The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were co-opted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. | more…
Protest and Survive is a powerful gift to the growing American movement from European Nuclear Disarmament (END), which E.P. Thompson helped to found, drafting the mobilizing documents. The book originated as a reaction to “Protect and Survive,” a take-cover pamphlet prepared in 1980 by British civil defense. The volume contains historian E.P. Thompson’s “A Letter to America,” and 11 other essays exploring the arms race, nuclear war, military bureaucracy and the prospects for peacemaking. | more…
This book makes the argument, supported by rich and extensive historical research into original sources, that it is possible to revolutionize work so that it can be, in the author’s words, “satisfying, creative, and stimulating at the same time that it is materially productive: we can have material abundance along with interesting work.” | more…
Nationalism and Socialism is a study in the history of Marxian ideas; but it is also an attempt to show how the ideas are related to the society from which they sprang, and how the changes in social relations were reflected in the emergence of a whole new formulation of nationalist theory. Marx and Engels had perforce to modify their early ideas on nationalism in light of later events, and Lenin revolutionized the whole approach. | more…
What is an intellectual? The most obvious answer would seem to be: a person working with his intellect, relying for his livelihood (or if he need not worry about such things, for the gratification of his interests) on his brain rather than on his brawn. Yet simple and straightforward as it is, this definition would be generally considered to be quite inadequate. Fitting everyone who is not engaged in physical labor, it clearly does not jibe with the common understanding of the term “intellectual.”… in the public consciousness there exists a different notion encompassing a certain category of people who constitute a narrower stratum than those “working with their brains.” This is not merely a terminological quibble. The existence of these two different concepts rather reflects an actual social condition, the understanding of which can take us a long way towards a better appreciation of the place and the function of the intellectual in society. | more…
