Abstract
In A Contest of Ideas, Nelson Lichtenstein assembles a series of representative essays to form a kind of intellectual and political biography of the labor movement, its intellectual supporters, and its attackers. Although topics include the political economy of WalMart, attacks on public-sector unions, and graduate student organizing, Lichtenstein’s focus is firmly planted on the transformation of the labor movement from the late 1930s through the early 1970s—the decisive period during which the initial promise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions to transform the American political economy floundered and then failed.
Lichtenstein’s disarmingly simple central idea is expressed in his introductory, autobiographical essay: that ideas matter more than ever in an age when the potency of strikes and unions’ political power have waned and the political economy on which the modern labor movement was founded has been radically transformed. To apply this thesis in practical terms would of course require a generational project by scholars and activists to explore the changing political economy and the relative roles of ideas versus economic and military power in shifting the balance of forces. Lichtenstein no doubt aims to spur this analysis.
Meanwhile, his unique contribution in this volume combines the depth of his historical scholarship (which includes ample appreciation and analysis of the work of other historians and intellectuals) with his personal activism to labor struggles, beginning with his years at Berkeley in the 1960s, through his early focus on the auto industry, through his more recent work on WalMart. His arguments are thus rooted in the historical, the political, and the personal, providing fertile ground for reflection by readers of similar stripe.
The collection is divided into five sections. The heart of section I, the semi-autobiographical “Shaping Myself, Shaping History,” is a critical reexamination of a central theme of Labor’s War at Home: that the betrayal by unions of shop floor activism and the struggle for control at the point of production played a decisive role in undermining labor’s capacity to influence the broader postwar political economy. Essays on the transformation of the political economy of production wrought by the WalMart model and the role of intellectuals in the labor movement are also included.
In the next section, “Capital, Labor, and the State,” Lichtenstein outlines a more expansive explanation for the failure of labor’s postwar agenda: on the one hand, labor’s overestimation of support from breakaway corporations for key postwar demands on capital—deepened shop floor control, universal benefits, politicized bargaining, and a broad role for labor in economic planning—and on the other hand, its underestimation of capital’s determination to obliterate the inroads made by the New Deal as it capitalized on the fruits of wartime production and the cold war.
The result of these failures was, of course, labor’s retreat into the dead end of the collectively bargained private welfare state and an industrial relations regime, which together would in short undermine both labor’s reform agenda and working class solidarity. Additional essays deepen the exploration of struggles at the point of production and in the broader political economy with examinations of supervisory organizing in auto and the role of the Communist Party in labor’s failure to create an interim postwar agenda around which it could regroup.
Section III, “The Rights Revolution,” distills Lichtenstein’s scholarship on labor and the civil rights movement and explores how the broad discourse of individual rights that has emerged—and within which human rights struggles have been framed—has both increased the difficulty of articulating and privileging a collective agenda and undermined solidarity.
The section entitled “The Specter of the Right” focuses on the failure of liberals and the left during the decades following the war to grasp the fragility of the New Deal regime, understand and prepare for the serious threat posed by the ideas of the right, or avoid the pitfalls of market triumphalism and wishful thinking during the era of postwar prosperity. That Lichtenstein’s original political home was the Shachtmanite Worker’s Party provided additional context for his lifelong concerns with radical democracy and capitalism as well as a heightened appreciation for the intellectual and organizational contributions of other intellectuals influenced by this tendency.
The final section, “Intellectuals and Their Ideas,” includes chapters on C. Wright Mills, Harvey Swados, and B. J. Widdick as well as chapters on Herbert Hill, Jay Lovestone, and graduate student organizing. The last chapter, “Why American Unions Need Intellectuals,” begins with Mills’s call in The New Men of Power for “a rank and file of vigorous workers, a brace of labor intellectuals, and … politically alert labor leaders” (p. 254) to ensure the continuation of a left labor project. Intended or not, citing Mills’s prescription highlights the absence of a discussion in A Contest of Ideas of the role of today’s “rank and file” in relation to intellectuals. It’s a discussion that A Contest of Ideas provides fertile background for but doesn’t attempt to engage.