International Labor and Working-class History 

About: International Labor and Working-class History is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Labor history. It has an ISSN identifier of 0147-5479. Over the lifetime, 999 publications have been published receiving 8569 citations. The journal is also known as: International labor and working-class history.

Globalization Threatens Labor's Rights

Abstract: Furthermore, Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod argues that during the same near-millennium the world globalized culturally twice before the twentieth century: with the introduction of mass printing in the fifteenth century and with the introduction of the telegraph and telephone in the nineteenth century.2 Thus we have at least five candidates for major waves of globali zation between 1200 and 1900 a.d. Some of them collapsed; Mongol do minion, for example, seems to have succumbed to a combination of plague, climatic variation that reduced the agricultural productivity of the Mon gols' grain-growing prey, and a European maritime outflanking of the over land trade route between East Asia and Europe. Other waves contributed to a stairstep advance in connectedness. What about the twentieth century? Are new forms and intensities of globalization comparable to these earlier political, economic, and cultural transformations occurring in our own time? Many commentators have said that recent changes far surpass any previous knitting together of the world.3 Any such hyperbole calls for definition and measurement. Ideally, globalization means an increase in the geographic range of locally conse quential social interactions, especially when that increase stretches a signif

Farewell to the working class

Abstract: By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators took apocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeply divided between the advocates of change (“New Times” required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politics could be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By the mid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present this contemporary transformation not as the “death of class,” but as the passing of one particular type of class society, one marked by the process of working-class formation between the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment, reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwar settlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attack on Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, the unity of the working class ceased to be available in the old and well-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While one dominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic male proletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, with their associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration), another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place (predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types of public employment). But the operative unity of this new working-class aggregation—its active agency as an organized political presence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the political efficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collective political agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emerging conditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of the twenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put back together again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old has been dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decomposition is yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into a new and coherently shaped form.

Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination

Abstract: Scholarship on whiteness has grown dramatically over the past decade, affecting nu- merous academic disciplines from literary criticism and American studies to history, sociology, geography, education, and anthropology. Despite its visibility and quantity, the genre has generated few serious historiographical assessments of its rise, development, strengths, and weaknesses. This essay, which critically examines the concept of whiteness and the ways labor historians have built their analyses around it, seeks to subject historical studies of whiteness to overdue scrutiny and to stimulate a debate on the utility of whiteness as a category of historical analysis. Toward that end, the essay explores the multiple and shifting definitions of whiteness used by scholars, concluding that historians have employed arbitrary and inconsistent definitions of their core concept, some overly expansive or metaphorically grounded and others that are radically restricted; whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings. The essay critically examines historians' use of W. E. B. Du Bois's reflections on the “psychological wage”—something of a foundational text for whiteness scholars—and concludes that the “psychological wage” of whiteness serves poorly as a new explanation for the old question of why white workers have refused to make common cause with African Americans. Whiteness scholars' assertions of the nonwhite status of various immigrant groups (the Irish and eastern and southern Europeans in particular) and the processes by which these groups allegedly became white are challenged, as is whiteness scholars' tendency toward highly selective readings of racial discourses. The essay faults some whiteness scholarship produced by historians for a lack of grounding in archival and other empirical evidence, for passive voice constructions (which obscure the agents who purportedly define immigrants as not white), and for a problematic reliance upon psychohistory in the absence of actual immigrant voices. Historians' use of the concept of whiteness, the essay concludes, suffers from a number of potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws; within American labor history, the whiteness project has failed to deliver on its promises.

Whiteness, Racism, and Identity

Abstract: As an organizing concept, whiteness rests on insecure theoretical ground—specifically, the notions of identity and agency. It replaces racism with race and equates race with racial identity, which it accepts uncritically both as an empirical datum and as a tool of analysis. It thereby establishes a false parallel between the objects and the authors of racism and between Afro-Americans and other Americans of non-European ancestry. Whiteness is the ideological counterpart of race relations, both of them ways of skirting around the relations of political, social, and economic power that have determined the place of Afro-Americans in American society.

A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

Abstract: secrets of life’s beginning and the social potential of the female body. Later in the century, practitioners compared pelvises, breasts, and menstrual flows to classify racial and national differences. They determined, for instance, that African women were masculine and thus inferior, for they seemed to have remarkably short labor after which they immediately returned to work. Other taxonomies targeted cultural and medical practices to deem continentals barbaric for using the Cesarean section and native peoples primitive for the rituals of the couvade (the mimicking of childbirth by the father). In the nineteenth century, men-midwives solidified their authority over the anatomy and subjectivity of women, offering expert opinion in cases of infanticide, molestation, and rape. By then the state interjected itself into the sphere of reproduction, measuring demography through the census and devising intrusive policy on illegitimacy, abortion, and parenthood, especially among the poor. Birthing the Nation breaks ground in its interdisciplinary reach. Jettisoning sweeping notions of gender and power in favor of fresh insight, Cody’s study is the first to account fully for the political and social circumstances that produced male-midwifery as well as for its manifold historical ramifications; the “birth” it gave to defining aspects of British science, nationalism, and a unique sense of the social. The book also excels in its employment of images. Cody highlights the corporality of reproductive knowledge embedded in prints and caricatures and the capacity of visual representations to generate distinct sets of meanings. In a segment that is particularly timely, she shows how men-midwives contributed to the creation of the modern subject position of the fetus by, among other means, commissioning highly sentimental detailed illustrations of the fetus-as-child resting in utero. Thus, “the unborn was endowed with a sense of personhood and even a notion of rights that had not been seen in previous centuries” (278).