Strike!

Jeremy Brecher

Description

Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America. Involving nationwide general strikes, the seizure of vast industrial establishments, nonviolent direct action on a massive scale, and armed battles with artillery and tanks, this exciting hidden history is told from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it. Encompassing the repeated repression of workers’ rebellions by company-sponsored violence, local police, state militias, and the U.S. Army and National Guard, it reveals a dimension of American history rarely found in the usual high school or college history course.

Since its original publication in 1972, no book has done as much as Strike! to bring U.S. labor history to a wide audience. Now this fiftieth anniversary edition brings the story up to date with chapters covering the “mini-revolts of the twenty-first century,” including Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for Fifteen. The new edition contains over a hundred pages of new materials and concludes by examining a wide range of current struggles, ranging from #BlackLivesMatter, to the great wave of teachers’ strikes “for the soul of public education,” to the global “Student Strike for Climate” that may be harbingers of mass strikes to come.

Sujets

• Unions
• Working class
• Labor relations
• Labor history

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638089
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for Strike!
Jeremy Brecher s Strike! is a classic of American historical writing. This new edition, bringing his account up to the present, comes amid rampant inequality and growing popular resistance. No book could be more timely for those seeking the roots of our current condition.
-Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize winner and DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University
Magnificent-a vivid, muscular labor history, just updated and rereleased by PM Press, which should be at the side of anyone who wants to understand the deep structure of force and counterforce in America.
-JoAnn Wypijewski, author of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence
With this new edition of Strike! Jeremy Brecher has brought the story of U.S. labor up to date. Here is the story of mass working-class action and organization. For a new generation that is once again discovering the power of organized workers and a class-based social movement, Brecher presents an important and critical perspective on the labor movement and U.S. history. For anyone who wants to get behind the headlines on the resurgence of U.S. labor, Strike! is essential reading.
-Elaine Bernard, executive director, Harvard University Trade Union Program
For the past twenty-five years, anyone getting turned on to American labor history has turned first to Strike! This new anniversary edition, which adds an in-depth examination of recent events and experiences, guarantees that this book will be the first source consulted by the next generation of workers and students who seek out the hidden history of the American working class.
-Peter Rachleff, author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement
Strike! manifests the real roots of workers struggle-battles that moved from the streets of Minneapolis in 1934, to the mass confrontations of the 1960s against the Vietnam War, poverty, and racism, to the war zone of the 1990s in Decatur, Illinois. Jeremy Brecher s underlying message is powerful: workers will be exploited and reviled unless we challenge those who appoint themselves as our masters.
-Dan Lane, activist and locked-out Staley worker
Jeremy Brecher s Strike! is one of the most important books on labor history published since World War II. It is a much-needed history of recent labor struggles. But what makes it indispensable is its point of view, its spirit, which is that of rank-and-file resistance to both corporate power and trade union bureaucracy. Its emphasis on worker-community solidarity, across all boundaries, is exactly what is needed in our time.
-Howard Zinn, author of A People s History of the United States
Splendid clearly the best single-volume summary yet published of American general strikes.
-Washington Post
Strike! is the single most important book about the history of the American labor movement published in our time. And now Jeremy Brecher has brought the history up to date-just in time to make a new generation ready for this new era of labor struggle.
-Dick Flacks, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jeremy Brecher s Strike! , a labor and left-wing classic, has educated tens of thousands of readers over the decades and now comes back again-better than ever.
-Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left
When Strike! first appeared in 1972, it provided a healthy antidote to narcotic of standard labor history. Rather than merely being the victims or at times allegedly the beneficiaries of government or corporate largess, workers, as Brecher shows in exciting, exhilarating strokes, not only have the power to change the world for the betterment of all humanity, but at their best moments, are capable of doing so in democratic, participatory fashion.
-Michael Goldfield, author of The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics
Brecher, a gifted young radical historian offers a graphic history of industrial strikes . His research is thorough, his presentation lucid and often absorbing draws its strength from a coherent view.
-Publishers Weekly
An exciting history of American labor.
-New York Times Book Review New and Recommended list
An objective, minimally tendentious study of the American experience a bracing draft of history brings to life the flashpoints of labor history.
-Richard Lingeman, New York Times
A magnificent book. I hope it will take its place as the standard history of American labor.
-Staughton Lynd, labor historian
The best book I have seen on American labor as a social movement. An important contribution to sociology as well as history. By focusing on mass actions of workers, Brecher sheds new light on the role of trade unions and radical organizations in the labor movement. Well-written, well-researched, and well-argued. I highly recommend it as a text for courses on social movements, political sociology, and American society.
-William Kornhauser, University of California, Berkeley
An excellent and exciting book.
-Fusion
A really impressive piece of work which deserves the widest possible circulation. It offers simultaneously a readable and largely accurate account of many of the major strikes of American workers since 1877 [and] an extremely useful and well-researched account of today s rank and file struggles.
-David Montgomery, author of The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925
Scholarly, genuinely stirring.
-New York Times Book Review

Strike! 50th Anniversary Edition
Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher 2020
This edition PM Press 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover design by John Yates/stealworks.com
Layout by Jonathan Rowland
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-62963-800-3
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-62963-856-0
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-62963-808-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946093
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface By Sara Nelson
Foreword By Kim Kelly
Introduction
PART I: MASS STRIKES IN AMERICA
Prologue
Chapter 1 The Great Upheaval
Chapter 2 May Day
Chapter 3 The Ragged Edge of Anarchy
Chapter 4 Nineteen Nineteen
Chapter 5 Depression Decade
Chapter 6 The War and Post-war Strike Wave
Chapter 7 The Unknown Labor Dimension of the Vietnam War-Era Revolt
Chapter 8 American Labor on the Eve of the Millennium
Chapter 9 The Significance of Mass Strikes
PART II: MINI-REVOLTS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Chapter 10 Beyond One-Sided Class War
Chapter 11 Striking for the Common Good
Chapter 12 Harbingers
Afterword Mass Strikes for Common Preservation?
To Learn More
Notes
Index
About the Contributors
Acknowledgments
E VEN SO PERSONAL A PROJECT AS WRITING A BOOK IS ONLY MADE POSSIBLE by the help of many other people. I would like to thank here those who have been of the most immediate help. Almost all have disagreed at one point or another; responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation remains completely my own.
Much of the initial work on this book was done at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. The Fellows, students, staff, and hangers-on of the Institute contributed much to my education in the years I was preparing to write Strike! . It was Marcus Raskin there who gave me the necessary encouragement to stop talking and start writing.
The collaborators who produced the magazine Root Branch contributed much individually and together to my understanding of the matters dealt with herein.
Edward M. Brecher not only made available an ideal place to prepare the manuscript, but gave me the benefit of his writing experience by painstakingly blue-penciling the first draft.
Sharon Hammer, printer and artist, skillfully prepared the original manuscript.
A grant from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation helped finance my research.
James H. Williams, Catherine Roraback, and Joel and Jeanne Stein lent me materials which otherwise would have been difficult to obtain.
A number of others were extremely generous with their time in reading and commenting on the original manuscript. I would like to thank especially Stanley Aronowitz, William Earl Brecher, Fred Gardner, Dorothy Lee, Staughton Lynd, Paul Mattick Jr., David Montgomery, Alan Rinzler, Steve Sapolsky, and Arthur Waskow.
I thank Elaine Bernard, Tim Costello, Jill Cutler, Richard Flacks, Dana Frank, Mike Goldfield, Paul Kumar, Staughton Lynd, Peter Rachleff, Jerry Tucker, Joe Uehlein, and John Yrchik, for their comments on an earlier draft of American Labor on the Eve of the Millennium, which concluded the twenty-fifth anniversary edition.
I thank those who have commented on drafts of the chapter, Beyond One-Sided Class War, including Steven Ashby, Mark Bray, Frank Emspak, Fernando Fasce, Becky Glass, Ryan Hill, Trish Kahle, Yates McKee, Peter Rachleff, Marcus Rediker, Peter Rugh, Nathan Schneider, Bill Scott, Marina Sitrin, Brendan Smith, David Solnit, and Joe Uehlein. Many of them made a special contribution by sharing detailed knowledge based on their personal participation in the events described. Special thanks to David Rovics for permission to use lyrics from Minimum Wage Strike.
I thank those who have helped make it possible for me to prepare this new edition, including Joey Paxman, Ramsey Kanaan, the staff of PM Press, my col