"One of America's Great Critics of Plutocracy"

"Eugene Debs was, as the abolitionist Horace Greeley once referred to Abe Lincoln, a 'growing man.' More than previous biographers, Gude illuminates the ways Debs never stopped learning, sharpening his socialist perspective, or recalibrating and expanding his conception of solidarity. From hard compromises within the ARU to his cofounding of the IWW to pondering the formation of an 'American Labor Party,' Debs pursued a never-ending quest of how best to empower workers and win socialism."

Matthew E. Stanley at Jacobin reviews Shawn Gude's American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs.

"What Went Wrong?"

"Some portion of the book's confusion about capitalism, and its author's refusal or inability to stand by its claims about capitalism, is symptomatic and shared. In 2014, Seth Rockman, one of Beckert's colleagues in the new history of capitalism, announced that the field had 'minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism.' That was a virtue, Rockman claimed, not a vice. If they 'let capitalism float as a placeholder,' scholars would be freed to do 'the empirical work of discovery' and find 'ground-level evidence of a system in operation.' Twelve years—and 1,325 pages—later, free time is over, and judging by the results in hand, scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began." 

Corey Robin at The Nation reviews Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History.

"The Broader Threat Posed by Right-Wing Authoritarianism"

"With the rise of right-wing populism and neofascism, the crisis has become acute. Neofascism sees the trade union movement as its enemy while at the same time trying to appeal to the working class who make up labor's membership. However, to win over this base, the far right is harkening back to previous pseudo pro-worker appeals by embracing racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic politics that can present as being in the interest of everyday working people."

At In These Times, Bill Fletcher, Jr., concludes that "[t]rade unionism must either be anti-fascist, or it will be nothing at all."

While Carl Davidson at ZNetwork calls for a "Third Reconstruction."

And Dustin Guastella at Damage blames the "MANGO class."

"Frustrated and Underemployed Elites Are Uniquely Well-Positioned to Disrupt Society"

"The day after The New York Times posted Mack's op-ed, Smith re-posted a 2022 piece about Turchin's theory of elite overproduction. It noted that demand for lawyers and government employees (the bulk of whom work for state and local governments) levelled off after 2008; that employment in publishing crashed in 2001 and never recovered; and that university job postings in the humanities crashed during the 2008 financial crash and never recovered. (If there's a poster child for elite overproduction, it's the humble university adjunct.) In the 21st century the professional-managerial class has experienced a loss of economic power that's analogous to (though of course much more muted than, and conducted at a much higher level than) the working class's loss of economic power starting in the late 1970s."

Timothy Noah at The New Republic considers "the rage of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich once labelled the professional-managerial class."

"Corporate Restructuring Leads to Mass Layoffs at C+C Music Factory"

"'These changes are definitely necessary, but a lot of good workers are being sent home today. Of course we'll miss them, but it's now time for us to move forward as the nation's prominent supplier of dance music.'"

From The Hard Times.

"Tedium, Skill, Pleasure, Camaraderie, Exhaustion, Power, and Freedom"

"While so much of Montgomery's writings were focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the worlds of work he described have ended up having far more in common with the way we work today than even he might have anticipated. Many of the service-sector workers who have started to organize in recent years—healthcare workers, teachers, screenwriters, actors, and, yes, academics—are people who have strong professional and ethical codes for their work and have become accustomed to some measure of workplace autonomy. They see their freedom at work and their sense of power to do it well threatened by the arbitrary power of their bosses and the sometimes faceless forces of capital. The American workers of today come from many backgrounds and many parts of the world, their politics shaped in part by their experiences in their countries of origin, as was the case for the immigrant workers of the late 19th century whose stories Montgomery told. They are people spurred to action by a rebellion against the imperatives of a new age of scientific management and drawn together by their common plight. They are artists whose day jobs in game stores and coffee shops foster just enough passion and solidarity to try to organize a union. All of this might have been familiar to the iron molders, glass blowers, coopers, and others of the early years of the 20th century."

Kim Phillips-Fein at The Nation reviews A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance.

"A Seminal Moment in the History of Higher Education"

"In the years after Ross's dismissal, Lovejoy—one of the professors who had resigned from Stanford and ultimately went to Johns Hopkins University—teamed with John Dewey of Columbia University to establish an organization aimed at ensuring academic freedom for faculty. In 1915 the newly formed American Association of University Professors released its 'Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.' Among other things, the declaration noted: 'Official action relating to reappointments and refusals of reappointment should be taken only with the advice and consent of some board or committee representative of the faculty.'"

In a 2015 Stanford Magazine article, Brian Eule recounts the story of Professor Edward Alsworth Ross.

"Family Rules Included 'Never Cross a Picket Line and Never Vote Republican'"

"She also said she was born and raised into atheism 'by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons.' She was a student activist, was educated as a scientist—she studied physics at Reed College and earned a PhD in cellular biology from Rockefeller University in 1968—but trained as a teacher and reporter.

"After getting her doctorate, she joined a group of activists trying to improve healthcare for poor New Yorkers, which cemented her love of reporting and writing. 'Health seemed related to biology,' she told the Washington Post in 2005."

Nardine Saad and Dorany Pineda at the Los Angeles Times report the death of Barbara Ehrenreich.

"Caught Between Big Business and Big Labor"

"The one group that clearly understands the folly in both perspectives is workers themselves. Workers have shown that they dislike the hyper-adversarialism and political activism that American unions bring into their workplaces but are eager for more representation, voice, and support than they can achieve individually. What they want, and need, is a middle ground that neither side is offering."

At Politico, Oren Cass writes that European labor models could help American workers.

"A Much More Ambitious Vision of a Thriving Creative Sphere"

"Artists in the middle of the twentieth century flourished not because the economy was inherently favorable to them, but as a result of powerful economic winds and the groups that joined in an attempt to harness them. Together, creative class groups wielded the crowbar of politics in an attempt to pry some autonomy out of consumer capitalism."

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The New Republic reviews Shannan Clark's The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism.

"The Playbook Companies Used to Win: Empty Social-Justice Rhetoric, Which Then Can Be Filled With All Manner of Poison"

"Democrats retain the support of the lowest-income Americans, and they're eager enough to shake hands with unions. The party's viability depends, too, on its ability to appeal to voters of color (and based on Biden's apparent problems with Latino voters, it has no reason to assume that demographic changes work to its favor). But it's not enough to tell people that you’re concerned about racial justice, that you want progress, that the policies you favor will be good for the poor. Anyone can do that. If you spend enough money, and coerce enough people, you can even make your story look like the truth. Uber and Lyft just proved it. So Democrats face a test of authenticity. If they mean any of the things they told voters this year, then economic injustice has to occupy a more central role in its policies and messaging. And class position is an overdue addition to the party's concept of identity politics. Silicon Valley isn't going to drop its war on labor, and gig workers need Democrats to fight back."

Sarah Jones at New York reacts to the passage of California's Proposition 22.

"Amazon Offers New Blank Box Upcharge For Progressive Members To Discreetly Receive Prime Orders"

"The press release also explained that for an extra $2, each package could be branded with the logo of a struggling, non-profit bookstore that helps disenfranchised communities or a local farming co-op."

From The Onion.

"Capitalism's Useful Idiots"

"Although very few people I knew voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the 1980s and '90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever, as long as it didn't involve big new social programs that affluent people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of ideological consistency."

The Atlantic runs an excerpt of Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History.

As does The New York Times.

"Let's Find Out Why"

"The English language provides a great many solid choices for someone wishing to describe a leader who plays on mob psychology or racial intolerance. 'Demagogue' is an obvious one, but there are others—'nationalist,' 'nativist,' 'racist,' or 'fascist,' to name a few. They are serviceable words, all of them. In the feverish climate of the Democracy Scare, however, none of those will work: 'populist' is the word we are instructed to use. 'Populists' are the ones we must suppress."

Thomas Frank at Harper's Magazine looks at the original Populists compared to how the description is used today.

"This Is the Heavy Undertow That Churns Beneath the Apparent Rising Tide of the American Left"

"This fundamental shift—from the party of Humphrey to the party of Schumer—remains the most important American political development that confronts the Left today. It is no accident that the decline of class voting has corresponded with fifty years of retreat for American workers: stagnant wages, accumulating debt, and increasing precarity, even as corporate profits have soared. Nor is it a coincidence that even popular two-term Democratic presidents in this era, elected by such dealigned class coalitions, have proven unable or unwilling to push for structural reforms on anything like the scale of the New Deal era, even after facing the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression."

Matt Karp at Jacobin contrasts Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

"The Best Plan for Promoting Workers' Rights Ever Proposed by a Major US Presidential Candidate"

"Sanders has no illusions about what it's going to take to win workplace democracy. He knows it will take a fight, and with the WDP, he is mobilizing troops for battle. As he put it on Twitter on the same day he unveiled his plan: 'If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it's about time the working class won that war.'"

Barry Eidlin at Jacobin discusses Bernie Sanders's Workplace Democracy Plan.

Servants into Slaves

"Even in 1700, Africans were hardly the only unfree colonists, for a majority of those laboring in Virginia were people bound to service. They were indentured whites. Population numbers are crucial in understanding the demography of labor in early Virginia. By 1680, only about 7% of Virginians were of African descent; 20% of Virginians were of African descent by 1700, and by 1750, the 100,000 enslaved Virginian men and women accounted for more than half the population. Here lies the demography of enslavement."

Nell Irvin Planter at The Guardian reminds readers that the first Africans in colonial Virginia were not enslaved.

And Olivia B. Waxman at Time discusses August 1619.

"20. and odd Negroes"

"'It's rather clear that Virginia did not have a set way of dealing with these folks, and it got worked out over time,' Scott says. 'They had indentured people in Virginia, and some people may have seen Africans just like they saw other indentured people. We know some people became free, so it looks like they were treated like every other indentured person.'
"Other scholars, including Linda Heywood and John Thornton of Boston University, insist that the Africans from the White Lion and the Treasurer were enslaved by the English as they had originally been by the Portuguese slave traders before they were taken by pirates.
"Whether indentured servants or slaves, Newby-Alexander says, 'Either way, they were unfree.'"

E. R. Shipp at USA Today discusses the four-hundredth anniversary of the first Africans arriving in colonial Virginia.

"With a Strange Twist of History's Knife, Once Again, the Pinkertons Are in the Middle"

"Are enforcers and protectors who serve those who can afford to pay inherently undemocratic? If capitalism, in its evolutions, has paid for the Pinkertons to serve the functions government can't provide, what does that mean about Pinkertons—and about government? Another entry on the Pinkertons' timeline touts its service to clients during 21st-century hurricanes, events that create miniature Wild Wests—frontier-like situations, where the government and law enforcement can't always protect everyone's property and bodies. Is this fair? In our new Gilded Age, our popular entertainments, like Red Dead 2, are reflecting back our uncertainty and rage about the inequities we're living through."

Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses the historical image of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

"Surprisingly Timeless in Ways That Are, by Turns, Delightful and Depressing"

"The stories that document the growing pains of the socialist movement, including its squabbles over the utility of electoral politics, have present-day corollaries as well. In the collection's opening story, 'An Old Fable Retold,' a group of chickens gathers to debate which sauce they should petition to be cooked in come Christmastime, scoffing at the naive idealism of a young chicken that pipes up to ask why they must be killed and eaten at all. It's a send-up of self-defeating reformism that, from the perspective of the members of the American left campaigning today for single-payer health care and tuition-free education, might easily describe the lukewarm pragmatism of Democratic Party centrists. Then there's 'The History of a Giant,' in which a giant named Labour discovers that while his associates Liberal and Tory both profess to have his interests at heart, usually around election time, neither group will let him propose legislative changes in Parliament that might actually improve his lot in life. (Again, the average American worker today might say the same of Democrats and Republicans.) The only solution, Labour comes to understand, is an independent party."

At The Atlantic, J. C. Pan reviews Michael Rosen's Worker's Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain.