How Union-Busting Bosses Propel the Right Wing to Power
U.S. bosses fight unions with a ferocity that is unmatched in the so-called free world. In the early days of the republic, master craftsmen prosecuted fledgling unions as criminal conspiracies that aimed to block their consolidation of wealth and property. During modern times, corporations threaten the jobs of pro-union workers in over half of all union elections—and follow through on the threat one-third of the time. In between, bosses have resorted to spies and frame-ups, physical violence, court injunctions, private armies of strikebreakers, racist appeals and immigrant exploitation. The labor question has never been a genteel debate about power and fairness in America. A new book from the University of Illinois Press’ “The Working Class History in American History” series offers a broad survey of how bosses have historically engaged in union-busting. Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism is a collection of scholarly essays edited by […]
When Labor Fought Rock-and-Roll
Facing the world ain’t easy when there isn’t anything going Standing at the corner waiting watching time go by Will I go to work today or shall I bide my time So begins the Kinks’ song, “Get Back in Line,” one of the most hauntingly beautiful paeans to the forced idleness and stress of unemployment ever committed to tape. I’ve turned to this song for solace, a little too often for comfort, but I’ve always been discomfited by the refrain that follows. ‘Cos when I see that union man walking down the street He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line Is this just Ray Davies being a contradictory crank? He has, […]
From Company Town to Rebel City: Richmond, California Shows How Progressives Can Win
Rebel cities have long been laboratories for progressive policy experimentation. Specifically, the small Bay Area city of Richmond, California has stood out for its boldness. It’s now the subject of a new book by Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, set to be released next Tuesday by Beacon Press. A long-time labor activist and frequent writer for In These Times, Early moved to Richmond five years ago. After “thirty-two Boston-area winters,” the placid weather was more of a draw than the city’s vibrant urban reform movement, Early writes. But, naturally, he soon got involved and began taking notes, eventually producing a lively read—an intimate, warts-and-all look at how a small band of activists fought for and won a slightly better world at home. His book is a ray of hope for anyone wondering how to survive, and possibly even thrive, under […]
Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble”
Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more workers are striking than before. There have been attempts to describe this emerging movement for social justice in book form before. The latest, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe, is the best so far. The Nation Books publication was released Tuesday. Jaffe, a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a leading light […]
What Will It Take To Wake Up the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of the New Working Class?
The American working class has been dissed and dismissed. Our unions busted, our wages slashed, our homes foreclosed and our rents raised. We’re blamed for the rise of Trump, but otherwise do not exist in the media landscape. But the working class is a sleeping giant that is beginning to stir and will soon instigate a great campaign for racial and economic justice, according to a new book by Tamara Draut. A vice president of the liberal think tank Demos, Draut’s previous book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, explored the how the high cost of college, housing and health insurance, combined with stagnant wages and made the usual milestones of adulthood increasingly out of reach for millennials. Her new book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, attempts to connect the dots between the struggles of those millennials and the politics of […]
Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Our First Socialist Mayor: Remembering Milwaukee’s Socialist Party History
As the country’s politics take a right turn, an unlikely progressive wins office as mayor of a major U.S. city. In an era marked by conformity and the primacy of business interests over the common good, he has the temerity to call himself a socialist. Both locally and nationally, his example serves as a beacon of hope for the waning left and a lightening rod of criticism for the resurgent right. His fundamental decency and fealty to the democratic process and the public good see him continually reelected, with most voters regarding him on a first-name basis. He goes on to run a quixotic campaign for President. If this sounds familiar to fans of Bernie Sanders’ career, it should. But I am describing Frank Zeidler, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee who served three terms from 1948-1960. When the producers of the television series Happy Days wanted to cast a nostalgic […]
Review: James P. Cannon and Origins of the American Revolutionary Left
Quitting the Socialist Party freed me to commit the twin heresies of reading V.I. Lenin and Michael Harrington. My political perspective hasn’t changed very much, but my perspective has become more nuanced. This leaves me very familiar with American social democratic theory and with the twists and turns of the old Socialist Party, as well as its last major off-shoots, and, thanks to Si Gerson’s library, with the external work and internal factionalism of the Communist Party, at least up until 1960. But the history of the American Trotskyite movement has remained a willful gap in my knowledge, mostly because I tend to find modern-day Trotskyites so interminable. Bryan D. Palmer’s “James P. Cannon and the American Revolutionary Left” begins to fill in some of that gap. Cannon is best known (to the extent that he’s known at all) as a father of American Trotskyism and founder of the Socialist […]
We Memoir Econo
Michael Azerrad’s excellent collection of 13 micro-biogrophies of beloved 80’s indie bands is a love letter to the era when pop culture began to fragment into mini-mass media of fanzines, underground rock clubs and vanity record labels. Cribbed from a Minutemen lyrics, Azerrad’s book, “Our Band Could Be Your Life” fleshes out the notion of gaining inspiration, principles and encouragement by the songs from some obscure band that your parents and most of your classmates never heard of. Teh internets have exacerbated this tendency towards fragmentation. It is regrettable, to some extent, that there can never be another Beatles to saunter across (the equivalent of) Ed Sullivan’s stage and capture the hearts and imaginations of an entire nation in two and a half minutes. But it is perhaps better to have the Replacements, whose music feels more personal due to their underdog cult status, and whose “Let it Be” far […]
Things the Grandchildren Should Buy
Eels frontman, E., has long mined personal tragedy to make uplifting art. Starting with 1997’s beautiful “Electro-Shock Blues,” a visceral elegy to the twin tragedies of his sister’s suicide and his mother’s death from cancer (events that occurred within months of his scoring his first big hit with “Novocain for the Soul”), and culminating with 2006’s sprawling “Blinking Lights (And Other Revelations),” E has incorporated his family biography into his music. But in the last two years, the erstwhile Mark Oliver Everett has gotten explicitly autobiographical. First, he hosted a documentary, which aired in the U.S. on PBS’ “Nova,” about his troubled genius of a father, Hugh Everett III, who directly challenged Niels Bohr with his “many worlds” theory and was crushed, professionally and spiritually, as a result. Finally, E published a sprightly memoir, “Things The Grandchildren Should Know,” late last year. The book reveals Everett as a memoirist on […]