p. Will Rogers. Go-won-go Mohawk. Princess White Deer. Princess Chinquilla. Chester Dieck. Also: Princess Watahwaso, Young Chief Poolaw, Molly Spotted Elk, and Princess Wahletka. This roll call of Indigenous—and not-so-Indigenous—vaudeville performers represents the major players who appear in Christine Bold’s “Vaudeville Indians,” a book that breaks new ground in the history of Indigenous performance in non-Indigenous spaces, the history of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century performance, and, more specifically, the history of vaudeville. While much has been written about the latter, Bold’s is the first book-length study of the presence and influence of Indigenous people in this highly influential, if short-lived, medium. While histories of vaudeville suggest that Indigenous performers were a very small and insignificant minority in vaudeville, Bold amasses sufficient evidence to demonstrate such was not the case. Her meticulous and thorough research clearly shows that Indigenous performers were ubiquitous on vaudeville circuits throughout North America and, in some cases, in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; their presence in this form of commercial entertainment was thus both transcontinental and transnational. Bold invites us to consider the multiple ways in which Indigenous performers created Indigenous spaces through their work, arguing that, despite having to contend with racial stereotypes that pervaded vaudeville, they were able to exert degrees of creative control over skits, dances, and songs; such control also extended to the costumes and props they used. Moreover, far from appearing anachronistic or as remnants of a vanishing race, these Indigenous performers demonstrated that they were fully integrated into the modernity represented by [End Page 189] vaudeville, itself shaped by the rhythms of industrial capitalism. Furthermore, because vaudeville was a central influence on early American film, these men and women influenced one of the most influential—and international—forms of mass entertainment of the twentieth century. Bold first provides an overview of vaudeville, the presence and workings of Indigenous networks that brought Indigenous people to its stages, and the reasons why they chose a career as performers. The rest of the book is structured around the careers of select performers; interspersed between Bold’s chapters are brief explorations or, as she calls them, “vaudeville numbers” that examine the work of certain individuals, such as Will Rogers and Molly Spotted Elk, in detail, thus providing microhistories of her central themes. Bold’s use of collective biography gives us intimate, detailed portraits of these highly mobile people and serves as a useful corrective to depictions of Indigenous performers only in the aggregate, as anonymous figures who lacked specific histories and genealogies. Moreover, although Bold reminds us of the importance of place and nation to these performers and locates them firmly in their communities, she also points to common themes that linked their lives and experiences: the need to make a living and the economic opportunities that vaudeville offered; the desire to be seen as part of a vibrant, modern culture defined on Indigenous terms; and, the potential that vaudeville offered to sidestep the increasing reach of the settler nation-state. Although other commercial opportunities for performance existed alongside those of vaudeville, Bold reminds us that the most common of those—the Wild West Show—not only denied Indigenous performers agency (as it was organized in a hierarchical fashion and directed by White managers), the large arenas in which the shows were performed physically alienated performers from their audiences. In contrast, the theatres which housed vaudeville shows were smaller and allowed performers and audiences greater proximity and, thus, greater interaction and intimacy. Finally, although vaudeville’s skeptical, sometimes cynical tone tended to promote an atomized, highly individualized picture of society, the predominance of family networks within Indigenous performers’ lives and careers meant that their work was structured by community and collectivity. Bold also calls our attention to the importance of material culture, such as clothing and ornamentation, as a means of understanding the dimensions of indigeneity in these performers’ presentations (unfortunately, many of the photographs she analyzes to...

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On