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Given what’s currently happening in the workplace—automation, offshoring, the decline of manufacturing jobs, the rise of the gig economy, the fight for the $15 minimum wage and the resurgence of labor activism in the 21st century—you might think that this would be the golden age of American labor and working-class history.
Not so.
As this country de-industrialized, interest in labor and working-class history waned.
Only a handful of major history departments have a dedicated working-class historian. The days when Yale made a senior appointment in American labor and working-class history are now 50 years in the past.
I find it deeply ironic and disturbing that at a time when issues of economic justice and social equity are widely touted, the study of the history of the actual working class has declined.
My interest in this topic is not purely academic. I grew up in Detroit and worked for a time on the afternoon shift (4 p.m. to 1 a.m.) in a nonunionized metal working plant. One of my sons works today in a nonunion Texas factory.
I am deeply concerned about the retreat from labor history. But I don’t want to exaggerate: Important work on working-class history continues to be produced. Leading scholars include Lizabeth Cohen, Julie Greene, Ruth Milkman, Jefferson Cowie, Leon Fink, Thavolia Glymph, Michael K. Honey, Nelson Lichtenstein, David Roediger and Joel Suarez, though I should note that many of these scholars are almost as old as I am.
Why, then, has labor and working-class history lost ground?
The reasons are not a secret. As the working class grew more diverse in terms of race, gender and ethnicity, the focus shifted to specific subgroups: Blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexican Americans, women of various identities. The rise of cultural history pushed the study of labor law, labor strikes, unionization and working class cultures to the sidelines.
Insofar as the white working class is studied, it is often through a negative lens. Whiteness studies, for example, shows how the white working class historically benefited from systemic racism, even while facing economic hardships. Scholarship in this field often argued that white working-class identity has been shaped in opposition to racial minorities, contributing to a sense of racial superiority despite their own struggles. It is certainly true that many labor unions did exclude nonwhite workers, reinforcing racial divisions within the working class and maintaining white dominance in many industries.
However, the most significant contributor to the decline in working-class and labor history as a field is the flight from Marxist history, whether in its materialist or its cultural form.
As you know as well as I, historical materialism posits that the economic base of society—comprising the means and relations of production—forms the foundation upon which societal structures (the superstructure) like politics, law and culture are built. History, in this view, evolves through a series of modes of production and transition from one mode to another is driven by contradictions and conflicts within the existing system. Class struggles are history’s primary driver.
Cultural Marxism, in contrast, examines the role of ideology and culture in sustaining and challenging economic and political structures. Cultural products can reinforce or challenge class structures and dominant ideologies that justify the status quo and mask the true nature of exploitation.
The end of the Cold War, the apparent triumph of capitalist democracies and the increasing prominence of identity politics shifted academic and cultural focus away from class-based analysis toward issues of race, gender and sexuality. This shift often emphasized individual and group identities over class struggle and economic determinism.
In addition, the rise of postmodern and poststructuralist theories in the late 20th century provided alternative frameworks for understanding culture and society. These theories often emphasized the fluidity of meaning, power relations and the decentralization of authority, contrasting sharply with the more structured analyses of cultural Marxism.
Labor and working-class history, as a stand-alone field, has been marginalized. The result: Most of my students know little about the struggles and achievements of the American working class.
This is the context in which the Labor and Working-Class History Association has published A David Montgomery Reader. Montgomery, one of the founders of the new labor history, was a proponent of history from the bottom up.
As the volume’s editors, Shelton Stromquist and James Barrett, explain, several themes run through Montgomery’s scholarship:
- The formation of a distinct working class, separate and apart from the middle class.
- The ever-shifting social relations of production in various workplace settings and workers’ struggles for control on the shop floor.
- The diversity of working-class experience and the ways in which the fragmentation of the working class along ethnic, gender, racial, regional and religious lines shaped collective action and politics.
- The tension between democratic values and the inequalities produced by a market economy.
- The impact of class in working people’s families, social life, value systems and communities.
These are themes that every student should be familiar with.
David Montgomery was not an Ivory Tower intellectual. Active in labor, civil rights and antiwar circles, he joined the World Federalist movement, which called for international control of atomic energy; helped integrate public facilities in Pennsylvania; worked in a New York City electrical manufacturing plant and a Minneapolis Honeywell plant; and joined the Communist Party (leaving in 1957). Blacklisted from machine shops, he enrolled in history graduate school in 1960, which led to his first job at the University of Pittsburgh, and he moved to Yale in 1979, where he supported the 1984 strike by clerical and technical workers. He died at the age of 84 in 2011.
His first book, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872, examined class formation during the early phases of industrialization and the first phase of the struggle for an eight-hour day, economic rights and a “republic of labor” freed from the shackles of wage slavery and resting on ideas of craft pride, mutualism and solidarity. In contrast to the old labor history (associated with figures like John R. Commons), the new labor history emphasized workers’ resistance to the reorganization of work processes by management.
In Beyond Equality and many subsequent works, he explored a central paradox about the American working class: that even as workers exercised growing influence at the ballot box, the state and the judiciary exercised increased power over working-class lives through strike breaking, restrictions on poor relief, antivagrancy laws and strict enforcement of stringent labor contracts.
Many of his subsequent essays examined how skilled workers “enforced their own standards and ethical norms on the shopfloor,” “often appealing to a gendered notion of ‘manliness.’”
He was especially interested in the instrumental role of a vanguard, a “militant minority” of socialists (and later communists), syndicalists and union progressives, in raising their fellow workers’ consciousness and driving labor organizing and strikes.
Whereas an earlier generation of labor historians regarded immigration as an obstacle to unionization, Montgomery argued that immigrant workers then (and more recently) were often at the forefront of labor activism.
Far from a story of progress, the history of American labor, in Montgomery’s eyes, is a story of recurrent struggle that has to be launched anew as older compromises between labor and management erode and contexts, economic, political and technological, change:
“The history of American workers has not been a story of progressive ascent from oppression to securely established rights, nor has it offered a past moment of democratic promise that was irretrievably snuffed out by the consolidation of modern capitalism. Their movement has grown only sporadically and through fierce struggles, been interrupted time and again … and been forced to reassess what it thought it had already accomplished and begin again.”
The publication of the Montgomery essay collection coincided with the death of another Yale professor, James C. Scott, who also favored a bottom-up approach to social analysis. He, too, focused on the resistance and agency of marginalized groups, while underscoring the importance of local and practical knowledge and practices and revealing the limitations of top-down approaches and the pervasive nature of everyday resistance.
Both scholars studied marginalized groups—in Scott’s case, peasants, slaves and Indigenous peoples—underscoring the agency and resilience of those often overlooked in traditional histories. The two scholars paid close attention to how material conditions and economic structures shape social and political dynamics. Both admired the ability of local communities to self-organize and resist outside control.
Montgomery and Scott questioned conventional notions of progress. Each argued that acts of resistance were often driven by a sense of economic justice and violations of the moral economy, a community’s shared expectations of fairness and reciprocity. Thus, economic inequality and exploitation are not only material issues but also deeply moral ones
May their example be an inspiration.
One of the profound intellectual tasks facing contemporary historians is to situate the histories of marginalized groups within the broader narrative of the history of capitalism and the formation of the modern, centralized nation-state. This approach not only acknowledges the systemic forces shaping these groups’ lives but also recognizes them as active agents with distinct cultures and value systems. Two stunning examples are Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton and Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Retail Revolution.
To effectively integrate the history of marginalized groups into the broader context of capitalist development and state formation, scholars must adopt an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from history, sociology, economics and anthropology. They must also treat capitalist and state development in a nuanced way, recognizing the many forms that capitalism has taken—mercantilist, industrial, finance, consumer and service, among others—while recognizing the dynamic interplay between economic practices, technological advancements and global integration, with each phase reshaped by shifts in social relations, production methods and economic structures.
We need to contextualize marginalized groups’ histories within evolving capitalist economies and state structures—and move beyond narratives of victimization. The histories of marginalized groups reveal not only the oppressive structures of capitalism and state formation but also the resilience and agency of these groups, who developed distinct cultures and value systems in response to their circumstances.
The history of capitalism and the modern state cannot be separated from the experiences of marginalized groups, for their struggles, adaptations and resistances are fundamental to understanding the broader economic and political transformations. Far from being mere victims, marginalized groups have played a pivotal role in the evolution of capitalism and the development of state structures and their histories must be integrated into broader historical narratives to appreciate their full impact. Only in this way can we truly understand the dynamics of power and resistance.
David Montgomery titled his masterwork—a study of the decline of labor unions during the period of industrial transformation stretching from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1920s—The Fall of the House of Labor. That book traced the ascent and descent of labor militancy, solidarity and resistance to exploitative labor practices, and control over the production process not only to recalcitrant employers, who exploited ethnic and racial divisions, but to state intervention and to the introduction of new machinery and division of labor, which deskilled many workers, leading to job insecurity and weakening traditional labor solidarity.
I can’t begin to predict the future of labor, but I can say this: Without a more holistic and integrated study of labor and working class history, our students will remain fundamentally unprepared for the challenges of creating an egalitarian and equitable society.
Imagine trying to build a house without understanding the principles of architecture. Similarly, attempting to navigate the future of labor without a solid grasp of its history is a recipe for failure.
