Part memoir and part reflective essay, David Ranney's Living and Dying on the Factory Floor is an absorbing read. Shakespeare tells us that “old men forget,” but seventy-nine-year-old Ranney has not forgotten much, and he demonstrates that his experience of industrial life forty years ago still holds lessons for labor activists and scholars today. In the late 1970s, Professor Ranney left academia to do manual work in steel fabrication shops, rendering plants, repair shops, and factories producing boxes and paper cups, all in the immense heavy industrial belt that once sprawled and smoked over southeastern Chicago. Like many other earnest young socialists, he believed that “a new society could be built from the initiatives of ‘mass organizations at the workplace’ ” (ix). What he found was in many ways very different from what he, as a leftist intellectual, had expected. The raw reality of race and class relations was confronting, the work often “brutal, unhealthy, [and] dangerous,” and the plants were often responsible for “serious environmental degradation” (121). Finally, worried about the health effects of toxic environments, most likely blacklisted, and with industrial jobs becoming scarce, he returned to academia. Ranney never forgot this important milestone in his life.Written in an engaging novelistic style, the first half of the book details Ranney's personal experience. In the second section, he ponders what lessons, despite enormous changes, his experiences might provide for contemporary left-wing activists. Ranney, the intellectual-cum-mechanic-and-welder, writes that he “inhabited a unique space where . . . [he] was simultaneously an outsider looking in and an insider looking out” (114).Ranney's characters stay with the reader long after finishing the book and remind us that the working class is not some amorphous mass but is composed of living human beings with strengths and weaknesses. He remembers many of his fellow workers with affection and concern, regretting that they drifted apart after he returned to university life. There is old Frank, a decent Polish American mechanic who happily teaches Ranney the tricks of the trade and who treats his Black and Latino colleagues with respect. Save for when he was in the army, Frank endured the horrible conditions of the Chicago Shortening factory for all his working life, which doesn't stop the company from firing him just weeks before he qualifies for pension rights. There is Charles, an African American worker who becomes Ranney's friend. During a strike, Ranney becomes the only white man he has ever hugged.Alas, Ranney soon finds that Frank's color-blindness is not representative. Two white pipe fitters, hired from the union hall, simply cannot understand why Ranney chooses to associate with the Blacks and Latinos. This epitomizes what Ranney knew in theory: that the working class is rent by fault lines of race and ethnicity and that racism is a problem that cannot be sidestepped. It does not escape Ranney that he is hired, as a greenhorn, for one of the best jobs: he is allowed to leapfrog Black and Latino workers who have toiled for years in the worst jobs in the plant.Ranney is rightly scornful of the Trumpian notion of the postwar years as a great age of “middle-class jobs” and prosperity for American workers. Although many industrial jobs did pay a modest living wage—and wages and conditions have deteriorated vastly since then—the reality of those jobs included toxic fumes, stultifying boredom, physical danger, tyrannical managements, and an entrenched racial/ethnic division of labor overseen by bosses and many unions. By the 1970s, the great wave of social unionism that marked the 1930s had ebbed, and as Ranney explains, Black and Latino workers had never really enjoyed its benefits. Where unions existed—such as at Chicago Shortening—they were often controlled by gangsters who collaborated with managements to crush any signs of independent shop floor organization. When another mob-controlled union offered Ranney and a comrade organizers’ jobs, they declined, worried that if they accepted and remained honest, they might end up wearing concrete boots in the Chicago River.Ranney is intensely critical of other (unspecified) leftist groups that tried to sidestep the crucial question of working-class racism—particularly that of white workers toward Black and Latino workers. Labor activists, he insists, must never lose sight of Marx's maxim that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin while in the black it is branded” (123). This categorical imperative also made pragmatic sense. In Ranney's opinion, employers were happy to ignore racism and self-destructive behaviors because they weakened any chance of successful organization.An unofficial strike at Chicago Shortening is a central incident in the book. The workers were rightly scornful of Local 55 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, which supposedly represented them. The organizer was a racist and most likely mobbed up. He worked hand in glove with management, but when he attempted to ram through a new contract without the workers’ consent, they rebelled and walked off the job. With the union, the company, and the state lined up against them, they lost, but the strike nevertheless gave an indication of what might be and how the “permanencies” of racism could be overcome in the context of a struggle that united workers on the basis of class. Racism is not the product of fixed and immutable “human nature.”.The industrial world that Ranney describes has largely vanished. Many of the factories across America, and much of the world beyond, have closed, and the areas around them are blighted. Ranney reminds us that whereas manufacturing workers made up 22 percent of the workforce in 1979, this number has shrunk to 8 percent today. By the early 1980s, capitalism had fallen into a long downswing. The response was to automate production, make capital highly mobile, and, where necessary, shift production offshore to low-wage, nonunion countries. Vast swaths of the US working class are much worse off today than they were in the period that Ranney describes. The labor movement is a shadow of its former self, and a demagogic half-tyrant, half-buffoon has convinced millions of people that it is possible to “make America great again”—to return to an alleged utopia, for whites at least. It is a profoundly depressing political and social landscape, yet Ranney remains cautiously hopeful. “Some may conclude,” he writes, “that all of the insights that I gained were for naught. But I find it difficult to believe that I was the only one who was deeply touched by what I experienced” (135). He realizes that, at the age of seventy-nine, he “will likely never know whether these insights have been passed along to a new generation of workers and radicals,” but he hopes that those insights can “keep the struggle for a new society alive” (136). He must be heartened by the recent surge in the popularity of socialist ideas among young people, which has rekindled hope for a decent society in which “the full and free development of every human being is its ruling principle” (135).