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What is capitalism? What is it we are for, if we are for it? Or against, if we are against it? As we use the term today, it generally refers to a kind of economy, variously characterized by private industry, free enterprise, competitive markets, and lots of investment opportunities, which most people believe are valuable parts of the way we live together. But during the 1830s and 1840s, in the run-up to the revolutions of 1848, when the term "capitalism" first began to appear frequently, it signified neither a social system nor a "mode of production" but a politics—the concerted attempt by capitalists and their allies to secure the political power they needed to ensure that their interests took precedence over those of everyone else, including landowners, small businesses, wage earners, and even taxpayers more generally.

In an extended review essay, labor studies scholar Michael Merrill evaluates three recent major works on Marx and Marxism. While crediting all three authors — Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Heinrich, and Fredric Jameson — with significant insights, he takes the latter two to task for uncritically accepting Marx's argument about the inevitability of labor's exploitation in market societies and, drawing upon a wide-ranging literature, offers an alternative perspective.

AbstractBoth Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri inCommonwealth(2008) and Peter Linebaugh inThe Magna Carta Manifesto(2009) want to put the commons and communism—understood as a form of society in which private property has been replaced by property in common—"back on the agenda." They even insist that just such a social and economic order "grounded in the common" is "already in process" and that communism is thus more relevant and possible than ever. To a certain extent, they are right. We need a functioning commons if human society is to remain viable. But we also need a functioning commercial economy capable of feeding the billions that human society has and most likely will continue to produce.

AbstractFrank Tannenbaum is best known for his studies of Mexican agrarian reform and for his contributions to the comparative history of slavery and slave societies. But as a young man he had made a name for himself as a notorious labor agitator, and he went on to publish two books on the US labor movement, which are worthy of reconsideration as important interpretations of independent trade unionism and political reform. The first volume appeared in 1921 and offered an original perspective on the popular syndicalism that formed such a large, positive element of the philosophy of the International Workers of the World (IWW), to the extent it had one, at the center of which lay the struggle for social recognition on the part of immigrant and (supposedly) unskilled workers. The second appeared thirty years later and provided a thoughtful defense of the private, employment-based welfare and industrial relations system that the New Deal established in the United States. Together the books offer a provocative account of the social and individual radicalism of US-style "pure and simple" trade unionism.

The objective conditions requisite for a labor movement revival are palpable: more poverty, more income inequality, more families without health insurance, more retirees without adequate pensions, not to mention the recent near-collapse of global finance. Despite conditions so ripe for unionism, the labor movement barely holds its own. Why? And what can be done about it? Does the future lie in a "transformative" (i.e., revolutionary) anticapitalist class struggle? Or does it lie closer to the roots of the current social democratic contractualism of the mainstream labor movement? Two recent books provide an opportunity for Michael Merrill to explore these questions.