Working for Democracy

Working for Democracy contains short essays surveying the struggles of the American working class from the Revolution to the early 1980s.Drawing on the writings of prominent labor and social historians, this slender volume offers a collection of interpretive pieces that synthesize recent scholarship.Most of the essays first appeared in the independent socialist weekly.In These Times, and editors Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley, like most of the other contributors, can be characterized as scholar-activists of the labor movement.Political action, in the form of a labor party, independent organization, or simply coalition building, gives the book a unifying theme.Of the fourteen chapters in the anthology, three focus on black workers, two on women workers, and the remainder on other expressions of labor militancy.Not surprisingly, the essays vary in quality.Alfred R Young's opening account of revolutionary mechanics is an excellent overview, including demographic information, job classifications, forms of political resistance, and the legacy of artisan republicanism.The Workingmen's parties of the late 1820s and early 1830s receive the attention of Franklin Rosemont.Eric Foner explores the often strained relations between abolitionists and labor leaders.In surveying working-class women from the 1830s to 1920, Mari Jo Buhle states that the often tense coalitions between middle-class activists and working women generally operated outside the mainstream labor movement.Alan Dawley's essay on politically self-conscious labor after the Civil War offers a cogent analysis of anarchism but only cursory comments about independent and nonpartisan politics.In a similar fashion, Paul Buhle's piece on the Socialists and Wobblies captures the vision of the latter in a spirited way while providing only a desultory treatment of the former.A creditable portrayal of black labor from 1865 to the 1930s is authored by Nell Irvin Painter.David Montgomery describes left-wing politics under the banner of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party from 1922 to 1944.While recognizing labor's gains under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, James R. Green holds that when workers joined the New Deal coalition they traded political independence for Democratic party loyalty.The book's last five essays probe more recent labor history.Richard Thomas analyzes blacks and the CIO from the mid-1930s to 1960, explaining how blacks used their own independent labor organizations as a vehicle to combat racism and to organize workers.The

Democracy · Industrial democracy · Political science · Politics · Labor Movements and Unions · Law