Suchergebnisse

AbstractLa pensée ouvrièrere pendant la second république et le second empire,Georges Duveau's classic but largely-forgotten study of French artisanal workers, focuses on changing attitudes toward work and education between 1848 and 1870, years which Duveau himself lauded as exceptionally fertile and creative in French social thought. How to explain such extraordinary fecundity? Partly, it can be explained by intensified police repression after Napoleon III's coup, when the educational institutions of workers were repressed and they had to design new ones under the eyes of a suspicious state. Perhaps a more important factor, one suggested by the recent work of Thomas Piketty, is the ever-growing need to produce workers capable catering to the ever more sophisticated needs of the fabulously wealthy. The highly skilled artisanal production in Paris combined with the growth of factories created the distinctive conditions of French economic growth.

David Montgomery was larger than life in his personal style and self-presentation as well as in his spirit. Both watching and listening to him in conversation were a treat. So absorbed would he become in explaining some little-known incident of labor militancy that his entire body would get involved, his hand gestures and physical movements growing broader, requiring his listener to stand back to get a fuller view. His intense interest in labor history and patient willingness to share his knowledge with younger scholars testified to his faith in labor far more effectively than any manifesto. He communicated a sense of labor history as a shared enterprise in which we were all fellow workers.

The collapse of neoliberalism since September and October of 2008 has been sudden and spectacular. The failure of the ideas sustaining the Washington Consensus and the practices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seems nearly complete. The new world we may be entering could have a dramatically different political opportunity structure than the old one. But what will take its place? What has the Left to offer? What has it learned in recent decades that have been filled with more defeats than victories? What will it have to offerright nowwhen millions are seeking solutions? Our contributors possess no crystal ball. Our answers to these questions are framed historically. How have left movements learned from defeat in the past? What factors have enabled them to exploit moments of opportunity? Analyzing the immediate historical context to the present crisis, historians can suggest which measures promise the most hope of success and which seem doomed to failure. To this end, the papers in this collection concern themselves with left victory and defeat. They show that victory and defeat are more problematic than we might think. Each raises its own particular set of challenges and concerns.

Except for historians of gender, mainstream labor history has neglected reproduction, the cluster of processes by which workers are born, recruited, raised, and educated. The central goal of this landmark collection is to restore the balance between production and reproduction in the study of class formation and collective action. Opening and concluding essays by Marcel van der Linden provide a focus for an outstanding collection of essays.