By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators took apocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeply divided between the advocates of change (“New Times” required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politics could be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By the mid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present this contemporary transformation not as the “death of class,” but as the passing of one particular type of class society, one marked by the process of working-class formation between the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment, reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwar settlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attack on Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, the unity of the working class ceased to be available in the old and well-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While one dominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic male proletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, with their associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration), another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place (predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types of public employment). But the operative unity of this new working-class aggregation—its active agency as an organized political presence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the political efficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collective political agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emerging conditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of the twenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put back together again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old has been dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decomposition is yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into a new and coherently shaped form.

Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspective à la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much stronger emphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson. Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing the dynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied local contexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feed these movements and alliances. Class is thus reduced to a microheuristic of hidden injuries and subaltern identities. However, the concept of social class can only help to articulate a position beyond formal institutionalism and the class language of bipolarity when it is wedded to a nonreductionist, nonessentialist, and nonfinalist theory of capitalism. Seen from this perspective, capitalism is a worldwide and world- embedded process of combined and uneven development that constantly assembles and disassembles the materials from which human communities are made. In short, if we want to rethink class in place, we need to rethink capitalism in space.

Responding to the triumph of the right during the 1980s, Eley and Nield conclude that traditional concepts of class are no longer workable and need a major overhauling. Unfortunately, they mischaracterize the literature, offer little that could refine the debates, and ignore the important role of capitalism in the last two decades.

The experience of socialist countries, which Geoff Eley and Keith Nield do not address, raises fundamental questions about their argument. Class-based thinking and rhetoric under Soviet socialism served as a weapon in the hands of the authorities, not as a vehicle for critical analysis, let alone for human emancipation. Before 1917, class-based ways of looking at the world presented enormous, indeed insurmountable obstacles for a liberal-based politics. Eley and Nield, while embracing liberalism, want to retain a role for class, but their vague proposals are almost exclusively rooted in historiographical polemics of overblown significance.

In my comment I raise two main questions about the Eley/Nield essay. First, I express some doubts about whether the issues discussed in their essay can be unproblematically transposed to historiographical debates in areas beyond Western Europe and North America. Certain themes, such as the need to reemphasize the political, are hardly pressing given the continual emphasis on politics and the state in Latin American labor history. Closely related to this, I question whether the state of gender studies within labor history can be used, in the way these authors seem to be doing, as a barometer of the sophistication and vitality of labor and working-class history. Despite recognizing the tremendous contribution of gendered approaches to labor history, I express doubts about its ability to help us rethink the category of class, and even express some concern that it might occlude careful consideration of class identities. Instead, pointing to two pathbreaking works in Latin American labor history, I argue that the types of questions we ask about class, and primarily about class, can provide the key to innovative scholarship about workers even if questions such as gender or ethnicity go unexamined. Finally, I point out that class will only be a vital category of analysis if it is recognized not simply as “useful,” but as forming a basis for genuinely creative and innovative historical studies.

The essay focuses on two points: First, Eley and Nield's emphasis on micropolitics, discourse, and diverse forms of affinity is stimulating and essential but inadequate to the task of understanding when and how the category of working class is useful. Such a task also requires nuanced analysis of interactions on a large scale and at long distance, of control of material resources, and of centralizing institutions. Second, their identity-centered vision of politics is too constraining to make clear the multiple forms of political imagination, connection, and mobilization or to figure out the extent as well as the limits of power.

Geoff Eley's and Keith Nield's essay is marked by a tension between a desire to update the old social history by detaching it from its materialist assumptions on the one hand and a commitment to continue writing narratives of working-class political agency on the other. By insisting that class is still the best way of analyzing inequality and mobilizing resistance to it, the authors foreclose other possibilities for thinking about contemporary politics and for writing critical history. They do not ask the questions that need to be asked, which are, What are the operative political categories capable of moving masses of people into agency? and, What terms might be used to represent inequalities of distribution? These questions don't exclude class but they don't require it either; they also allow for a more open and probing approach than is offered by Eley and Nield.

Our principal anxiety about the responses to “Farewell to the Working Class?” concerns their strangely private character. In the main—the response of Barbara Weinstein excepted—the respondents seem to use the opportunity our article has provided simply to restate some of their own previous positions. Often they engage neither with the substance of our article nor, equally importantly, with its conciliatory tone. As a result, the chance further to depolemicize these important debates has been lost or otherwise evaded in a variety of reiterations.

This review essay has three aims: First, it presents a critique of the work of those scholars whose “primacy of politics” approach has posited the fall of class. Second, it reviews a selection of traditional and reworked defenses of class. Third, it indicates some of the fruitful ways in which class can be employed in the new millennium.

The eleventh annual conference of the Institute of Contemporary British History was held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, July 12–16, 1999. The first day was largely concerned with British Marxist and socialist movements; the second concentrated on the trade unions and comparative perspectives; the third and fourth days focused on the Labour party; and the conference concluded with a day on the future of the Left. The conference was male-dominated to about the same proportion as most university departments in Britain, but the age range of participants was broad and involved doctoral students as well as professors. Only two papers were presented on women in the labor movement, and although participants addressed issues concerned with identity and ethnicity, there was nothing directly concerned with imperialism or immigrants from Britain's former colonies and their British-born offspring.

Few nonspecialists know that Belgium was the first continental European country to benefit and suffer from the Industrial Revolution. Resulting in part from this heritage and also building on an even older tradition of textile manufacturing dating back to the High Middle Ages, Belgium is home to a number of high-quality museums and institutions showcasing and researching the age of industry and its corresponding social movements. Two such organizations are the Archive and Museum of the Socialist Workers Movement (AMSAB) and the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textiles (MIAT) in the city of Ghent. On April 27–30, 1999, these two institutions joined forces to organize an international conference on “Gender and Class in the 20th Century.” For several days, participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and Belgium gathered to listen and respond to a variety of presentations covering the whole range of issues related to the conference theme, from sexuality at the point of production to the discursive construction of poverty as female in the contemporary global age.

Roughly fifty years after the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) purged communist-led unions from its membership, the Southwest Labor Studies Association met in San Francisco from April 29 to May 1, 1999, to reconsider the history and implications of this event and, more broadly, to attempt to untangle the connections between and among McCarthyism, anticommunist liberalism, and the political trajectory of organized labor during the postwar era. Bringing together labor activists, union members, and academics, panels considered these themes from a number of perspectives and methodological approaches. Papers focused on such topics as the dynamics of political repression, the effectiveness of liberal anticommunist politics for organized labor, and the role of the state in shaping the labor movement.

From April 22–25, 1999, the Organization of American Historians held its ninety-second annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. The theme was “State and Society in North America: Processes of Social Power and Social Change.” More than seven hundred scholars were on the program, an impressive showing; and for Canadian historians, whose community is comparatively small, a source of envy. The participants were, of course, overwhelmingly American and US specialists, but many Canadian colleagues presented papers or attended, as did other international scholars, including Americanists based overseas. While most sessions were held at a downtown hotel, organizers made use of local cultural venues and historic sites. They scheduled a session on the Underground Railroad, for instance, at St. Lawrence Hall, site of the first meeting of the Colored Free Men in Canada and an antislavery lecture by Frederick Douglas.

I cannot provide a definitive answer to those of us pondering what the best alternative to capitalism is, but after attending the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association (PNLHA) Conference in Westminster, British Columbia, over the weekend of May 28–30, 1999, I can tell you that this is certainly a preferable alternative to standard academic conferences. As usual, the PNLHA was able to produce a cadre of historians (from the trades as well as academia), active unionists, and old-timers whose memories are as tapable as a keg of beer. Although the association designates labor history as its subject, newly elected President Ross Rieder likes to say, “History ends the moment before now.”

The field of debate over the value of postmodernism for the practice of history by now has become littered with the remains of so many alleged authorities that even General Douglas Haig might quail before such a prospect. Cynicism is perhaps the best defense against the assaults being launched from both sides of this new no man's land. However, every so often, one contribution to such ritual bloodlettings acts as a flare to reveal the importance of the issues at stake at the same time as it cogently analyzes the arguments and assumptions underlying the controversy. Of the books and articles under review here, perhaps none will be of greater importance to historians than Richard Price's chapter on “Postmodernism as Theory and History” in John Belchem's and Neville Kirk's edited volume, Languages of Labour, which does just that.

Joseph P. Ward's study explores the extensive but largely untapped early modern records of London's trade guilds (known as livery companies). In many respects, his work is intended as a corrective to previous interpretations, which followed a time-honored Enlightenment tradition. These tended to portray the guilds as hidebound, even retrograde institutions, committed to perpetuating urban oligarchies through various arbitrary controls whose ultimate effect was merely to dampen economic development. Ward seeks to deflate this commonplace view by revealing the inner workings of the livery companies and by examining their role in shaping the lives and identities of working Londoners during a period of immense economic and demographic upheaval.

These two books concern major chapters in the history of mass housing: Amsterdam in the first two decades of the century and “Red Vienna.” Both programs were models of state welfare reform, but the political contexts are totally at odds: Amsterdam, with its settlement initiatives achieved through a corporatist compromise among moderate parties, and Vienna, where the Social Democrats attempted literally to build socialism in the midst of “a highly charged, often violent political conflict between left and right” (Blau, 13).

The metamorphosis of French syndicalism is easy enough to discern. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the Bourses du Travail and the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), workers talked openly about revolution. Employers and the government took them seriously, as they took themselves seriously. After all, French labor had a long and impressive revolutionary pedigree, and throughout the fin de siècle the working class kept adding to its scars as it continued to engage in frequent and violent confrontations with the forces of order. Thus the proletariat primed itself for the decisive showdown: the general strike, the heroic and largely spontaneous episode that would finish off bourgeois society and bring workers to power. This was the revolutionary “myth” that propelled the labor movement forward.

The industrial unrest of November–December 1947 constitutes a major signpost in post-World War Two French society and politics, and, indeed, it has served to indicate the hardening of the then-emerging Cold War divide in and beyond France. Strongest in centers of Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) power, this strike wave symbolized the definitive end of the postliberation tripartite governmental alliance among centrist Catholics, social democrats, and communists. The strikers' oftentimes militant activism led hostile observers to detect insurrectionary aims on the part of blue-collar workers, the CGT, the PCF, and the Kremlin. Because of the obvious centrality of the “red strikes” in late 1947, the paucity of serious analyses is all the more remarkable.

Transforming Peasants is a collection of papers that focuses primarily on the Russian peasantry between 1861–1930, with brief forays into Poland, the Kirgiz steppe, and Turkestan. Judith Pallot's introduction to the volume is informative and concise. She provides the reader with an excellent overview of each paper and highlights each author's contribution to the existing debates within the context of Russian and East European peasant studies. Pallot is well versed in the comparative literature on the study of the peasantry and notes the degree to which new work on the Russian, Central Asian, and East European peasantries has been influenced, informed, and expanded by this comparative material. What unifies the various selections in Transforming Peasants is that each author is grappling with the way in which the state, intellectuals, or educated society conceived of or “imagined” peasants and how these conceptions, in turn, influenced, shaped, or determined policy aimed at transforming the peasantry.