Readings for December 9th: The Future of Work and the Transformation of the Democratic Party
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.
Reading Responses for December 2: The Long Downturn
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.
Reading Responses for November 18: The Fall of the New Deal Order
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)
Reading Discussion for November 11: New Worlds of Work
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.
(Optional) November 4th Readings: Black Freedom
- 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.
Reading Discussion for October 28: The New Deal Order
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.
Reading for October 21st: Making the New Deal
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.
Reading Discussion for October 7: Freedom and Unfreedom in the Lean Years
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).
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- 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?
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- 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)
Reading Discussion for September 30: Populism and Radicalism
- 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.
- (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.
Reading Discussion for September 23: The Work of Conquest and Development
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?
- For this article, think about these questions:
- (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.
Reading Discussion for September 16: Slavery and Freedom
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:
Reading Discussion for September 9: Varieties of Non-Slave Labor
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.
Reading Discussion September 2: Work and the Origins of American Capitalism
[Please write your responses and questions in the comments to this post]
Hulya Kartal wrote:
Naomi R. Lamoreaux refuses to settle in a binary argument for the timeline of the American farmers utilizing capitalism. During the late 1970s, so-called moralist economists, M. Merrill, J. Henretta, and C. Clark claimed that the American economy was not capitalist until the late 19th century. In 1981, W Rothenberg made a counter-argument claiming that the farmers starting in the late 18th-century act like capitalists: shop for the highest prices for their crops refuting the theory of moral economists that the farmers’ intention was not centralized around profit, and their priority was social harmony.
The author rejects to cling into either theory and that she claims that the farmers did have more in common with merchants and manufacturers unlike the moralist economists could admit and yet she refuses to call them capitalist. Lamoreaux does not want to fall in a pitfall coerced by the classic neoliberal economics: dichotomy.
What intriguing in this essay is that the author transcendences the dichotomy relying on recent economic theories to shed light in grey areas, and that not oversimplifying whether the farmers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were capitalist.
On the otherhand, one would appreciate the clear definition of what capitalism is. During the colonial era, the colonialist confiscated the land, expropriated natural resources, and kidnapped and exploited labor power. I agree that the colonialists certainly had different ways, ie. calculating the profit. Yet, are such practices suffice enough evidence to avoid calling them capitalists? Also, how appropriate to use the current capitalist practices to measure the two hundred years old ones?
David Noven wrote:
This week’s readings center around the development of Capitalism in The United States. James Parisot’s, essay “The Two Hundred and Fifty Year Transition: How the American Empire Became Capitalist” is primarily a summary of the history of market forces through Reconstruction that formed our current economic system. By beginning his work with a discussion of Max Weber’s and Karl Marx’s ideas concerning capitalism, he enters into the debate regarding the definition of capitalism, which is covered in all of this week’s readings, as well as the role of agriculture and manufacturing in its evolution. In short, Weber sees capitalism as a social structure that supplants traditional (and religious) values and ethics with one that is centered around “rational economic rationalization” (pg. 590). For Marx, the pursuit of surplus value (capital) derived by owners as a result of the difference between labor costs (wages) and production, forms the guiding principle of capitalism, a system where the relationship between the worker and owner favors those who control the means of production over those doing the work. The Hamilton essay this week practically foreshadows the Weberian ideal of a society centered around commerce and the pursuit of wealth. Jefferson’s essay extolls the idyllic virtues of an agricultural society and argues that the new country should avoid manufacturing at the risk of becoming just the sort of society that Hamilton expounds. The remainder of Parisot’s essay describes how farming and manufacturing contributed to, or slowed, the road to capitalism through various regions of the country due to differences in trade practices, work compensation practices, land agreements, etc. He touches on the roles of slaves, immigrants, indentured servants, and women, the latter of whom are the subject of Jeanne Boydston’s detailed essay on women’s market labor. Naomi R. Lamoreaux has an excellent discussion of the debate concerning the role of farming and manufacturing in developing capitalism, using empirical evidence such as changing bookkeeping practices and how familial roles influenced capitalism’s formation over a more communal system.
I appreciated the Parisot essay as an excellent introduction to the growth of capitalism but found the other essays more compelling due to their more narrowed subject matter. Boydston’s work, by limiting its focus to the role of women, explored her subject deeper, making it more convincing. The Lamoreaux essay was intriguing, but I failed to be convinced that accurate bookkeeping is necessarily tied to a capitalistic drive. Bookkeeping would surely evolve in manufacturing as businesses became large enough to hire specialized clerks, accounting practices became more standardized, and businesses relied more on money over trade in consort with the rise of commerce and banking. With greater access to education outside the home, larger corporate structures, and better transportation, the necessity and desire to hire from outside the family would increase. Today, however, will still see that the family business remains alive and well, even up to the highest levels of government. The converse argument showing bookkeeping in agriculture also rings a little flat. As farmers increased their productivity and developed their farms, they would most likely require less need for accurate bookkeeping and could focus their efforts on production. In addition, with the absence of a tax on profits in early America, bookkeeping was not legally mandated.
Weekly Reading Discusion
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.
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