Since the vote was almost even split between “The Future of Work” and the “Democrats and Class Politics,” I’ve decided to do a bit of both. The required readings for our final week are:

Future of Work

• Aaron Benanav, “A World Without Work?” Dissent (Fall 2020)
• Chloe Watlington, “Who Owns Tomorrow?” Commune.

The Democrats and Class Politics

• Brent Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats,” Modern American History (2019).
• Gabe Winant, “Professional-Managerial Capitalism,” N+1.

 

Below are some additional (NOT REQUIRED) readings and the readings from the other topics we entertained:

Future of Work: for those that want to read a more fleshed out version of Aaron’s argument, see his two-part essay below

• Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work 1” New Left Review, II/119 (September-October 2019), pp. 5-38.
• Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work 2” New Left Review, II/120 (November-December 2019), pp. 117-146.

On the Democrats, see Matt Stoller, “How Democrats Killed their Populist Soul,” The Atlantic.

LABOR, RACE, AND MASS INCARCERATION

• John Clegg, Adaner Usmani, “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration,” Catalyst
• Jack Norton, David Stein, “Materializing Race: On Capitalism and Mass Incarceration,” Spectre.
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “How Do We Change America?” The New Yorker, June 8, 2020.

 

 

Judith Stein’s piece picks up where we left off by providing, I think, a more pointed historical argument about what ended the New Deal order. While organized labor makes an appearance here, this is much more of a political history, covering policy options not taken, presidential politics, Paul Volcker, and a particular critique of the left. The rest of these readings take us to the present by exploring the precariousness of work since the 1970s, poverty, and work amid our contemporary pandemic. Please be sure to read the UN report (primary source).

• Judith Stein, “Conflict, Change, and Economic Policy in the Long 1970s,” in Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, Cal Winslow (eds.), Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, Chapter 3.
• Aaron Benanav, “Precarity Rising,” Viewpoint Magazine, June 15, 2015:
• Sarah Jaffe, Michelle Chen, “Jaffe-Chen_Work in the Time of Coronavirus” Dissent, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Summer 2020): pp. 125-148.
• (Primary Source) Philip Alston, “Statement on Visit to the USA,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, December 15, 2017.

Readings:

• Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 74 (Fall 2008).
  • What made the New Deal order possible? Why is it a “long exception”?
•  Lane Windham, “Signing Up the Shipyard: Organizing Newport News and Reinterpreting the 1970s,” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History, 10, No. 2 (Summer 2013): 31-53.
  • What is Windham’s critique of Jefferson Cowie’s interpretation of the 1970s as a decade of “blue collar” defeat? What is Windham’s alternative interpretation of the “New Deal Order” and the idea of a social compact between business, labor, and the state?
• Gabriel Winant, “Anomalies and Continuities: Positivism and Historicism on Inequality,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
  • What is Winant’s critique of Jefferson Cowie? What makes the inequality of the period after the 1970s different from that of the Gilded Age?
• Tim Barker, “Other People’s Blood,” N+1, No. 34 (Spring 2019).
  • Who is Paul Volcker? What was the “Volcker Shock”? How did Volcker’s policies affect labor and help end of the “New Deal order”?

GUEST SPEAKER: Tim Barker, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Harvard University

PRIMARY SOURCE:

Oral Histories: “Jim Hughes.” “Susan Casey,” “Karen Lewis,” in Harry Maurer, Not Working: An Oral History of the Unemployed (New York, 1979)

Jeff is our head poster for this coming week’s readings:

• Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, 2013), Chapter 6.
  • How did the Voting Rights Act transform the lives of African-American workers in the South? How did it affect white workers?
• Ruth Milkman, “Immigrant Organizing and the New Labor Movement in Los Angeles,” Critical Sociology, vol. 26 nos. 1/2, pp. 59-81.
  • Are undocumented immigrants “unorganizable”?
• Nancy MaCLean, “The Hidden History of Affirmative Action: Working Women’s Struggles in the 1970s,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1999.

PRIMARY SOURCE:

Studs Terkel, “Ruth Lindstrom, baby nurse” and “Rose Hoffman, public school teacher,” in Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day (New York, 1972), pp. 626-635.

Please remember that all of this week’s readings are optional. We will watch a documentary that day, but you are of course welcome to do the readings and comment on the readings here:

• Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, 2013), Chapters 2, 4, 6-8.
• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (March 2005), pp. 1233-1263.
• David Leonhardt, “The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950,” New York Times, June 25, 2020.

PRIMARY SOURCES: Martin Luther King Jr., “All Labor Has Dignity” (Boston, 1963), Chapters 3-4, 6 AND “A Freedom Budget for All Americans”  

Please write questions and, if you had strong opinions on any of the readings, comments for the following readings:

• Kristoffer Smemo, Samir Sonti, and Gabriel Winant, “Conflict and Consensus: The Steel Strike of 1959 and the Anatomy of the New Deal Order,” Critical Historical Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2017).
• Kim Phillips-Fein, “Business Conservatism on the Shop Floor- Anti-Union Campaigns in the 1950s,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. 2, No. 2, (2010).
• (Primary Source) “The American Standard of Living—How Can It Best Be Improved?” Radio Debate Between Senator Robert A. Taft and Walter P. Reuther, President, UAW-CIO

 

OPTIONAL READINGS:

• Joshua Freeman, “‘‘Common Requirements of Industrialization’: Cold War Mass Production,” in Behemoth: A history of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York, 2018), Chapter 6.
• Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York, 2005), Chapter 3.

Please note that for this week you are not required to write a reading response but you are of course welcome to do so if it helps you organize your thoughts about the reading:

 

• Lizabeth Cohen, “Workers Make a New Deal,” in David E. Hamilton, The New Deal (New York, 1999).
• Jennifer Klein, “The Politics of Economy Security- Employee Benefits and the Privatization of New Deal Liberalism,” Journal of Policy History
• Primary Source: Walter Linder, The Great Flint Sit-Down Strike Against GM, 1936-37, Solidarity Pamphlet No. 31

PRIMARY SOURCE:

Franklin Roosevelt’s Re-Nomination Acceptance Speech (1936)

 

• OPTIONAL: Steve Fraser, “The Labor Question,’” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1989), Chapter 3.

Readings:

• Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Chicago, 2010): Chapter 1 up to section 5 (pages 47-66) and all of Chapter 2. [if you’re pressed on time please just focus on Chapter 2).
  • • Why did labor unions struggle or fail in the 1920s?
    • What was Samuel Gompers’s theory of the place of unions and workers in capitalism? What, in his view, was the proper role of the state in labor-capital relations? Who was left out of Gompers’s political vision?
    • What was the AFL’s attitude towards employers under Hugh Green’s direction?
    • Why was it important for workers like carpenters to own their own tools? How did that make their relation with employers unique?
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010), pp. 8-15, 95-122.
  • A couple of the pages appear to be a little blurry or cut off, but they really shouldn’t be a huge problem. That said, please let me know if you can’t see all the pages clearly and I can try re-scanning the book.
  • This is a more narrative piece that gives a good sense of the lived experience of the great migration. For this reading, I just want you to get the big picture, asking yourself: what is “the great migration” and how did Black people experience it?
• Neil Fligstein, “The Transformation of Southern Agriculture and the Migration of Blacks and Whites, 1930-1940,” The International Migration Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 1983), 268-290.
  • What is the economic theory of the great migration?
  • What is Fligstein’s critique of this theory and alternative explanation?

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Robert M. La Follete, “The Danger Threatening Representative Government” (1897)

Herbert Hoover, Campaign Speech, Madison Square Garden, New York (October 22, 1928)

Readings:

• Charles Postel, “The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy,” in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, John Abromeit, et al, eds. (Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2015).
• Lawrence C. Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights- East Texas as a Case Study.” The American Historical Review 76.5 (1971): 1435–1456.
• Leon Fink, “The Great Strikes Revisited,” in The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia, 2015), Chapter 2.

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Omaha Platform

• (optional/supplemental) Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Champaign, 2000 abridged version), Chapters 2, 4, 6-12.

Readings:

• Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland, 2019), Chapters 3-5 (chapters 6 and 7 now “optional”)
  • For Chapter 3, read the first half closely and skim the rest of the chapter. Don’t get bogged down in the particulars.
  • For all three chapters, think about these questions:
    • What is the relationship between the state (government) and capitalism/markets?
    • What are the origins of private property?
• Rudi Batzell, “Free Labour, Capitalism, and the Anti-Slavery Origins of Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s,” Past and Present, Vol. 255 (November 2014), pp. 143-186.
  • For this article, think about these questions:
    • What, from the Workingmen’s Party’s perspective, does it mean for labor to be free?
    • Why did Chinese workers migrate?
    • How was mining and farm labor transformed in the late 19th century?
• (Optional) Emma Teitelman, “Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and West After the American Civil War,” The Journal of American History (March 2020), pp. 879-900.

Head posters will write a summary and interpretation of at least one of this week’s readings: 

• W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, 1935, 1962, 1992), Chapters 1-4.
• Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008), Chapter 6.
• Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review, 1/181 (May-June 1990).

 

• (optional/supplementary) Eric Foner, “The Meaning of Freedom in Age of Emancipation,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (1994): 435–460.

PRIMARY SOURCE:

“The Happiest Laboring Class in the World”: Two Virginia Slaveholders Debate Methods of Slave Management, 1837.

 

Head posters will write a summary and interpretation of at least one of this week’s readings:

• Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984, 2004), Introduction and Chapters 1-2.
• Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (June 1973) 531-588.

In the comments to this post, head posters can post a response to individual chapters form Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic rather than all of his readings (Intro, Ch. 1-2) if they would like.

In the comments to this post, responders will post their response to head poster’s interpretation and pose 2 questions about the readings (including the primary sources) to the class.

Each week, two students will post two short paragraphs here.

The first paragraph should summarize at least one of the readings. This paragraph should state clearly the author(s) argument(s) and what kinds of evidence or assumptions the author relied on for their argument.

The second paragraph should state briefly whether or not the student found the argument persuasive and then explain why they were persuaded or why they were not persuaded.

Each week, EVERY NON-POSTING STUDENT will be required to respond to the weekly responses with at least one paragraph that reflects on whether or not they share main responder’s interpretation of the text and why. Additionally, each student will be asked to pose at least 2 discussion questions about any or all of the week’s readings. These questions will be the basis for class discussion.