165: Arrighi, Hopkins & Wallerstein's Antisystemic Movements

From my notes from December 13, 2011 (!)

Author: Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins & Immanuel Wallerstein

Title (Year): Antisystemic Movements (1989)

Abstract:

The five essays that make up Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein’s Antisystemic Movements, all of which were presented between 1982 and 1988 at the International Colloquia on the World Economy, progressively theorize and explicate the new world-system and the antisystemic movements that shape and are shaped by it.  Although system and resistance are dialectically related, all resistence is directly shaped by the structures and processes of the world-system; the purpose of this volume is to reexamine patterns and successes of antisystemic movements thus far.  To theorize the world-system, AH&W expand on Weber’s distinction between class-based (economic) and status-based (prestige) political communities, which, in turn, is based on Marx’ base and superstructure.  They articulate status-based communities to autonomous nation-states and class-based communities to the increasingly global world economy, where economic and political competition are increasingly being replaced by giant transnational corporations managing vast circulations of capital.  States become striated into three rings of power: the core states, which conveniently include the US, USSR, Japan, China, and Western Europe; the semi-peripheral states, which are mostly communist, and the peripheral states which are going through various iterations of radical nationalism.  As capitalism goes global, power becomes centralized in the core, but capital becomes decentralized as it goes further and further in search of Third World countries that can’t resist its exploitation.  However, while increased globalization of capitalism leads to increased oppression of the world’s peoples, this process also leads to greater opportunities for transnational resistance, because capitalism’s “integrating tendencies” lend structure and organization to the resistence that is always-already fomenting just beneath the surface.  When oppression becomes too acute, antisystemic activity responds.  The dilemma of antisystemic activism, however, is that historically it has been aimed at overturning the state, but in the era of global capitalism it should really be aiming to overturn the capitalist system, because capitalism, not states, is where the power lies now.

I have to admit, I find a lot to like in world-systems theory, partly because it is clearly and succinctly theorized and partly because its global perspective helps explain processes that might be invisible or less logical at a smaller scale.  Although the authors touch on a mere two dozen sources in their bibliography, they spend pages explaining each element of their theory and how they used Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, or Emile Durkheim to derive it, a process which, while keeping their work solidly within the Enlightenment canon, clearly anchors their ideas in the history of Western thought.  Thus, they are able to derive a political model from the familiar base-and-superstructure, explain that class is by definition a class in itself but nationalism is a class for itself (because it involves mutual recognition of non-economic similarities), and show that at a global scale, class and status become fused at the level of the state and therefore at the level of the (dialectically necessary) antisystemic movement.  Likewise, they can show that while social movements generally occur in direct action against the state, the new global capitalism – and the resulting fusion between base and superstructure at the state level – make it possible for revolution to occur at the global scale, both because the theory works out neatly and because all of the states are thoroughly and irrevocably interconnected.  The combination of theory and global scale makes world processes and world revolution visible and legible.  It also has an eerie ability to make sense of the relationships between, say, the Arab Spring, the teetering Euro, and the Occupy Wall Street movement: increased interconnectivity both renders economics more important than statehood and helps protesters mobilize class- and status-based identities and rhetorics to protest the New World Order.

Despite my infatuation with neat theoretical explanations, however, AH&W’s world-systems version of social movement theory is not without its problems.  Beyond the obvious lack of empirical evidence, world-systems theory, as Tilly reiterates in Big Structures, operates at such a large scale that only sweeping generalizations are possible; this leads to an erasure of the very differences between peoples and movements that can help explain their development, rise, and fall.  Further, characterizing social movements as merely the dialectical partner of global capitalism assigns all agency to the capitalist system and leaves nothing but structurally pre-ordained crumbs for antisystemic activists – or for any social actors, for that matter.  And far from being dynamic, the picture of the world that world-systems theory creates is resolutely static, with its three concentric rings of power, continually-suffering oppressed peoples, and linear trajectory from 1848 to 1968, which the authors call the “great rehearsal.”  The great rehearsal for the glorious revolution?  In spite of their insistence on a dialectical structure, the authors come off as rather heavy-handed Marxists, moulding world history into some slow but steady progress toward the final liberatory revolution.

Despite this heavy-handedness – and in some cases because of it – AH&W’s world-systems take on social movements is connected to many writers working on similar problems at the same time and has had a profound impact on the study of social movements.  The authors cite Marx, Smith, Weber, and Durkheim as their primary influences, and these are all very visible in the text, but Foucault and Althusser are also quite present, particularly in their conception of politics as a closed system and power as inescapable.  Although he disagrees with their choice of scale, Charles Tilly’s Big Structures shows that he was strongly influenced by their nation-state/world-economy tension as well as by the dialectical relationship between social movements and the structures they are moving against.  Tarrow’s Power in Movement belies a similar understanding of these tensions, though he (and Tilly) insist that the large-scale theory be paired with empirical evidence of historically contingent social movements.  Finally, and more recently, geographer David Harvey has adapted world-systems theory for the present day and has used it to advocate for revolution from within the system.  Thus, despite its faults, world-systems theory has been incredibly useful for scholars of social movements, and I imagine it will continue to do so.

97: Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire

In Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, Penny Von Eschen locates radical black American thought within the larger tradition of politics of the African diaspora, and she traces the rise and fall of the relationship between the two in the decades surrounding WWII.  The international politics of the African diaspora (or the Black Atlantic) combined local struggles against racism and colonialism with a broad critique of imperialism.  International black leaders found support in Pan-Africanism, the Popular Front, labor movements in the US and the colonies, and a very vocal independent black press in the US; they viewed WWII as a unique opportunity to pursue their anti-colonial activism because they felt the racism and imperialism of the Axis powers would force the Allies to recognize and join their mission.  This international context for radical black American thought provides context for the Civil Rights movement while detaching race from its American context and reconfiguring it as the internal contradiction in global capitalism.

94: Doug Rossinow's Politics of Authenticity

With The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, Doug Rossinow writes a history of the New Left that emphasizes continuity across both time and the broader political field of the 1960s.  Unlike many scholars of the 1960s, Rossinow was not there; this is a much-needed history of the left from the outside.  Instead of drawing on personal connections and personal experience, Rossinow relies on newspapers, TV, radio, and other media sources, as well as interviews, to understand the Left and place it in context.  He argues that the New Left operated by applying an existentialist activism to the left; from this perspective, the New Left developed in response to the Cold War of the 1950s, and it ended partly because the seeds of identity politics within existentialism fragmented the Left after 1968.

93: Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open

Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America is a conscious attempt to excavate and describe the legacy of the women's movement - primarily second wave feminism - for generations of women (and men) who didn't live through it, so that a kind of living, breathing social history can keep the struggle for gender equality alive.  In particular, Rosen charts the change in women's consciousness from the 1950s to the 1990s through a vast compendium of the many issues, events, people, ideas, books, successes, and failures of the women’s movement in the United States, with some connections to women’s movements outside the US.

This book is written for a popular audience in response to her discovery that her undergraduate students in the 1980s had no idea what the women's movement had redefined.  Accordingly, it hits all the highlights: Betty Freidan, SNCC and other civil rights groups, the coming together of the Old and New Left in what she calls the “female generation gap,” Kennedy’s commission on women and the tension between liberal and radical feminism, NOW, Gloria Steinem, the Vietnam War, abortion, the naming of hidden injuries, sexuality, the body, intersections between feminism and race and class, protests and happenings, consciousness-raising groups, sex, pornography,  ideological factionalism, trashing, paranoia, the FBI, commodification, the superwoman, and Ronald Reagan and the spread of global feminism.  Throughout, she attempts to characterize the depth and breadth of the women’s movement as much as she can while also showing just how interconnected this historical period was.  She also tries to account for the successes and failures of the women's movement and the legacy of the movement as a whole.

Rosen's faith in the power of narrative to continue the perpetual gender revolution is clear, and I think her point that we will lose the gains we have made if we are not vigilant is a good one - just look at the attacks on affirmative action.  However, I would very much like to read a history of this iteration of the women's movement written by someone who was not there, to get a sense of the larger social and political context and a more thoroughgoing critique (instead of a celebration) of the movement itself.

92: Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left

In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg argues that "by maintaining the democratic spirit of the 1930s through the Cold War, children's literature became a kind of bridge between the Old Left and the New Left generations" and contributed to the youth rebellions of the 1960s.  Working from a vast array of primary sources, including 33 author interviews, several hundred fiction and non-fiction books for children, and other archival materials, Mickenberg builds her argument by contextualizing close readings of children's books in their historical time and place.  While she is not the first to discuss dissent in a Cold War context, Mickenberg shows that this dissent was right out in the open in children's books; its very accessibility points to pervasive "counterhegemonic impulses" and the survival of the Popular Front in the midst of McCarthyism.

91: Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors

In Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Lisa McGirr traces the development of the Conservative movement in Orange County from 1945 to Reagan's presidential election in 1980; she argues that the Right used religion and consumerism to create a movement that combined an emphasis on individual experience with the collectivism required to create social change.  Using archival sources and oral histories with activists and ordinary people who helped build the conservative movement in Orange County in the 1960s, McGirr builds the history of the Conservative movement from the ground up.

McGirr's interest in telling the rise of the Right from its own perspective creates a nuanced picture of right-wing activism in Orange County.  She shows that upwardly mobile, white, educated, suburban moms and dads were attracted to Conservatism because it resonated with their own experiences as successful individuals and as Westerners who were suspicious of "liberal Washington intellectuals'" intervention in their lives.  Orange County Conservatives also included many competing worldviews, including long-held libertarianism, a religious interest in fighting godlessness and immorality, a distrust of "collectivism," and an interest in a return to American foundational values.  Anti-Communism held these libertarians and social conservatives together (along with extremist groups like the John Birch Society) in the 1950s and early 1960s.  However, after Goldwater's defeat in 1964 the Orange County Right broke with extremist groups and forged a more mainstream, populist conservative movement under Ronald Reagan that attacked general liberal permissiveness, big government, welfare, and criminality.  The parallel rise of 1960s counterculture and evangelical Christianity in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought a host of new social concerns, state welfare programs, and religious zeal for a return to morality; this stoked a fire that spread nationally and ended up getting Reagan elected president.

While McGirr's method is not innovative from a history perspective, her choice of subject is unusual for a study of social movements, as most social movement theorists include a progressive or left agenda and an association with an oppressed group in their definitions of social movements.  However, her grassroots analysis of the Right's rise to power and her interest in reading members of the Right from their own perspectives provides a depth of analysis that does justice to an incredibly powerful movement.

89: Miriam Ching Yoon Louie's Sweatshop Warriors

Miriam Ching Yoon Louie's Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory is both energetic activist scholarship and history from the bottom up.  Louie, a lifelong activist, builds on interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Mexicana immigrant sweatshop workers from five independent community-based workers' centers in New York, El Paso, Oakland, San Antonio and LA (from 1997-2000) to argue that "grassroots immigrant women [are] agents of change... the very heartbeat of the labor and anti-sweatshop movements."  By combining the experiences of these women with a structural analysis of the global sweatshop industry, Louie turns the story of their progress form workers to warriors into a handbook for other activists for social change.

Plenty of theorists and historians have explored the development of global capitalism.  Where Louie's account is unique is in her focus on (and identification with) immigrant sweatshop workers in the United States.  Working from this perspective, Louie shows that, first, the global sweatshop pyramid of exploitation takes advantage of the "exceptional" and the "different" in order to "relegate certain strata of the population into super-exploited positions and other to more privileged buffer positions;" the "exceptions" being gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and so on.  She thus exposes the exploitation of social difference as the heart of the global capitalist enterprise.  Second, she shows that immigrant sweatshop labor in the US is itself a product of US expansion abroad: many of the women argue that "we are here because you were there."  And third, this perspective also allows her to show concretely and in detail how global capitalism can and is being resisted by the people at the very bottom of the pyramid, who use both their differences in language and in origin AND their common experiences to fight for basic rights like a minimum wage, safe working conditions, a cap on hours, greater corporate accountability... as well as food, education, rights to housing, and so on.

Louie brings the voices and experiences of women who have turned their differences into an asset and begun working together for social change.  And, conscious of her readers' probable ignorance of these women's lives, she asks that we not be voyeurs or consumers of their work and their lives, but that we join to help them in their struggles.

88: Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels

In Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, Robin Kelley argues that extra-institutional forms of resistance, not formal SMOs, are foundational to black workers' larger struggle for racial and economic justice.  Building on James Scott's "infrapolitics," or everyday small acts of resistance, evasion, and defiance, Kelley shifts the political history of the black working class to the "margins of struggle," the unorganized, often spontaneous battles with authority, and the social movements that are somehow thought to be "inauthentic" representations of a community's interests.  He thus locates black political resistance in the complexity of the lived experience of ordinary people whose lives are raced and classed.

Kelley investigates black infrapolitics in a variety of 20th century settings and constructs: the double-edged sword of the "mask of grins and lies"in the pre-WWII South; African American Communists in the South and African American volunteers in the Spanish-American War; the zoot suits, bebop, and hipster ethic in the black male working-class culture of Malcolm X's youth and the gangsta rap of 1990s LA; bus protests long before Rosa Parks' formal resistance.  In each situation, he locates resistance at a wide variety of scales, from enlisting to fight in a war or working to build the Communist party to walking, smiling, dressing, sitting, or singing in a certain way and in a certain time and place.

By focusing on infrapolitics, Kelley is able to situate now-famous protests like the Woolworth's sit-ins in a long tradition of extra-institutional, everyday resistance; as George Lipsitz points out, he is also able pinpoint the beginnings of social movements in everyday forms of resistance that overcome oppression even as they are structured by its particular spatial, economic, and cultural forms.

82: Clay Carson's In Struggle

Clay Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s uses the trajectory of SNCC’s radicalism in the 1960s both to analyze the black civil rights movement as a historical struggle and to draw conclusions based on this struggle about social movements more generally.  He divides SNCC’s history into three broad segments: formation of a grassroots organization around the dual foci of non-violent protest strategies and socioeconomic programs to help poor rural Southern blacks; organizational centralization and internal strife related to a deepening understanding of the extent of structural racism in the United States and conflict over whether separatism or interracial collaboration would best address it; and a turn toward generating black power ideology and away from social programs that resulted in the failure of SNCC and a dissipation of the civil rights movement more generally.  As Carson assembles oral histories, meeting transcripts, newspaper accounts, and other sources into this general narrative, several historically contingent conclusions emerge.  First and foremost, Carson argues that the black civil rights movement (as SNCC) was most successful at effecting social change early in the movement, when it was able to balance individual interests with collective rights – hence Ella Baker’s “group-centered leaders” instead of “leader-centered groups.” Further, developing an ideology is important for sustaining a mass movement, but this ideology has to come from the ground up, not from the top down.  Hence, SNCC lost its constituency when it moved away from localized social and economic programs and toward flashy Black Power rhetoric.  And finally, Carson argues that radical separatism will not achieve social equality as well as interracial cooperation or cooperation with more liberal groups, both because it overemphasizes individualism and because it has little basis in the material reality of most potential constituents.  Carson’s history thus makes a compelling argument for grassroots activism and a federated structure as two characteristics of a successful social change organization.

80: Nan Boyd's Wide Open Town

In Wide Open Town, Nan Boyd argues that San Francisco’s bar-based queer culture was just as important to the development of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement there as were the city’s more mainstream activist groups.  The book relies primarily on some 40 oral histories with San Francisco bargoers, owners, and LGBT rights activists, as well as tourist guides, periodicals, clippings, photographs, and public records to construct (in often meticulous detail) a narrative of how the development of San Francisco’s gay scene swelled into a fight for civil rights.  Although the writing style is a bit heavy-handed at times, Boyd’s innovative research and methodology create a narrative that is anything but closed or canonical.  Rather, by limiting her scope to San Francisco before 1965 and structuring the book in terms of community formation rather than strict chronology, Boyd is able to open up the development of San Francisco’s gay civil rights movement and analyze (or characterize) it in terms of a variety of local contextual factors.  As she moves through topics as diverse as the gay male community, tourism, and female impersonation; the lesbian community, prostitution, and the female body; policing and the construction of homosexuality as behavior- versus desire-based; homophile activism and class-based differences over separatism and assimilation; and coalition-building, she explores the relationships between economics, use of space, police and media oppression, and the development of a community into a class-for-itself.  The result is a narrative that characterizes San Francisco’s gay civil rights movement as a multi-class, space- and place-dependent grassroots movement.  Boyd’s work thus argues that, for this movement in this place and time, “the politics of everyday life were every bit as important as the politics of organized social movement activism.” (242)

76: Piven & Cloward's Poor People's Movements

In Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Piven and Cloward study four American social movements, two from the 1930s and two from the 1960s, to identify patterns in protester behavior, political and social context, and state responses that might inform lower-class political movements in the future.  And they determine that in any social social movement (and all social movements, for their purposes, come from the working classes), "whatever the people won was a response to their turbulence and not to their organized numbers."  In other words, uncontrollable mass insurgency, not SMOs, are what cause changes in society and win more rights for oppressed groups.

The reason SMOs kill a social movement instead of fueling it is that organizational development involves creating a disciplined, orderly membership and on getting resources, usually from elites, to sustain the organization.  Elites are more than happy to help fund these organizations, because they're a way of calming down angry people and bringing them into orderly obedience again - or at least a way of distracting them from their revolutionary goals.  "Organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their revolutionary politics, and therefore SMOs kill social movements.

65: Nicola Beisel's Imperiled Innocents

In Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America, Nicola Beisel links Anthony Comstock and moral reform crusades to class formation and nativist fears regarding increased immigration in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the Gilded Age.  Working from mostly published primary and secondary sources on anti-vice campaigns against abortionists, 'free love' advocates, gambling halls, and obscenity, as well as archival sources like the Josiah Leeds papers, Beisel argues that "moral reform movements... are properly seen as struggles over class reproduction."  In other words, anti-vice reformers were far less interested in the well-being of the people they tried to reform than they were in keeping vice and corruption from polluting their children and endangering their elite status.  By extension, vice reform revealed fears about both declining parental authority and an increased immigrant presence.

51: Paul Boyer's Urban Masses and Moral Order in America

In Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920, Paul Boyer argues that between 1820 and 1920, urban reform shifted from voluntary efforts concerned with individual morality to professionalized/ institutionalized concern with environmental factors.  With this shift, reformers' values and programming shifted as well, from nostalgic, rural, and religious to urban and secular.  This transition tracked a larger shift in American society from rural to urban culture, even as both the reform movement and the larger culture retained elements of earlier generations' religious millenialism.

Boyer's book is solid, well-documented, modernist history that works to dissolve divides between rich and poor, urban and rural, and old and new reform movements.  He traces four stages of American urban reform between 1820 and 1920:

• Jacksonian era: evangelical leaders, funded by businesses and professional groups, use Bible societies, tract societies, and Sunday schools to recreate rural values and community for displaced urban dwellers
• Mid-19th century: new institutions, like the Children's Aid Society and the YMCA focus on the city in the belief that cities contained the resources for their own reform
• Gilded Age: the reform community splits; new groups like the Charity Organization Society and early settlement houses are divided over whether they should focus on individual morality or environmental issues and whether they should pursue 'coercive' or 'assimilative' reform
• Progressive Era: reformers push aside their differences and focus on reforming the urban environment. Crusades to reform municipal government, abolish saloons and organized vice, establish local parks and playgrounds all proliferate to instill ideals of citizen loyalty and virtue

Social reform dies down in the 1920s, as people finally see the city not as a threat to the social order but as the new social order itself.  They then start to celebrate diversity, cultural pluralism, and the city's resources for both pleasure and reform.

Boyer makes several claims about the causes and implications of this trajectory.  First, urban reform gets institutionalized in large part because unlike in rural towns, where a single rowdy drunk dude could easily be stopped by a few capable townspeople, the huge numbers of people in cities seem to necessitate large reform apparatuses; with urbanization, individual problems became social problems.  Further, although he documents many reform movements that crossed social classes, he suspects - as do I - that the people who benefited most from voluntary urban reform movements were the reformers themselves, who found in the reform community a refuge from the alienation of their new urban homes.  While the book could certainly use more voices from the urban masses themselves (if only to see what the reformers were up against), and while it pays surprisingly little attention to the missionary mind (a la Bob Abzug), it provides a solid history of reform movements and would be in good company with Levenstein or Roediger's studies of the same time period.

49: Bob Abzug's Cosmos Crumbling

In Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, Bob Abzug explicitly links antebellum reform movements and religion.  Using a series of "spiritual biographies" that includes Benjamin Rush, Lyman Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimke sisters, and Lydia Maria Child, he argues that reformers in this era - from vegetarians to abolitionists - were inspired by a religious ideal of the way things ought to be.  He doesn't mean that evangelicalism inspired reform - what he means is that reform expressed a religious conception of the universe that many found lacking in more traditional religious arenas.  This view of antebellum reform challenges previous histories which tend to focus either on a rational narrative of Progress or a materialist reading of history by shifting the focus to religious thoughts, feelings, beliefs and aspirations.  The result is a kind of genealogy of reform "cosmology."

According to Abzug, the early 19th century was particularly conducive to this combination of spirituality and reform for three reasons.  First, the new republic heartily endorsed religious pluralism; second, the public sphere was full of heated debates about how America could or should define itself religiously; and third, the economy was already beginning to shift into a more modern industrial-capitalist configuration, which caused no end of social problems and social anxiety to go with them.  And this relatively unstable environment inspired religious reformers to set their sights on not just repairing their "crumbling cosmos" of social and religious norms but elevating it to the new Jerusalem.  Reformers fuse their religious zeal with practical concerns so that these new reform movements become a kind of secular religion bent on changing the world to fit God's plan.  Abzug traces an underlying religiosity among reformers, beginning with Benjamin Rush's critique of religion via environmentalism, moving through temperance, sabbatarianism, and manual labor movements designed to 'resacralize' the everyday, and finishing in the 1830s with "body reform" movements like vegetarianism, phrenology, abolitionism and women's rights.  This last set of reforms sees the evangelical impulse crumbling under personal antagonisms and conflicting religious views; religion, no longer able to unite reformers, passes back into the private, and abolition and women's rights pass into the realm of the political.

Abzug does only focus on reform movements inspired by Protestant Christianity, and he presents these movements through spiritual personal biographies rather than social or institutional histories; both choices somewhat limit the scope of his conclusions regarding America's wider reform culture.  However, he does show that the combination of social reform and religious zeal created a kind of secular religiosity that opened up a space for broader cultural critique.

24: Laura Pulido's Black, Brown, Yellow and Left

Laura Pulido squeezes several agendas into this book.  As an LA activist who worked with an antiracist, anticapitalist group called the Labor/Community Strategy Center to organize a multiethnic left, she is interested in learning from the history and mechanics of previous multi-racial organizing attempts; she is also interested in fostering a class-based leftist politics among her readers.  As a scholar, she is fascinated by the sixties and frustrated that histories of radicalism in that period are either mostly white or centered around the Black Panther Party, so she wants to expand the history of racial/ethnic activism to incorporate more of LA's racial and ethnic groups; and she wants to complicate racism by breaking down the black white binary and investigating racial hierarchies and collaborations (or not) in the people she is studying.
 
Therefore, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left is part history of the Third World Left, part empirical study of what she calls "differential racism," and part analysis of the growth, development, and decline of a social movement.  Pulido accomplishes all of these goals via a comparative analysis of left-leaning activism among three racial/ethnic groups in LA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using three organizations as stand-ins: the Black Panther Party for African Americans; East Wind, a Japanese American group, for Asian Americans; and CASA, a Chicano/a group, for Latino/as.

Although the details of each case make for good reading, her historical conclusions about the relationship between race/ethnicity, racism, and Left activism reveal the complexities of the Third World Left.  Her study of the Black Panther Party suggests that their two main concerns of self-defense and community service were directly related to African American racialization (as the 'Other' to whites, they were at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy and over-policed) and their class position as urban poor.  CASA, by contrast, focused on labor organizing and immigration issues reflected Chicano/as position as a 'problem minority': their racial status and particular historical experiences as immigrants and low-wage workers meant that they were a needed part of the economy, but only as subordinated and exploited workers.  And as a Japanese American group in a multiethnic, multi-class Asian American community, East Wind focused on issues of identity, community service, and solidarity work; their activities reflected their mixed economic position and their status as a 'middle minority.'

Though Pulido found enough connections among groups to indicate a relatively coherent Third World Left, she quickly discovered that these connections were rather thin.  All three organizations were interested in the connection between their own identity as a racial or ethnic 'nation' and anticolonial struggles worldwide, and all three were fighting racism and economic exploitation at home, but they were unsure how to work with other communities in LA.  This uncertainty had a lot to do with the complex racial hierarchies in LA at the time: African Americans, for instance, were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but through the millitancy and visibility of the Black Panther Party they were at the top of the social movement hierarchy. Uncertain positioning, as well as uncertainty regarding the status of one's own group, made lasting coalitions difficult.

Pulido argues that despite a strong need for a multiethnic left today, the situation is much the same as it was in the 1960s and 1970s: strong ethnic groups with weak connections among them, and a weak Third World Left as a result.  Despite some issues with scope (using a single organization to stand in for all ethnic/racial organizing, for instance), Pulido's book provides a thoughtful analysis of the intersections between race and class in LA that may well be a useful guidebook for folks trying to build political capital today.

23: Edwin Layton's Revolt of the Engineers

Revolt of the Engineers lives in the depths of library storage, which is unfortunate because it's a rather interesting study of a failed social movement among early 20th-century engineers.  Also, it was written in 1971, and the political and ideological struggles of that era seem clearly to have influenced Layton's thinking.  And maybe it's just me, but I find reading about a social movement from one era through the eyes of another to be rather illuminating.

Layton argues that professionalization and progressive organizing efforts among engineers in the early 20th century may not have led to large, lasting social change either within the profession or in American society, but the engineers' efforts were still an important cross-pollination between technology and culture.

To support this claim, Layton traces a chronological history of the rise and fall of different professional engineering organizations and their relationship to the broader social reform movement in turn-of-the-century America.  One of his more entertaining examples is the career of Henry Gantt, whose appropriately-named Gantt charts are still in use today, at least among my undergrad Civil Engineering students.

Henry Gantt was a talented follower of Frederick Taylor, the guy who devised all those time and motion studies to make Ford's assembly lines faster and more efficient.  (Harry Bravermann and Tim Cresswell both do cool - and very different - treatments of Taylor and his impact.)  Like Taylor, Gantt thought scientific management was the best thing ever, and he developed his Gantt chart as a visual project management tool to help users maintain top-down scientific control over an entire process.  Also like Taylor, Gantt thought that scientific management principles could and should be applied in areas beyond the confines of business, especially government and education.  But Gantt, who liked to carefully chart out arms production and ship production processes in his office during WWI, went a step further.  With the right visualization tools (heh) and a firm commitment to scientific management principles, Gantt thought that engineers could potentially plan not just individual industries but the whole economy, from defense production, education, and government to automobile manufacturing, city development, and social services.  And because scientific management efficiently allocated resources and talent, letting the engineers run society would be perfectly efficiently and perfectly just.  Democracy and scientific management would finally become synonymous!

Now, the problem with this scheme, as Layton points out, is that it's not a democracy but a technocracy, where the engineers in their central planning offices get to design sociotechnical systems, but all citizens can do is conform to them.  Incidentally, this kind of thinking also plagued engineering's professional societies, where infighting over power and prestige kept engineers from making any serious progress toward social goals.  Layton concludes here, with the decline of a movement that could have had a huge impact on society, particularly during the Great Depression. 

Yet I think that if self-serving politics hindered engineers from effecting large-scale social reform or a mass seizure of political power, they helped them spread scientific management ideas in more conservative arenas like business, and manufacturing in particular.  Here, stripped of its revolutionary potential, scientific management could be used to further exploit the labor of assembly-line and sweatshop workers by speeding the pace of production and thus lowering per-unit labor costs.  Layton doesn't dwell on this particular legacy, but his frustration with his subjects' deflation of their movement is clear.  The implications for the time in which he was writing seem pretty clear, too.

16: McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly's Dynamics of Contention

Dynamics of Contention is not the easiest to get through (ok, so it made me want to put an ice pick through my head), but it's a pretty important book in social movement theory, so here goes.

Back in the day (like, before the 1960s), social movement theory was a lot closer to social psychology, or crowd theory, or theories of contagion: basically, scholars knew that social movements could and did form and that they could be really dangerous for the social order (see the French Revolution, for instance), but they blamed them on mob mentality and temporary insanity.  And in the 1960s and 70s, when all that social unrest was going on, social scientists did develop more complex theories, but these were still relatively simple: people join organizations which in turn build a mass following and put enormous pressure on the government and the rest of society.  (So claim the authors of this book, anyway.)

Dynamics of Contention builds on the theories from the 60s and 70s, but it updates them for the Postmodern era in three ways:

• combines lots of different kinds of uprisings - revolutions, strikes, wars, social movements, and so on - under the more general umbrella of "contentious politics," so that the things scholars have learned about these different struggles can be pooled together in hopes of finding commonalities among them
• shifts the thing being studied from organizations and individuals to relationships between different organizations and actors, and looks at these relationships as being unstable, shifting, and "dynamic" rather than fixed
• systematizes the study of political struggle from holistic histories to systematic analyses and a search for "processes" and "mechanisms" that all political struggles share.

Basically, they make things more complicated, since it's a lot harder to keep track of a bunch of individual people who are all parts of different political organizations and friends with different people at different times than it is to just talk about, say, battles between SNCC and the Black Panthers.  And a more complicated model means that whatever they come up with with look more like real life, right?

Having made things more like real life, then, they spend the rest of the book poking around in 15 different political struggles from all different points in history and all different parts of the world, and they come up with three - yes, three - processes that most of these struggles share.  These are:

• Actor constitution, where contentious groups form by developing a shared vision and then doing something unusual to get their demands heard and make their presence known
• Polarization, where all the moderates head to one or the other of two political or social poles, and the vacuum in the middle keeps the two sides from talking to each other and coming to peaceable conflict resolution
• Scale shift, where a local contentious group grows into a translocal, national, or international group by linking up with other groups who have similar interests or grievances

Thinking about the development of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, this model makes sense to me.  I'm not a huge fan of giant, transhistorical studies that don't collect their own data, though, and I'm also a little weirded out by two holes in their model: it doesn't seem to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful movements, and it only seems to account for the growth of movements, not their functioning or their decline.  But these guys are bigwig sociologists; perhaps these concerns are addressed somewhere else in their work.

13: Michael Denning's The Cultural Front

Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, for all its weighty historical detail and analysis, centers around a single theme: that the 1930s amalgamation of labor and cultural interests into a "Popular Front" might be little-known now, but it resulted in a "laboring of culture" that is still reverberating, at least in left-leaning circles, today.
What Denning means by "laboring of culture" is the tricky part, because he sees labor and culture as dialectically related parts, which means that each shapes the other and that they're therefore as difficult to separate as a codependent high school couple.  So he spends the first half of the book tracing their conjoined public appearances, including the shared language of the "labor movement," the "proletariat," and the "work," "toil," and "struggle" of labor activists and artists; the "proletarianization" of the culture industries, as children of working-class parents increasingly work as singers, artists, novelists, actors, cartoonists and make mass culture more like working-class culture; and the "social democratic" labor politics that influenced (and was influenced by) everything from textile strikes to fiction to dinner-table conversation.

The result of all this cross-pollination between labor movements, the people in the working-class, and cultural production, Denning argues, was a mass movement to permanently connect American labor with American culture.  That way, American culture could represent and be represented by the people, and Leftist and communist social visions could be realized. 

And lest his readers think he's making all of this up, Denning spends the whole second half of the book proving it by analyzing products of this labor-culture combo: John Dos Passos' U.S.A, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Billie Holiday's love songs, experimental musical theater, gangster films, and something he calls the "ghetto pastoral," of which A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably the best-known example.  By thoroughly examining each of these cultural productions formally (er, he spends a good 50 pages talking about metaphors and narrative structures in the Dos Passos section alone) and simultaneously situating them in their cultural and historical context, Denning shows that yes, in the 1930s, labor and culture were thoroughly intertwined.

Of course, mass culture is not super communist or particularly pro-Labor today; if anything, the profusion of reality TV shows, re-released remakes of Spiderman movies, auto-tuned pop music, and baby animal YouTube videos that populate mass culture serve more to distract us than to incite us to revolution.  But lest this decoupling of labor and culture prove that the Popular Front didn't have as much impact on American culture as Denning claims, he closes his book with this quote from cultural theorist Fredric Jameson:


history progresses by failure rather than by success…. It would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures – that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history – than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense.

In other words, while the movement failed to permanently connect labor and culture, the people in it were both ordinary and extraordinary: they were totally human, but we are still trying to figure out the full implications of the things they produced, the ideas they had, and the politics they espoused.  And hey, maybe the most successful movements are those that show us how ordinary humans can create history.

9: Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (round 1)

Having just read James Miller's book on the 1960s, and  knowing that The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution was published in 1967, all I could think about while reading this book is what Bailyn thought about the social and political ferment all around him.  Was he hiding in an archive somewhere deep in the Harvard library system and researching the Revolution while his students were outside protesting in the streets?  Or was all that political unrest what drove him into the archives in the first place, and if that was the case, was he for social and political change, or against it?

Truthfully, I can't quite tell (though I can guess) what his position was, but I do think his research was driven by a desire to understand and explain the present.  Using close readings of some 400+ pamphlets published in the colonies between 1760 and 1776, Bailyn makes two major arguments about the American Revolution.  First, he argues that the Revolution was steeped in the intellectual, historical, and political traditions of Europe, and thus it was not as radical of a break with the past as we like to think.  Second, he argues that it was "ideological," or motivated by a desire to protect and extend a uniquely American worldview, and thus it was not as lofty and intellectual and idealistic as we like to think, either.

There are some obvious problems with Bailyn's method.  Most notably, he claims to want to recreate the world of the Revolutionary generation, but he does so primarily by reading political pamphlets, and of these, he really only focuses on those that supported the revolution because, as he says, no one cares about the losers.  And, judging by some of the truly amazing conspiracy theories he uncovers, this approach would be kind of like listening to either NPR or Rush Limbaugh and assuming they spoke to the worldview of most Americans (which, let's face it, they don't).

However, he also comes up with some really fascinating stuff.  He argues that the American Revolution was inspired by an Enlightenment belief in liberty after all (and not, as Charles Beard claimed, by class warfare) and by religious beliefs in American exceptionalism (with a nod to his former mentor, Perry Miller), but also by a strain of British oppositional thought that he dates to the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period.  Drawing on little-known (to us) British writers like Algernon Sidney, Henry Neville, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, Bailyn shows that this oppositional strain had two goals: to hold up and protect the liberty and freedom of the individual, and to expose the corruption, decay, and abuses of power in the over-centralized British government.  He then traces these two goals to American pamphleteers Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Otis (among others) and argues that, through them, Americans became increasingly suspicious of a vast British conspiracy to reclaim the colonies and take away their liberties.  And what better reason to start a revolution than to disconnect your pure, virtuous, simple new homeland from an ugly, corrupt, tyrannical, decaying, conspiratorial imperial power BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE??! 

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

While the whole conspiracy angle might be a bit much, Bailyn's connection between these oppositional British thinkers and the American Revolution does have important implications for the 1960s (and for today, too.)  Once he's made the connection, he goes on to talk about how a democratic government works.  In his view, a democracy functions via the productive tension between regulatory institutions and a populace of active, informed individuals; by making our voices heard, we can constantly readjust the regulatory institutions so that they both respect our civil liberties and control for abuses.  It's like we are in a perpetual revolution.  If the people rise up in an angry, unthinking mob (or lapse into uninformed submission), however, the system ceases to function, because in either case the government becomes too powerful.  The book reads, to me anyway, as both a cautionary tale about our responsibilities as American citizens and a narrative of faith in the flexible, evolving democratic system that the Revolution set in motion.

You can check out round 2 here.

8: Roy Rosenzweig's Eight Hours for What We Will

This book is so lovely and so clear, and, judging from the number of times Rosenzweig's name comes up in the Acknowledgement sections of other books, he's a wonderfully nice guy, too.

Eight Hours for What We Will is a study of the leisure time and space of the working class in the industrial town of Worcester, MA from 1870-1920.  Rosenzweig is a labor historian who was researching and writing in the late 70s/ early 80s, and accordingly his study bear a few hallmarks of the New Social History: he is committed to giving voice to people who were once silenced by history (i.e., working class people); he prefers to work within the specifics of a single community rather than to generalize about national trends; and he is interested in the holistic, everyday lives and culture of the people he is studying, not just a small segment of their lives.

Therefore, his study of working-class people in Worcester might not be generalizable to the nation, but it has a wealth of detail on Swedish wireworkers, the fight for a park in Ward 5, Irish drinking habits, the Protestant-Catholic divide, and what people really did in working-class movie theaters at the turn of the century (they brought their kids and talked - a lot!  Alamo Drafthouse would not approve.)

And as a result of these specific details, Rosenzweig is able to draw some interesting conclusions about why Worcester was considered a 'scab hole' with a chronic open shop problem: the immigrant communities there were so insular and so different from one another that they were unable to unite across ethnic, cultural, or religious lines.  Further, some issues, particularly the fight over working-class saloons, not only divided the working class (Irish Catholics vs Swedish evangelicals) but allowed for some cross-class alliances (particularly among non-drinking Protestants), thus splintering the working class further.  And this splintering worked to the benefit of the industrialists but to the detriment of the workers, who couldn't lobby for shorter days or higher pay as effectively as could workers in other towns.

However, like the workers in David Gartman's Auto Opium, the working classes in Worcester had a weakness for the new mass culture and mass entertainment, and they were eager patrons of amusement parks and movie houses when these came to town.  Unlike Gartman, however, Rosenzweig sees this working class obsession with consumption not as an opiate but as an incredible boon to his subjects.  To patronize amusement parks and movie houses, people had to come out of their ethnic enclaves and mingle with people of other religions, ethnicities, cultures, and sometimes even other classes.  This new mass mingling in new leisure spaces, combined with rising incomes and the development of a new ethnic middle class, led to less antagonism within the working class itself, which in turn provided a foundation for more radical political activism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Basically, modernization and the rise of mass consumer culture at the turn of the century was both the problem (creation of a culture of individual accumulation) and the solution (break down intra-class divisions so the working class can fight its oppressors later on down the line.)  Or at least Rosenzweig hopes so.