Working-class Organizations Research Articles

Working-Class Movies

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL CLASS AND THE SILENT CINEMA IN the United States has been a perennial issue in film scholarship. Stephen J. Ross's Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America is the latest contribution to the subject and its most systematic study to date. As a labor historian, Ross brings a subtle grasp of the history of class relations in the United States to the topic. Using archival sources that cinema historians have largely ignored, such as labor newspapers and the proceedings and papers from working-class organizations, Ross has rediscovered a group of radical filmmakers from the silent era. Unfortunately, in placing their stories into context, he sometimes overstates the extent to which the motionpicture industry before World War I helped to foster an oppositional

The General Law of US Capitalist Accumulation: Contingent Work and the Working Class

For several years now, there has been a minor rekindling of interest in the ideas of Karl Marx, hailed in the New Yorker as “the next big thinker.” Like other articles supposedly professing sympathy with Marx, this exhibits a common misconception. It is also underwritten with the following revisionism: Given that the agents of social change–the “modern working class”–are shrinking drastically and disappearing fast, Marx’s revolutionary hopes are doomed. Nowonly a residual Marx prevails, a Marx‐lite, a mere analyzer of the defects of bourgeois society. This article seeks to contest these distortions. It brings Marx to bear on the present US context, positing him as an apt economic critic and telling political prophet of millennial America. It addresses standard clichés about his class definition and emphasizes how Marx really left us with a flexible, dialectical theory, hinging on the process of capital accumulation. From the standpoint of accumulation dynamics, we can justifiably argue that the working class is still growing, not shrinking in numbers. From this perspective, too, we might better comprehend the whole phenomenon of corporate downsizing and “contingent work” within the remit of Marx’s different forms of relative surplus populations. The attendant questions about working class organization and politics are dealt with in the paper’s conclusion, which illustrates how Marxian‐style resistance is already beginning to take hold in the United States.

The “Polishness” of Production: Factory Politics and the Reinvention of Working-Class National and Political Identities in Russian Poland's Textile Industry, 1880-1910

While the development of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism has received considerable scholarly attention, it has almost always focused on how the intelligentsia became the standard-bearers of Polish national consciousness. As a result, we know very little about how other members of Polish society constructed national identities. This is particularly perplexing when it comes to studying Russian Poland's workers, for there was no dearth of Polish nationalist activity among these workers. National demands articulated by Łodź's Polish workers during strikes in 1892, for example, inspired a group of social democrats to abandon internationalism and instead create the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). During the revolution of 1905, nationalism once again assumed an important place in both working-class protest and organization. Workers played a prominent role in the Polish school strikes. They also supported and sustained a uniquely Polish phenomena—a nationalist working-class political party, the National Union of Workers (NZR). Although the NZR and its constituent trade unions could be found within every industry within Russian Poland, the organization gained its greatest foothold within the textile industry. Moreover, it was within the textile industry in 1906 where bitter debates between nationalist and socialist workers erupted in violence after a disgruntled weaver from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) concluded a political argument with an NZR coworker by gunning him down in the street.

Sibling Rivalry on the Left and Labor Struggles in Colombia During the 1940s

AbstractOn the Colombian Left during the 1940s, little differentiated the rank and file of the Communist party from the left wing of the Liberal party. Individuals commonly moved back and forth between the two groups. Animosity was rampant among leaders, however, as shown by the clashes between the principal compañeros and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán's left-Liberal populist mobilization. As this rivalry played out in the Communist strongholds of the union movement, it became apparent that a large portion of the organized working class (perhaps a majority) supported Gaitán even though their leaders dismissed him as a fascist. Workers, organized and unorganized, clearly demonstrated their belief that Gaitanismo was a radical movement of change despite the fact that it arose within the traditional party system.

G.D.H. Cole and William Cobbett

William Cobbett was, during his own lifetime, a highly controversial figure who often found it necessary to defend himself against supposed misrepresentation. His historical persona remains no less controversial. The complexities of Cobbett's career and character have supported a variety of interpretations, and many writers this century have felt the need to define ‘the real Cobbett’. Modern misrepresentations have arisen less from false stories invented to damn him than from the misleading emphases employed to praise him, with both Left and Right seeking in their different ways to appropriate what they see as his legacy. For conservatives, he has been an essentially timeless figure, standing for Old England and all that may have made such a place great. Writers on the Left have treated him rather as a figure of the past, rationalised to fit into the rise of working-class consciousness and organisation, and divested of some aspects unseemly in an early representative of ‘the cause’. Cobbett has been adopted as an important figure for the Left, but readings based on the assumptions about working-class radicalism held by the modern British Labour movement have often found it necessary to exclude aspects of his writings as inconsistent, or at least idiosyncratic.

Community Organizations Recruiting Community Participation: Predicaments in Planning

Planners usually justify community participation in terms of benefits to participants, such as claiming democratic rights, getting power, learning, solving problems, and building community. At the same time, community organizations depend on participation for the legitimacy, effort, and money needed to govern and carry out work. Organizations encounter predicaments when they cannot find one group that provides all three. They must choose among imperfect and conflicting participation arrangements, with risks of acting ineffectively or not at all. The article analyzes participation predicaments in planning in a working-class white ethnic community organization and an upper- middle-class Jewish community federation. The latter can raise more money from community members, but both face similar problems in organizing the participation needed to act.

Globalism and the Left

If imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, globalism is the latest stage of imperialism – and, yet, nowhere in the whole literature of the Left is there any evidence of a systematic attempt to understand, let alone combat, the havoc being wreaked on Third World countries by capital in its latest avatar. Instead, the Left has either sought refuge from the storms of change in the Orthodox Marxist Church, intoning capitalism is capitalism is capitalism and rubbishing the disbelievers, or, while accepting the epochal shift in capitalism, continued to resort to the particular (Marxist) analysis of a particular (industrial) period to envisage capitalism’s early demise, hopefully at its own hands. The first lot and the more important maintain that the universalisation of capitalism is no new thing – that it was always global (in intent, presumably, if not in deed), only now it is more so. And the opposition to capitalism is still in place. The nation state has not been overrun by global capital, there’s still room for manoeuvre there; the polity still allows of enough democracy for us to take advantage of it in our fight against capital; the working class (in the developed capitalist countries) is still the agent of change and working-class organisation the vehicle of change. To depart from any of these eternal verities and assert that there is an epochal change in capitalism – at least as significant as the transition from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism – which requires us to rethink our strategies and realign our forces, is to succumb to the disease of ‘the post-modern Left’ and all those others who declare, with Thatcher, that there is no alternative (TINA) to capitalism. Merely to utter the word globalisation, which, according to this ‘school’, is a right-wing shibboleth deriving from neo-liberal ideology, is to sing hosannas to capitalism while laying premature wreaths on a living, breathing socialism. Hence, its followers reject the term Globalism and the Left

The Dynamics of Class Politics and National Economies in Globalisation: The Marginalisation of the Unacceptable

Globalisation literature neglects domestic class politics and the national economy as important variables. Although the importance of nation-states is accepted they are viewed with the assumption that the global economy is the determining factor in state policies. However class conflict or class alliances involving the state, national capital and the organised working class are vital in explaining the timing and process of globalisation, and national economies remain the most important spaces in the global economy. The global economy must be understood as always displaying an international and national element.

Trade Unions in Zimbabwe: For Democracy, Against Neo-Liberalism

The author examines the impact of organised labour on the process of democratisation in Zimbabwe. However, the extent to which democratisation and economic reform has been achieved has been strongly conditioned, on the one hand, by the weaknesses and divisions within the opposition, and by strength and skills of the incumbent regime, on the other. The outcome is the current situation of stalemate in which the formations of working-class organisation have proved powerful enough to defend and win limited political rights, but too weak to topple the formidable edifice of the de facto one-party State in favour of a bourgeois democratic regime. This raises questions of strategy which are touched on at the end of this paper.

The Sociology of Work in Latin America

This article on the development of the sociology of work in Latin America addresses changes in the main themes, interdisciplinary relationships, and research methodologies during three periods, beginning in the 1950s. During this era, the themes shifted from modernization, to working-class organization under democracy and dictatorship, and, most recently, to structural adjustment and economic globalization. The sociology of work has become increasingly linked to other social sciences, history, management, and industrial engineering. Researchers use an array of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Current challenges for the discipline in Latin America include the relationships between the labor process and labor markets, and between intrafirm processes and interfirm connections, and the introduction of gender and labor culture perspectives into the analysis of new production paradigms.

Uprooting tradition: Rethinking the place and space of labour organization

This paper considers contemporary geographical debate about the position of labour in the global economy. I suggest that interpretations of working class organization have been overly focused upon the decline in trade union membership and influence, neglecting the new opportunities that have arisen for labour to organize, often at different spatial scales and using different methods than was previously the case. For good reason, scholars have concentrated attention upon the black cloud that comprises the bulk of trade union experience, but in so doing they have largely neglected the glimpses of a silver lining which hold new possibilities for the future. One such avenue of possibility, which provides the focus of debate in the second half of this paper, are the European Works Councils, which are facilitating trans‐spatial contact between workers in multinational corporations. I suggest that such developments have profound geographical and political significance and they do much to unstable the contemporary conceptual paradigms through which we view the position of labour.

Class in a Multicultural Age: Organization of American Historians Meeting

The April 1997 conference of Organization of American Historians (OAH) in San Francisco was thematically centered on the meanings of citizenship. Despite relatively expansive body of work by labor histor ians which has directly or indirectly addressed this theme over years, there were relatively few sessions that dealt with labor or working-class history. I attended several of these panels but was most intrigued by a session on Recasting Citizenship: The Uses of Class in a Multicultural Age. The papers and discussion at this panel incorporated both controver sial issues within field of labor history and issues pertinent to future labor and social scholarship?not to mention movements. The panelists represented an impressive cross-section of scholars who have written against grain of a field once centered exclusively on white, male, organized working class. Elizabeth Faue, Robin Kelley, James Horton, Alice Kessler-Harris, and David Roediger have each in their own way challenged and expanded our understanding of class in relation to community, race, and gender. Their observations and comments at this session both sharpened that challenge and generally moved from a schol arly focus to a broader context of academic and social activism. Specifically, issue of uses of class in a multicultural age was approached as a methodological problem, as a political problem within academy, and as a challenge to building a new and vital labor movement. Elizabeth Faue (Wayne State University) opened session with question, What do we do with class in terms of citizenship? She identified a fundamental problem in this relationship by noting that although notions of citizenship have historically been rooted in work and work identities, class and citizenship have been articulated in languages which are both reinforcing and competing. She continued with contention that, gener ally, class has been excluded from national discourse on meaning of citizenship, with a few notable exceptions: rise of American Federa tion of Labor in 1920s, which brought to forefront idea of respectable (white, male) citizen-worker; labor movement of 1930s led by Congress of Industrial Organizations, through which class deter mined scope of claims made on citizenship; and era from 1979 to present, in which class has come into competition with race and gender as a primary determiner of identity. In current era, relationship of class to citizenship and state has remained unclear.

The Union of Australian Women: The Childcare Issue

This paper argues that one forgotten group that played a significant part in the development of child care in Victoria is the Union of Australian Women (UAW). As a working class organisation the UAW fought to represent the interests of working women during the 1950s and 1960s. This included a commitment to child care. Because of the dominance of the traditional maternalist groups in the 1950s and 1960s, the UAW was unable to have much influence. However, the conjunction of historical forces at the beginning of the 1970s gave the UAW an opportunity to form new coalitions that challenged the dominance of the traditional children's services groups. The paper begins by outlining the position adopted by the traditional maternalist groups that dominated child care issues in Victoria in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper then explores the early work of the UAW in child care and finally discusses the role of the UAW in the development of community child care. The paper concludes that by using the experience gained over the previous decades, the members of the UAW were well placed to take a leading role in the community child care movement.

The Affluent Worker or the Divided Party? Explaining the Transformation of the ALP in the 1950s

This article argues that the Australian Labor Party was transformed in the 1950s, shedding its rhetorical commitment to socialism as well as many of its democratic ties to the organised working class. It also attempts to explain this transformation. The argument that this transformation was the product of rising working-class incomes and declining class consciousness is considered, before being rejected on both empirical and theoretical grounds. An alternative political explanation, which focuses on the interactions between the Party, its working-class constituency, and its leadership, is then offered. The article thereby aims not only to reconceptualise a specific moment in the history of Labor, but to reorient our theoretical approach to the Party, and our understanding of political change in the early postwar decades.

The Legacy of Eric Williams

The Legacy of Eric Williams George Lamming (bio) Dr. Eric Williams started in a way which to my mind is unique in the history of Caribbean politics. He started with an intensive and quite exhausting campaign of popular education. He turned history, the history of the Caribbean, into gossip so that the story of a people’s predicament seemed no longer the infinite barren track of documents, dates and texts. Everything became news: slavery, colonization, the forgivable deception of metropolitan rule, the sad and inevitable unawareness of native production. His lectures retained always the character of whisper which everyone was allowed to hear, a rumor which experience had established as truth. And whatever misgivings we may have about the ultimate value of popular education, this undertaking, it seems to me, has become an achievement of genius on the part of a teacher. No other West Indian politician has exposed himself so consistently to the gravest of all political risks: the risk of refusing to talk down to an electorate. He distinguished very early and quite clearly between formal education, which is often wasteful, and native intelligence: and having done that, he worked on the native intelligence by demanding at all times an adult attention and response to his lectures. This was an example, probably the first of its kind in our part of the world, of the teacher, in the noblest sense of teacher, turned politician, and of the politician, in the truly moral sense of politician, turned teacher. So when he visited Jamaica shortly after the formation of the People’s National Movement to consult with Norman Manley, they were astonished and amused by the authority of tone with which he spoke about his plans for Trinidad and Tobago. One member of the Manley family told me: “We thought him a bit cracked to be talking as a Government with a party of a few months old and about to face its first election. In Jamaica it took the People’s National Party some twelve years before we won our first election.” In the euphoria of success which had marked his sojourn to Oxford University, Williams made no distinction between dream and reality; indeed he may have unconsciously embraced the belief that dream was the foundation of reality. The People’s National Movement won its first election eight months after it was founded. In my recollection of the period it was thought they would do well and provide the country with its first coherent and critical parliamentary opposition. But victory was beyond the expectations of his most ardent admirers. It was a victory which also contradicted the history of party evolution in other territories, for Williams had maintained a strategic distance from the organized working class which was the twin of the political party in Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, and elsewhere. Nor was [End Page 731] he favored by the old Trinidad traditional colored middle class whose ambition for imperial honors would have made them uncomfortable with the doctor’s language of “colonial” and “imperialist” and “letting down my bucket,” which was not a vessel of high repute. His constituency was the aspiring lower middle class, a generation who were just a leap away from the cane patch, and struggling with belligerent pride to redeem their humble origins. Education was the only weapon that could rescue them from the multiple humiliations of the past. This was the critical importance of Woodford Square. But paradox was at the heart of everything Williams did. His reputation as a man of learning carried a certain mystique in a society where scarcity of education was an imperative of colonial rule. He attracted vast crowds. Men traveled with their children to make sure no member of the family would be deprived of this feast of knowledge. But Williams was not himself a man with a taste for crowds. This proximity to the ordinary man by handshake and pat on the back was a difficult exercise for him to simulate, and he made no effort to overcome what would have been a fatal deficiency in the normal politician. He was not the normal politician; and that was his first essential gift to the political culture of...

Working for Democracy: Brazil's Organized Working Class in Comparative Perspective

Working-class collective action may appear to be in decline. In many ad vanced capitalist countries, industrial working class has shrunk, rates of unionization have dropped, unions have lost power, and parties represent ing labor have slipped in popularity. At same time, new scholarship has questioned universality of class-based collective action, insisting that it is contingent, socially constructed, and historically specific. The relevance of class to contemporary politics, even its very existence, is questioned more and more forcefully. It may be that those who study labor movements will soon study not working-class collective action but in words of a college administrator, the movement of labor from one place to anoth er.1 Yet class identity and working-class collective action as a form of politics are not in decline everywhere. Taking one powerful indicator of such action?the formation of trade unions?we find that percentage of workers in trade unions actually increased even in advanced capitalist countries such as Sweden, Italy, and Canada between 1970 and 1990.2 And in many so-called newly industrializing countries, trade union growth has been explosive in last few decades.3 Brazil is one of those countries. Its trade unionists have become not only numerous, but militant: Since late 1970s unions have played a key role in opposing military regime that was reformed into a civilian one in 1985, in dismantling state controls over labor, and in challenging neoliberal economic reforms. The weight of organized working class has increased mightily in Brazil over last quarter-century, in terms of both its sheer numerical strength and its role as a political actor. Organized labor has also been a key element in growth of support for left-wing parties since Brazil returned to a system of multiparty compe tition in 1982. These parties include Democratic Labor party, or Par tido Democr?tico Trabalhista (PDT); Socialist party, or Partido Social ista Brasileiro (PSB); Communist party, or Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B); and most significantly, Workers' party, or Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). All of these parties have appealed strongly to organized working class in their rhetoric and programs and all, save PDT, increased their representation in national congress in 1994 elections. Together, they control one-fifth of seats in lower house, C?mara dos Deputados. In historiography of Latin American labor, Brazil has often been

The Postwar Social Contract: Comment

The four papers presented in American Historical Association's session on postwar social contract collectively describe a major epoch in history of advanced capitalism and sociopolitical collaboration that underlay three decades of unprecedented postwar economic growth. After an era of depression, war, and turbulent or repressive politics, four countries discussed achieved startling stabilization. The essay writers, who have each produced important historical analyses of their respective soci eties in twentieth century, all agree that a broad social compact be tween capitalist entrepreneurs, delegates of working-class organizations, and political officials was critical to this outcome. Each writer takes pains to demonstrate unique path that his respective society took toward collaboration of capital and labor but still affirms overriding pattern of social collaboration. Exceptionalism, whether of a French, German, Japanese, or American sort, remains no greater than normal di vergence of species within a common genus allows for. The United States remains unique by virtue of ethnic diversity, but is a participant in larger trend, and indeed is perhaps not so important to overall result as earlier works dealing with its Cold War role might suggest. Collectively four papers offer a history of capitalist convergence. Most of other countries of Western Europe and British Commonwealth, I believe, might validly be included in overall model. It would be interesting to ask to what degree Latin American societies could also be assimilated. What were historical bases of postwar compact that these papers all accept? While each writer demonstrates internal pressures to overcome earlier confrontational behavior between capital and labor, each concedes a key role for United States, which was committed to an ideological struggle against communist parties and unions oriented toward Soviet preferences. Although it plays a less significant role in West Ger many, each author highlights division within labor movement such that a strategically important group of moderate, or noncommunist, union leaders accepted a corporatist accommodation with managers on behalf of economic growth and wage increases linked to growth: what I have described as (as papers generously acknowledge) the politics of productivity. In effect, those labor leaders willing to endorse a postwar social compact for growth accepted a linkage of wages to productivity, whereas between 1944 and 1947 many had sought to redistribute social product (or at least to defend real wages in a period of inflation) by labor militancy.

The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy

Economic geographers have neglected the international activities of workers and working class organizations. Worker invisibility has been particularly evident in explanations of the geography of foreign direct investment. Yet for over a century workers have built international labor organizations which have shaped economic and political geographies. This paper examines an international campaign waged on behalf of some 1,700 members of United Steelworkers of America Local 5668 who were locked out of an aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, West Virginia on expiration of their contract in November 1990. The lockout was part of a company plan to break the local union and operate the smelter with a non-union work force. The paper analyzes how Local 5668 and its supporters built a global solidarity network which successfully forced a multibillion-dollar transnational metals trading corporation to reinstate the locked out union workers and sign a new contract. As the paper shows, workers clearly make economic geographies through their actions. Economic geographers should pay greater empirical and theoretical attention to this fact.

Weaving the ethnic fabric: social networks among Swedish-American radicals in Chicago, 1890-1940

The present dissertation deals with how a segment of the Swedish immigrant group mobilized to be included in American society. Three Swedish-American working class organizations have been studied a ...

The Popular Front Pageant: Its Emergence and Decline

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.