The most thoroughly researched analysis of American labor history and political economy I have ever read. A masterclass.

fucking incredible

A masterpiece

I wish I'd read this...well, I was a child when it came out but anytime in the intervening 30-odd years. It would have made my job much easier.

"The postwar defeat of Southern labor organization (and, correlatively, the failure of the labor movement to become a civil rights movement) was the Achilles heel of American unionism."

Why has the American working class never really had any mass organizations going further left than the capitalist Democratic Party? The short answers are pretty obvious and Davis nails them (the abstract "working class" is in reality segmented by tremendous privileges of white racism and overconsumptionism, so that capital and Yuppie nouveaux riches form a solid political bloc), but his astute examination of the historical details, from 1776 to the racist disaster of 1984, when leftists like the DSA rushed to Mondale and denounced Jesse Jackson, makes this book invaluable.

Impossible to summarize, much of the book revolves around the transition to post-Fordism, showing that "industrial relations" was never anything more than an unstable regime, already faltering in the late 1950s. Davis makes some very interesting observations about the role of Christian Democracy in Europe, and the importance of the ascendance of the fractions of capital based in the Sun Belt.

A good part of the US left is still trying to relegate the problems of a politically subsidized middle class and an excluded Black population (Davis shows that the two are absolutely the two sides of the same coin!) to a secondary level, or even ignore them completely. Back in the 80s, Davis insisted that a Second Reconstruction was the order of the day, and nothing has changed.

From Davis’s epilogue:

“As I have argued at some length, the failure of the postwar labor movement to form an organic bloc with Black liberation, to organize the South or to defeat the power of Southern reaction in the Democratic Party, have determined, more than any other factors, the ultimate decline of American trade unionism and the rightward reconstruction of the political economy during the 1970s. The frustration of any second Reconstruction was the pivotal event marking the end of the Rooseveltian epoch of reform and its underlying economic base: the integrative capacities of a Fordist mass consumption economy. The minimal democratic program of the civil rights movement, involving the claims to equal housing, equal employment and equal political representation, has proved to be an impossible set of reforms for contemporary American capitalism to enact.

The struggle for substantive social equality for the Black and Hispanic working class is no longer simply part of the unfinished agenda of liberalism, currently on hold while those concerned wait patiently for it to be resumed in the next Democratic administration. Their struggle has evolved, rather, towards what might be called a 'revolutionary-democratic’ platform that challenges the current political economy of capitalism. At this juncture in history, as the [Jesse] Jackson campaign demonstrated, the return toward even the unsatisfactory Great Society levels of welfare maintenance and job subsidization would require halting the new Cold War and entail a massive shift of resources from the military to the social budget. Any real movement towards an economic integration of the working poor into a new high-wage environment would involve a radical expansion of the public sector and a complete undoing of the 'overconsumptionist’ logic that expresses the social power of the expanded middle strata. Substantive economic citizenship for Black and Hispanic America would require levels of change dangerously close to the threshold of socialist transformation.”

Mike D brings the heat.

Moi qui a depuis longtemps une dent contre le rêve américain a été un peu déçu. Il faut dire que j'était très excité de lire le livre. C'est l'histoire des classes ouvrières aux États-Unis, mais on aborde peu le rôle du rêve américain.

Lovely writing, unique and smart perspective, essential reading for understanding the American working class

Exhaustive and at times plodding but always rescued by Davis' effortless and invigorating rhetoric.