Footnotes for "The Crisis of Labor and the Left in the United States"

1. Merlin Chowkwanyun catalogues and responds to many of these proclamations in 'The Crisis in Thinking About the Crisis', Renewal, 17, 2009, pp. 57-66. As he points out, the fantasy that crises generate spontaneous revolutionary responses is a venerable one. See Russell Jacoby’s ‘Towards a Critique of Automatic Marxism: The Politics of Crisis Theory from Lukács to the Frankfurt School’, Telos, Winter 1971, pp. 118-46 and 'The Politics of Crisis Theory: Toward the Critique of Automatic Marxism II', Telos, Spring 1975, pp. 3-52. Ralph Miliband provided an important historical antidote to the premise that the left makes its greatest gains in crisis moments, and the tendency to prelapsarian yearnings for days of yore when the left was strong in 'Socialism and the Myth of the Golden Past', Socialist Register 1964, London: Merlin Press, 1964, pp. 92-103.

2. There is a substantial literature on that moment in American political history, but Nelson Lichtenstein, "State of the Union: A Century of American Labor", Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002 and Kim Moody, "An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism", London and New York: Verso, 1998 remain among the most astute accounts.

3. Sam Gindin, 'Unmaking Global Capitalism', Jacobin, 14, 2014, available at https://www.jacobinmag.com, lays out a perspective on the current state of the left and the sources of the current situation, and an argument about the necessary approach to rebuilding a credible left opposition that are almost identical with our own. That is not surprising, as we have been part of an ongoing conversation animated by shared perspectives and a common political project, although our view of the US labour movement in the 1950s and 1960s may be somewhat more sanguine than his. While agreeing with Gindin's larger point that the trade unions developed more as sectional and instrumental organizations, we would stress that even within that limited context the institutional labour movement and trade union culture provided space for articulation of a practice nearer class-struggle unionism and for cultivation of a more sharply politicized and broader class consciousness among rank-and-file workers.

4. Katherine van Wezel Stone, 'The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law', The Yale Law Journal, 90, June 1981, p. 1516. For a cogent overview of the postwar politics of growth at the national level, see Alan Wolfe, America's I"mpasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth", Boston: South End Press, 1982; John Mollenkopf, "The Contested City", Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983; and Robert Collins, "More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America", New York & London: Oxford University Press, 2002.

5. See Jeffrey M. Hornstein, "A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth Century American Middle Class", Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, esp. pp. 119-55; and Robert O. Self, "American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland", Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.

6. Ralph Miliband wonderfully debunked this mythology in his 'Professor Galbraith and American Capitalism', Socialist Register 1968, London: Merlin Press, 1968, pp. 215-29. The sleight-of-hand academics and pundits deployed to make class, and thus class conflict, disappear included shifting discussion of class as a meaningful social category from political economy to culture. This tendency is critiqued in Adolph Reed, Jr., 'Reinventing the Working Class: A Study in Elite Manipulation', New Labor Forum, 13, Fall 2004, pp. 18-26. Penny Lewis, "Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory", Ithaca and London: ILR Press, 2013, discusses the significance of this cultural construction of class in mystifying the sources of opposition to the Vietnam war and the notion of 'hardhat' patriotism.

7. Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007, describes a shift away from an approach stressing the roots of racial inequality in political economy to one focused on individual equal protection and equality of opportunity in civil rights litigation in the late 1940s, a shift that was the result of a combination of incentives and disincentives, including successful challenges to de jure segregation, and the chilling effect of anticommunist hysteria on expression of views that could seem like economic radicalism.

8. Gary Becker, "The Economics of Discrimination", Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

9. For critical discussion of those tendencies in late 1960s and 1970s black American radicalism, see Dean E. Robinson, "Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought", New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 70-136 and 'Black Power Nationalism as Ethnic Pluralism', in Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren et al., Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, Denver, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010, pp. 186-214; and Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

10. Neoliberalism has become a catchword, of course, and taxonomizing it has become something of a cottage industry. Monica Prasad succinctly characterizes it as a practical programme consisting in 'taxation structures that favor capital accumulation over income redistribution, industrial policies that minimize the presence of the state in private industry, and retrenchment in welfare spending'. "The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States", Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 4-5. David Harvey cuts to the heart of the matter in describing neoliberalism as a programme for class power as well as a free-market utopia. "A Brief History of Neoliberalism", Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 2-3. From our perspective, neoliberalism is best summarized as capitalism that has effectively eliminated working-class opposition.

11. Joseph A. McCartin, "Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America", New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

12. Adolph Reed, Jr., 'Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals', Harper's, March 2014, pp. 30-1.

13. In the spirit of full disclosure, both authors were intimately involved in that effort.

14. For discussion of the programme's specifics and more a thorough account of the Labor Party project and its history, see Mark Dudzic and Katherine Isaac, 'Labor Party Time? Not Yet', December 2012, available at http://www.thelaborparty.org; and Derek Seidman, 'Looking Back at the Labor Party: An Interview with Mark Dudzic', New Labor Forum, 23, Winter 2014, pp. 60-4 (and the response by Adolph Reed, Jr., pp. 65-7).

15. The New Party was formed to promote fusion voting as a model for national progressive political action. In 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled in 'Timmins v. Twin Cities Area New Party' that states could not be compelled to permit fusion voting, and the national party quickly faded away. Its offshoot, the Working Families Party (WFP), has thrived in New York, which has a long history of minor parties gaining limited influence through fusion voting. The WFP has been less successful in the seven other states that allow fusion voting, and recently the party expanded into some non-fusion states.

16. On 'activistism' see Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti, '"Action Will Be Taken": Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents', Left Business Observer, available at http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com. See also, Reed, 'Nothing Left'.

17. Adolph Reed, Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, 'Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents', Socialist Register 2012, Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2011, pp. 149-75; Walter Benn Michaels, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality", New York and London: Metropolitan Books, 2006 and 'Against Diversity', New Left Review, 52(July/August), 2008, pp. 33-6; Adolph Reed, Jr., 'Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism', New Labor Forum, 22, Winter 2013, pp. 49-57.

18. Adolph Reed, Jr., 'The "Color Line" Then and Now: The Souls of Black Folk and the Changing Context of Black American Politics', in Reed, Warren et al, Renewing Black Intellectual History, pp. 271-3 and 'The Limits of Anti-racism', Left Business Observer, No. 121, September 2009, available at http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com.

19 Michelle Alexander, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness", New York: The New Press, 2010. For one powerful critique of Alexander's argument, see James Forman, Jr. 'Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow', New York University Law Review, 87, 2012, pp. 21-69.

20. Eric Arnesen provides a careful consideration of the history of scholarship on race and the labour movement in 'Passion and Politics: Race and the Writing of Working-Class History', Journal of the Historical Society, 6, September 2006, pp. 323-56.

21. Even the reliably working-class conscious Labor Notes sometimes lapses into this sort of formulation; see Steve Payne, 'Kellogg's Delivers Memphis a Slap in the Face', Labor Notes, 20 January 2014.

22. Jo Ann Mort, ed., "Not Your Father's Labor Movement", New York: Verso, 1998.

23. See Herman Benson, 'Hybrid Unions: Dead End or Fertile Future?', Dissent, Winter 2009; Melvin Dubofsky, 'The Legacy of Andy Stern', Dissent, 12 May 2010, available at http://www.dissentmagazine.org; and Steve Early, "The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old?", Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.

24. For discussion of this issue see Sam Gindin, 'Puzzle or Misreading? Stagnation, Austerity and Left Politics', The Bullet, No. 920, 31 December 2013, and 'Underestimating Capital, Overestimating Labour: A Response to Andrew Kliman', The Bullet, No. 953, 21 March 2014, available at http://www.socialistproject.ca.

25. Gindin, 'Unmaking Global Capitalism'.

26. Jane McAlevey, "Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement", New York and London: Verso, 2014, provides a pragmatically grounded and careful argument for developing a new social movement unionism in the US.

27. Rich Yeselson, 'Fortress Unionism', Democracy, Summer 2013, p. 76.

28. Jake Rosenfeld, "What Unions No Longer Do", Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 158.

29. Yeselson, 'Fortress Unionism', p. 79.

30. Bruce Raynor and Andy Stern, 'Build Bridges. Not Fortresses', Democracy, Fall 2013, pp. 63-7.

31. Bryan D. Palmer criticizes these formulations persuasively in 'Reconsiderations of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianization', Socialist Register 2014, London: Merlin Press, 2014, pp. 40-62.

32. 'Taxi! Taxi! Cabbies for Unlikely Union', available at http://www.aflcio.org.

33. See http://www.workerscenter.org.

34. Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, "Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice", Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009; and Sam Gindin, 'Working People's Assemblies: Can We Learn from American Activists?', Canadian Dimension, 40 (September/October), 2006, available at http://canadiandimension.com.

35. G. Gonos and C. Martino, 'Temp Agency Workers in New Jersey's Logistics Hub: The Case for A Union Hiring Hall', Working USA, December 2011, pp. 499-525.

36. See Michael D. Yates, 'What's the Matter with US Labor? An Interview with Robert Fitch', MRzine, 30 March 2006, available at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org.

37. 'Transit Workers and Advocates to Mobilize 20 Million Riders to Unite for May Transit Action Month', available at http://www.atu.org.

38. 'Utilities Are a Public Good and Should Be Owned by the Public', available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com.

39. APWU President Mark Dimondstein's remarkable speech at the 2014 Labor Notes Conference, 'APWU Pres. Mark Dimondstein Calls For Defense Of The People's Post Office', is available at https://www.youtube.com.

40. Micah Uetricht, "Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity", New York and London: Verso, 2014; and Labor Notes, "How To Jump Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers", Detroit: LERP, 2014.

41. For a recent revival of this idea, see: 'Why can't college be free?', available at http://inthesetimes.com; and 'What's Out? Student Debt. What's In? Free College', The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11 June 2014.

42. Richard Seymour, 'How the Right Sold Austerity as the Only Economic Solution', The Guardian, 28 March 2014.

43. Some of this work has begun at Cornell's Global Labor Institute and with organizations like the Labor Network for Sustainability, available at http://www.labor4sustainability.org.