Working-class Institutions Research Articles

Working-Class Institutions, Amazon and The Politics of Local Economic Development in Western Queens

In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of two locations for their second headquarters. While there had certainly been criticism and organizing against the proposed deal, given that it had the vocal support of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, most New Yorkers had assumed that the deal would be implemented. Then, rather surprisingly, on February 14th, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the deal and its decision not to come to LIC. This article uses the case of Amazon and other large scale developments in western Queens to discuss the conflictual and often messy politics of local economic development (LED) in working class communities. It argues that urban studies pays too little attention to how and why working class organizations participate in the politics of LED; and often thereby shape the enacted policies of LED.

Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man

Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man

Remembering Leo Panitch (1945–2020)

Late in December 2020, the socialist world lost an important member, Leo Panitch. Born into a North End Winnipeg Jewish immigrant subculture “in which working class institutions and socialist ideas...

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACTDuring the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.

Twenty-First Century “Populism:” Not for the Unions and a Good Thing Too

AbstractOn both the left and the right the phrase “populism” has lost any tangible meaning; or rather it is the default word used to describe otherwise unorganized and atomized anti-elite sentiment of almost any sort. The labor movement is a genuinely anti-corporate and anti-elite effort to empower workers both white and of color, but few commentators describe it as “populist,” and correctly so. This is because trade unions have an organized leadership, a concrete program, and the capacity to exist once the fever of the election season has passed. In his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders largely missed the much needed opportunity to defend and legitimize these working-class institutions for millions of potential members.

Democrazia operaia. La dottrina delle istituzioni rivoluzionarie nel Gramsci ordinovista

The author traces, through articles written by Gramsci during the first year and a half of release of «L'Ordine Nuovo», the development of Factory Council's doctrine. Inspired by the voluntary initiatives in Turin factories, the young Sardinian processes, since the summer of 1919, a revolutionary theory gathered on the role of working-class institutions. The extensive task of the Factory, in a materially and spiritually devastated postwar industrial society, forces the political thinker to reshape the traditional functions of the two representative proletarian institutions: Labor Union and Political Party. Only rethinking about how they work, anchored in patterns typical of the bourgeois society, it's possible to lead to success the revolutionary movement of the most aware Italian workers: from Turin industries can arise the future construction of Italian Soviet republic that, after the victory of the Revolution in all countries, will be melted in international communist society.

Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience

In the opening paragraph of their introduction to this collection of essays, the editors note that it has been twenty-five years since the publication of the “path-breaking” Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (coedited by Michael B. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, 1983), which announced the arrival of the new labor history (p. 1). While the editors hope that this current volume will also serve “as a marker of an important transitional moment in labor history,” it is not clear that the essays included here show as much of a paradigm shift as that earlier work (ibid.). Where the new labor history changed the focus from working-class institutions (that is, unions) to workers, this collection continues that tradition of writing history from the bottom up. Indeed, the last three essays, included in a section labeled “New Directions in U.S. Labor History,” are specifically meant to suggest new theoretical approaches that historians of labor and the working class should adopt. The first eight essays, in contrast, are meant to showcase new, original research by leading scholars in the field.

Globalisation, Skill Formation and the Varieties of Capitalism Approach

This paper is concerned to evaluate the varieties of capitalism approach to global institutional convergence and divergence as represented by the skill formation and welfare state theory of Margarita Estevez-Abe, Torben Iversen and David Soskice. They argue that the configuration of particular skills and labor markets distinctive of national economies can explain key aspects of welfare state provision. This paper makes the case that the generation and utilization of skills is fundamentally changing as a result of developments within multinational companies (MNCs). The empirical data with respect to the critique of Estevez-Abe et al's theory comes from a three-year study of MNCs' skill strategies. The study comprises 190 interviews with senior managers in 20 MNCs in three sectors -- electronics and information technology, automobiles and finance. Insofar as skill is related to strengthening working-class institutions and power, then the skills capture thesis suggests a weakening of such institutions and the influence they have on welfare state institutions.

Postscript: Australian and British Labour Compared

At the outset I should make it eminently clear that I am expert in neither Australian nor British labour history. As a Canadian labour historian, I have read broadly in both fields but can claim no particular research expertise in either. I can claim, however, a broad interest in the development of comparative and transnational approaches to the study of the working class. Undoubtedly, this interest was the basis for Greg Patmore and Neville Kirk's request that I produce a brief afterword or postscript for this collection of essays. In April 1987 a group of Canadian labour historians met with Welsh colleagues in the beautiful setting of Gregynog Hall new Newtown in mid-Wales. Under the joint leadership of Deian Hopkin, then editor of Llafur, and myself, Canadian and Welsh colleagues learned much from each other in comparing working-class development in the two geographic areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Approximately 20 months later, a similar group of Canadians traveled to Sydney, Australia to participate in a joint conference with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.2 Both of these conferences, while undoubtedly productive and stimulating, left their organisers frustrated with the limitations of simply placing two national perspectives side-by-side with no explicit effort to tease out the comparative insights. Hence, Patmore and Kealey devised the technique utilised in a second Australian Canadian conference in Sydney, and repeated in this British-Australian volume. Experts from each national context wrote theme papers on their country but then they were asked to work together to develop a truly comparative essay. The results of the first effort appeared in 1996, and this collection represents the fruits of the most recent collaboration between the Australian and British Societies for the Study of Labour History.3 One significant difference between the two efforts is that fewer of the final matchups are contained in the current volume. As Kirk suggests in his introduction, it is to be hoped that the conference presenters on historiography, race, gender and the passages of radicalism and culture will submit their final essays for publication.4 For these would provide a broader context in which to situate the essays published here; in this regard, the historiographie essay would be particularly beneficial. The absence of these essays leave the existing collection rather too narrowly focused on work and the labour movement at the expense of an array of other aspects of workers' lives. The editors are evidently well aware of this fact as the Berger / Patmore essay itself highlights 'the importance of transnational transfer processes for the development of nationally constituted labour movements'.5 We have spoken already about comparative and transnational labour history. It is important that we clearly distinguish these approaches because, while related, they are not identical. As recently refined by Michael Hanagan, 'Transnational labour history studies state border crossings that result from labor market demand, state labor policies, the actions of workers, or the practices of working-class institutions'.6 Hence, not all comparative labour studies qualify because not all of them involve

Teaching 9/11 and Why I'm Not Doing It Anymore

Soon after 9/11, I noticed a similarity between images of Hiroshima after dropping of atomic bomb and wreckage of World Trade Center. Yet popular discourses on tragedy compared attacks on twin towers not with devastation of a civilian population but with attacks on our military ships in Pearl Harbor. This inspired me to think more carefully about how I could provoke students to fight centripetal pull of events. How could I create an environment where students felt both at ease to express their opinions freely and confident enough to challenge false abstractions and simple dichotomies on which certainties are based? Where could they find tools to break into monolithic discourses that were being erected? Sacred Heart University, where I teach media studies, is a working-class institution an hour from New York City. Many students come from metropolitan New York area and had family and friends who worked or lived in lower Manhattan at time of attacks. Some had internships in the city. Some are sons and daughters of uniformed service personnel or are themselves firefighters, police officers, or postal workers. And a number of students have their tuition paid by military. Still, within student body, there is diversity in political awareness and political sophistication. This essay is about a course I taught during 2002-03 academic year, Reading Seminar in Media and Cultural Theory. This one-semester seminar is an exit course, a culminating experience for students majoring in media studies, and a bonding opportunity for senior class, especially important to part-time and returning students. It tackles advanced work in theoretical and critical context of mass media as social phenomenon: their ontologies, codes and conventions, productions of meaning, and positioning of viewer/reader. The course uses specific problematics, which change nearly every year, to encourage critical and creative thinking about ways media affect our personal and collective consciousness. The role of instructor is primarily Socratic: to pose questions that unsettle and challenge, to test orthodoxies, and to suggest routes by which students can discover theoretical methods appropriate for their endeavors. I decided to devote 2002-03 senior reading seminar to study of representations of Holocaust and events of 9/11. We explored theories of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Hayden White by concentrating on how Holocaust and recent attacks on United States have been represented in media and in popular imagination. I did not mean to equate 9/11 and Holocaust; rather, I wanted to draw on substantial body of literature on how Holocaust has been represented to acquire methods that we might adapt for our own analyses of representations of 9/11: representations of attacks on World Trade

The Faces in Lonesome's Crowd: Imaging the Mass Audience in A Face in the Crowd

The Faces in Lonesome's Crowd: Imaging the Mass Audience in A Face in the Crowd Courtney Maloney In 1958, Raymond Williams asked readers: "who are the masses?" Williams had two answers. First he asserted that, "in practice," in the specific location of mid-century British society, the masses "can hardly be other than the working people." At the same time, however, Williams notes the emergence of the use of the term "mass" as one of opprobrium, and observes: "The masses are always the others, whom we don't know, and can't know." Ultimately, Williams comes to the conclusion that there are no masses, "there are only ways of seeing people as masses" (299-300). I begin this study of Λ Face in the Crowd with Williams' ruminations on the term "masses" because the three ways of thinking about "masses" he outlines suggest the issues at stake in reading a film which makes a representation of a mass audience of television central to its narrative . Director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg collaborated closely on A Face in the Crowd, a film conceived by both of them as "a warning to the American people" about the dangerous power of television to manipulate a mass audience (qtd. in Neve, Film and Politics 197). A Face in the Crowd does indeed make a number of sharp critiques of the television industry's ability to sway public opinion, focusing especially on its propensity to allow the control exerted by advertising sponsors to influJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (Fall 1999): 251-277. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 252 JNT ence the political realm. In order to make this point, the filmmakers' characterization of television's mass audience relies on assumptions corresponding to Williams' first two formulations of "the masses" (that is, as working people and as other people), and simultaneously enacts a process of "seeing people as masses." Here, "the masses" carries its negative, dismissive connotation. In Culture and Society, Williams critiques the common discursive elision of "masses" as the majority and "masses" as the mob, noting that such references projected the majority of the population as a threat to culture and democracy. On the contrary, Williams argues, it is this use of the terms "masses" and "mass" as a label of opprobrium which is anti-democratic (297-300). The idea of "the masses" in Williams' discussion is contrasted with that of "community," and especially the foundation of community embodied in working-class institutions and organizations: the ethic of solidarity (328). Although in Culture and Society "mass" and "solidarity" are contrasting ways of conceiving of the social aggregate, in Keywords, Williams acknowledges the positive sense of "mass" as "directly comparable to solidarity. It was when the people acted together, 'as one man,' that they could effectively change their condition" (194). Reflected in Williams' treatment of "masses" is the term's polysemy: one usage with dismissive and demeaning connotations, and another to describe a collective of people with social agency. A Face in the Crowd represents "the masses" in the form of a television audience possessing intriguing hints of an agency which is ultimately undermined. Most critics, such as Thomas H. Pauly, Lloyd Michaels, and John Yates, for example, agree that the film portrays the television-viewing public as a mass of gullible dupes. None, however, have looked closely at the nature of this representation: the imaging of the mass audience as specifically working-class, and the ways some of the responses of this fictional audience to its TV idol could be interpreted as acts of power and resistance. It is worth tracing these ambiguities to show how this film, so often dismissed for what Pauly calls Kazan's "overblown styling" (220), reflected the contest of meaning in the polysemous term "masses." In the end, however, the force of the narrative carries the negative sense. The actions of the TV audience are moot; "the masses" that Kazan and Schulberg imagine are indeed powerless as well as duped. The Faces in Lonesome's Crowd 253 Why does A Face in the Crowd represent the "mass audience" the way it does? One way of answering this question would be to look at...

The blitz, civilian morale and the city: mass-observation and working-class culture in Britain, 1940–41

One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban centres and the continuity of working-class institutions helped shape and maintain morale during the critical period of 1940–41

GENDERING WELFARE STATE THEORY

Feminist scholarship on the relative importance of working-class institutional strength in the economy and in the state has led to two divergent conclusions. Radical feminists argue that working-class institutions dominated by men produce male-biased outcomes; socialist feminists hold that working-class institutions promote classwide interests that benefit women as well as men. This article addresses this debate by applying generic and gendered working-class strength models of the welfare state in an examination of women's public pension quality. Quality is measured as women's average pension (1) compared with that of men, (2) relative to women's average earnings, and (3) compared with the average wage in the society. The authors find support for the socialist feminist view. Working-class institutions, having historically organized and represented the interests of working men, benefit women by improving the security and adequacy of their retirement incomes, but it is women's access to working-class economic and political institutions that brings greater economic equality with men in old age.

German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism, and: Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts

Reviewed by: German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism, and: Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts Richard Bodek German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism. Donna Harsch. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Pp. 398. $45.00 Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts. Alan Steinweis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Pp. 233. $34.95. The history of the Weimar-era German Social Democratic Party (SPD) is usually told as follows. 1 The party, and the larger movement attached to it, was monolithic. Its mindset was that of a middle-aged petit bourgeois: stolid, unimaginative, and unadventurous. The active, heroic era of the Empire was gone forever; leaders like August Bebel were replaced by a crowd of faceless bureaucrats. 2 According to this story, the political energy during the Weimar era belonged either to the Communists or to the National Socialists. Donna Harsch’s German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism should give the lie to these easy assumptions. According to Harsch, rather than being trapped in rigid uniformity, the Social Democratic movement was a mansion with many rooms—or, to mix metaphors—riven by contrasting visions of what it was and should be. Furthermore, the movement’s ultimate breakdown was due not to a lack of imagination, but rather to a surfeit. Opposing assumptions about correct Socialist politics canceled one another out, ending in the movement’s ultimate paralysis. A second corrective to the literature is Harsch’s contention that the Social Democratic movement experienced a period of reinvigoration at the end of Weimar, a reinvigoration that sadly did not last long enough to stem the Nazi tide. Harsch carefully examines the literature and conferences sponsored by the SPD during the Republican era. Rather than papering over the differences within the movement, or discounting the seriousness of party leftists (a mistake often made by contemporary Communists and later historians), Harsch examines the variety of political positions and solutions to Weimar’s crises propounded across the party’s political spectrum. Although she is quick to point out similarities among the positions (their general belief that politics should be a rational endeavor, their assumptions that class interests are real interests), she carefully dissects the differences among the party’s left and right, even as she questions the utility of this easy distinction. The central question for Harsch is why the SPD, at the height of its power in 1928, was outmaneuvered from the end of that year until the end of the republic. Her first chapter shows that the movement’s apparent strength in 1928 hid a number of fundamental weaknesses. Its constituent organizations had very different agendas. The trade unions were more interested in social welfare programs than in democracy. The Reichsbanner—ostensibly an independent republican paramilitary force, but ultimately a Social Democratic organization—functioned as a propaganda machine for the republican ideal, but resisted a full-scale integration with bourgeois organizations. Although the party itself was a mixture of left-wing and [End Page 251] right-wing tendencies, its executive was well in place. The average member of the party executive was fifty-four years old and from a skilled working-class background. The party itself acted and spoke like a working-class institution, but the percentage of its membership that could be considered to be proletarian had dropped from the prewar period. Members were skilled and aging. Perhaps Harsch’s discussion of ideology is the key to explaining the SPD’s collapse. She convincingly argues three points. The party’s center defended democracy, but never developed plans to extend it. The left wanted to extend democracy, but had no strategy with which to do so. Harsch focuses on the party’s lack of goals and strategy as well as its inability to project itself as a force to lead a nation, rather than a class within it. The rest of Harsch’s book is a series of chronologically organized case studies that test her thesis. The period from June 1928 to March 1930 took the SPD from a successful...

The New Labor History in American History Textbooks

If the new labor history has not changed the face of American historiography in the past twenty years, it certainly ranks among the discipline's most exciting developments. Focusing on the relationship of workers and working-class institutions to the larger social and political culture, labor historians ranging from Herbert G. Gutman and David Montgomery to Christine Stansell and Mary H. Blewett have broadened definitions of the political, challenged traditional views of how economic structure is shaped, and provided much of the empirical data that has encouraged us to rethink the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in constructing national identity.' How much of this scholarship has crept into textbooks? In this essay, we explore how well the new labor history has been incorporated into seven popular texts used in college level introductory United States history courses. We have not included here the one textbook that is built around working people's centrality to United States history, the American Social History Project's Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (originally conceived and directed by Herbert G. Gutman), but we heartily recommend it to those who wish to place working people's perspectives at the core of their courses.2

Disposition Is Not Action: The Rise and Demise of the Knights of Labor

Recent theoretical and historical studies of working-class formation have raised important doubts about standard interpretations of the American working class. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the renewed debate over “American exceptionalism,” that unexpected combination of political conservatism and weak working-class institutions in the nation that underwent the modern world's first democratic revolution. Once it was popular to argue that American workers felt no need for collective action, either because of a classlessness that was firmly rooted in the psyche of the first new nation or because of an innate job consciousness that was able to attain full flowering only in the United States, that most bourgeois of countries. But two decades of social history have documented such a rich diversity of militant working-class activity that such explanations are now rarely invoked.

COMPETITIVE STRATEGY AND COLLECTIVE ACTION IN THE UK BREWING INDUSTRY:

Between 1985 and 1988 we were involved in research and consultancy for the Working Men's Club and Institute Union in the United Kingdom. This organisation of voluntary clubs is unique in Europe and has been identified as potentially the largest single consumer group in the European Community. It is active in the political sphere at both Westminster (where it organises the largest All‐Party Parliamentary Committee with 181 sitting members of both houses) and at Strasbourg (a smaller group of active M.E.P.s) and it has set up mechanisms for negotiation for national accounting with the major brewers, although the organisation is itself the major shareholder in two smaller clubs' breweries. Nevertheless, the club union is in a worrying decline, and one of the contributory factors to this has been its commercially naive attitude to the brewery companies with whom its members do business. In addition, the organisation is a democratic affiliation, with what has been argued as being the most democratic but also the most cumbersome and frustrating structure of any British working class institution. In this paper we attempt to describe some of the tensions between democratic altruism and commercial necessity which bedevil the continuing existence of the organisation, and of its constituent clubs, in the context of current industry strategy. Part of this research was sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council grant No. F09 0067, 1986; a further project by the Working Men's Club and Institute Union itself.

American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive Era: The Socialist Sunday School

Described by one unsympathetic observer in Buffalo as Schools of Nonsense and by one ardent participant in Milwaukee as rebel factories, the movement to establish Socialist Sunday schools (S.S.S.) in the United States during the early twentieth century is perhaps one of the best kept secrets of American socialist and educational historiography.' This essay attempts to rectify that situation by analyzing an educational movement that falls outside of the traditional and progressive educational camps of the early 1900s. During these years numerous working-class radicals provided their children with a formal, weekend education that lacked the strong capitalistic biases dominant in the public schools. The Socialist Sunday schools represent the most obvious, formal, and widespread educational activity for children ever undertaken by American Socialists. The development of these schools testified to the activism of grassroots radicals who flourished during an era of progressive change. Moreover, their efforts are particularly noteworthy in light of the theoretical writings of Antonio Gramsci, in particular his Prison Notebooks of 1929 to 1935. Gramsci's formulation of the war of position, in which working-class institutions and culture gradually surround the bourgeois State apparatus with a counter hegemony, and of the importance of the working-class creating its own organic intellectuals, gives to this fledgling, ultimately unsuccessful Sunday school movement added historical and theoretical significance.2 Whichever view one takes-that they taught nonsense or rebellion-the Socialist Sunday schools deserve serious attention as among the

Transatlantic working-class institutions

This paper investigates the migration of English and Irish textile workers from Lancashire, England to Fall River, Massachusetts. Historians have traditionally focused on migration and immigrants in terms of the image of the deracinated peasants. This paper looks at the influence of the industrial experience in Europe before migration on the culture and institutions of industrial migrants and the impact of that experience and those institutions on the American industrial city. These migrants brought with them institutions and a consciousness which were forged in Europe and which directly affected the American setting. By looking at the interactions between Fall River and Lancashire and the functioning of the formal and informal institutions of the working class of Fall River the paper will analyse the transatlantic nature of the working-class experience.

The City and Community

This chapter seeks to analyze the urban environment in order to understand how community functioned to maintain militancy and how working class institutions, both formal and informal, have acted to maintain strong class solidarity and contribute to collective action. It looks at the effect and nature of immigration patterns and the modes of integrating immigrants into existing working class organizations. The workers in both neighboring cities lived in working class ghettos. In the late nineteenth century the ghettos of Fall River took on ethnic characteristics. Immigrants first settled in areas around the mills which had brought them to the city. The centrality or dispersion of the urban setting, the demands of the work place, and the nature of immigration acted, depending upon a whole configuration of elements, to strengthen or weaken community institutions. The needs of the members of the working class community created by the structure of work reinforced community institutions.