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Article contents
The History of Politics and the Politics of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
I believe Ira Katznelson is quite right to link the condition of labor history as a scholarly field with bigger changes taking place in the world. The malaise he points to is a response to the striking, protracted, and continuing shift to the Right in political life; the prolonged and barely challenged erosion of working-class living standards, rights, and organizations; and the evident programmatic and strategic bankruptcy alike of Stalinist, social democratic, and even more explicitly business-minded labor leaders and labor parties. Those waiting for organized labor to stand up on its hind legs and fight back grow disappointed and disoriented.
- Type
- ILWCH Roundtable: What Next for Labor and Working-Class History?
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1994
References
NOTES
1. From this perspective, for example, the CIO, as it existed circa 1947–50, represented the sum and substance of all the real hopes and goals of the workers who laid its foundations during the 1930s. Nothing of significant weight had been left out, disappointed, frustrated, or suppressed. Other roads not taken, ambivalences, ambiguities, inchoate aspirations voiced (or impulses acted upon) by workers at the height of their mobilization are dismissed as mere epiphenomena.
2. Hattam, Victoria C., Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993), 207, 211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Works that grapple with this subject include those by David Montgomery, Leon Fink, Nelson Lichtenstein, Sean Wilentz, Amy Bridges, Richard Oestreicher, Iver Bernstein, Grace Palladino, Bruce Levine, and the American Social History Project's Who Built America?
4. Interesting beginnings can be found in the studies of African-American workers produced by Joe William Trotter, Jr.