Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330061
Adam Ewing
Four decades ago, Jeffrey Perry embarked on a project to chronicle the life and work of Hubert Henry Harrison, one of the most important and understudied Black intellectuals of the twentieth century. Perry worked with Harrison's family to collect, preserve, and inventory surviving writings, correspondence, scrapbooks, and diaries, then collaborated with staff at Columbia University to establish a Harrison archive and a Harrison website. He published two important books that did much to revitalize scholarly interest in Harrison: an edited collection of Harrison's writings, and a biography that chronicles Harrison's life from his birth in St. Croix in 1883 to the height of his leadership of the New Negro movement in 1918. The volume under review here comprises a second and final biography of Harrison, leading readers up to his death in 1927. It secures Perry's legacy as the preeminent chronicler of Harrison's life.By 1918, when this volume opens, Harrison had already cemented his role as “the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals” (Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, 46). Ardently anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, Harrison emerged as the most important Black organizer for the Socialist Party by 1912, before leaving in frustration over the party's racial chauvinism. In 1917, Harrison launched the Liberty League and inaugurated what he coined the “New Negro movement,” the race-conscious, radical edge of Black American politics during and after World War I.The second volume of the biography begins during a moment of transition, as the mantle of New Negro leadership passed from Harrison to the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). One of the great strengths of the book is Perry's comprehensive examination of the relationship between Harrison, Garvey, and the UNIA. Perry argues, as he and others have done previously, that Garvey lifted much of the platform of the Liberty League and used it to relaunch his own struggling organization. In this volume, Perry also ascribes Harrison a central role in building the UNIA itself. Hired in early 1920 as the managing editor of the Negro World, the UNIA's key propaganda tool, Harrison overhauled the paper and stewarded its rise as the most important Black newspaper of its time.Just as Harrison was a major influence in sparking Garvey's radical turn during the UNIA's rise, he served as a radical and independent voice within the organization during the UNIA's peak institutional years in the United States (1920–22). Despite his association with the Negro World, Harrison maintained a distance from Garvey and grew increasingly frustrated with the UNIA leader's lack (in his view) of a constructive political program. By the time Garvey was arrested for mail fraud in 1922, Harrison was thoroughly disillusioned with Garvey's “swindle” and joined many New York–based Black intellectu
40年前，杰弗里·佩里(Jeffrey Perry)开始着手一项计划，记录休伯特·亨利·哈里森(Hubert Henry Harrison)的生活和工作。哈里森是20世纪最重要、最未被充分研究的黑人知识分子之一。佩里与哈里森的家人一起收集、保存和整理幸存的作品、信件、剪贴簿和日记，然后与哥伦比亚大学的工作人员合作建立了哈里森档案和哈里森网站。他出版了两本重要的书，极大地恢复了对哈里森的学术兴趣:一本是哈里森作品的编辑集，另一本是哈里森的传记，记录了哈里森从1883年出生在圣克罗伊岛到1918年领导新黑人运动达到顶峰的一生。本书是哈里森的第二部也是最后一部传记，带领读者直到他1927年去世。它确保了佩里作为哈里森生活的杰出编年史家的遗产。到1918年，当本卷开始时，哈里森已经巩固了他作为“种族激进派中最具阶级意识的人和阶级激进派中最具种族意识的人”的角色(佩里，休伯特·哈里森:哈莱姆激进派之声，1883-1918，第46页)。哈里森热情地反资本主义和反帝国主义，到1912年，他成为社会党最重要的黑人组织者，后来他因党内的种族沙文主义而沮丧地离开了社会党。1917年，哈里森发起了自由联盟，并开创了他所创造的“新黑人运动”，这是第一次世界大战期间和之后美国黑人政治的种族意识和激进边缘。传记的第二卷开始于一个过渡时期，新黑人领导的衣帽从哈里森传给牙买加出生的活动家马库斯·加维(Marcus Garvey)和他的“全球黑人改善协会”(UNIA)。本书最大的优点之一是佩里对哈里森、加维和联合国之间关系的全面考察。佩里认为，正如他和其他人之前所做的那样，加维举起了自由联盟的大部分平台，并利用它重新启动了他自己的挣扎组织。在这本书中，佩里还认为哈里森在建立联合国的过程中发挥了核心作用。1920年初，哈里森被聘为《黑人世界》的总编辑，《黑人世界》是联合国的主要宣传工具，他对报纸进行了彻底改革，并使其成为当时最重要的黑人报纸。正如哈里森是促使加维在美国大学协会崛起期间转向激进的主要影响因素一样，在美国大学协会的鼎盛时期(1920 - 1922年)，他也在该组织内部发出了激进而独立的声音。尽管哈里森与黑人世界有联系，但他与加维保持着一定的距离，并对联合工会领导人缺乏建设性的政治计划(在他看来)感到越来越沮丧。1922年，加维因邮件诈骗被捕，哈里森对加维的“骗局”彻底失望了，他加入了许多纽约黑人知识分子的行列，向联邦当局提供证词和证据。阅读佩里的文本，人们就会明白为什么哈里森站在纽约的有利位置，认为加维的做法弊大于利。这本书仔细地重建了UNIA日益严重的财政问题，加维对他的追随者的钱的鲁莽，以及该组织使用恐吓和暴力来压制敌人和镇压异议。人们还可以从哈里森的私人日记中读出一种嫉妒，即是加维，而不是他，在引导新黑人运动的进程。1925年，当哈里森与马库斯·加维分居的第一任妻子艾米·阿什伍德·加维(也是联合工会的联合创始人)有过一段短暂的婚外情时，哈里森在日记中热情地写道，他正在“进行一次光荣的报复”(629页)。哈里森是一位杰出的知识分子，在任何主题上都能侃侃而谈，无论是在街角还是在演讲厅，他都能让听众眼花缭乱，深受同龄人的钦佩。他的传记第二卷为哈里森成熟的思想提供了一幅有价值的肖像。特别令人感兴趣的是他短命的国际有色人种团结联盟(ICUL)的计划，该计划为哈里森代替加维组织的运动提供了深刻的见解:一种泛非洲主义，像加维主义一样，要求恢复黑人的政治、经济、文化和社会自治，但将美国黑人的核心斗争视为居住在美国本身。1924年，哈里森提出了建立黑人国中之国的要求，早于共产国际提出的著名得多的“黑带”理论，后来又呼吁新非洲共和国等组织建立黑人国家。在20世纪20年代阅读哈里森的思想，人们可以瞥见激进的泛非主义的轮廓，这种思想将在20世纪60年代和70年代在美国达到顶峰。
{"title":"Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927","authors":"Adam Ewing","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330061","url":null,"abstract":"Four decades ago, Jeffrey Perry embarked on a project to chronicle the life and work of Hubert Henry Harrison, one of the most important and understudied Black intellectuals of the twentieth century. Perry worked with Harrison's family to collect, preserve, and inventory surviving writings, correspondence, scrapbooks, and diaries, then collaborated with staff at Columbia University to establish a Harrison archive and a Harrison website. He published two important books that did much to revitalize scholarly interest in Harrison: an edited collection of Harrison's writings, and a biography that chronicles Harrison's life from his birth in St. Croix in 1883 to the height of his leadership of the New Negro movement in 1918. The volume under review here comprises a second and final biography of Harrison, leading readers up to his death in 1927. It secures Perry's legacy as the preeminent chronicler of Harrison's life.By 1918, when this volume opens, Harrison had already cemented his role as “the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals” (Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, 46). Ardently anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, Harrison emerged as the most important Black organizer for the Socialist Party by 1912, before leaving in frustration over the party's racial chauvinism. In 1917, Harrison launched the Liberty League and inaugurated what he coined the “New Negro movement,” the race-conscious, radical edge of Black American politics during and after World War I.The second volume of the biography begins during a moment of transition, as the mantle of New Negro leadership passed from Harrison to the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). One of the great strengths of the book is Perry's comprehensive examination of the relationship between Harrison, Garvey, and the UNIA. Perry argues, as he and others have done previously, that Garvey lifted much of the platform of the Liberty League and used it to relaunch his own struggling organization. In this volume, Perry also ascribes Harrison a central role in building the UNIA itself. Hired in early 1920 as the managing editor of the Negro World, the UNIA's key propaganda tool, Harrison overhauled the paper and stewarded its rise as the most important Black newspaper of its time.Just as Harrison was a major influence in sparking Garvey's radical turn during the UNIA's rise, he served as a radical and independent voice within the organization during the UNIA's peak institutional years in the United States (1920–22). Despite his association with the Negro World, Harrison maintained a distance from Garvey and grew increasingly frustrated with the UNIA leader's lack (in his view) of a constructive political program. By the time Garvey was arrested for mail fraud in 1922, Harrison was thoroughly disillusioned with Garvey's “swindle” and joined many New York–based Black intellectu","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329834
Stephen Brier
Along with the late distinguished historian Ira Berlin, my colleagues and I at CUNY's American Social History Project (ASHP) had the privilege of being the people who worked most closely with Herb Gutman in the final half-dozen years of his all-too-short life and career. In his final years, as he had for much of the previous three decades of his work, Herb remained deeply committed to questioning accepted historical truths and using new methodologies to transform historical analysis and to popularize the writing of American history for a broad public audience. In pursuit of these connected goals, Gutman constantly posed difficult questions about the past to his colleagues, collaborators, and students: What are the proper subjects of historical inquiry? How can we conduct the most effective scholarly research? How do we evaluate and best present the results of that research? In addition to being an innovative scholar, Herb was also an inspired teacher who always challenged all who came in contact with him to discover innovative ways to convey what happened in the past and to rethink its larger meaning for American society in general and for the writing and rewriting of American history in specific.At the outset of his academic career in the 1950s, rather than focusing on the institutional history of unions, radical parties, and labor leaders or seeing workers as mere “factors of production,” Gutman set out to uncover what ordinary working people had believed, and how they had behaved in their disparate responses to the rise of industrial capitalism in local communities and workplaces. And while he was always interested in writing about strikes and what happened in the workplace (the standard fare of labor historians), he was even more engaged by the diverse cultural and social forms of multiethnic/multiracial working-class activity. Gutman's early scholarly work emerged from two basic premises: the often hidden history of working people needed to be uncovered for the light it would shed on larger historical issues and questions; and working people were active agents in the historical process rather than its passive victims. Gutman's early work drew heavily on the pioneering historical scholarship of Edward Thompson and the cultural anthropology of Sidney Mintz. His early methodology (as embodied in the various essays published in the 1976 collection of his early work, Work, Culture, and Society) centered on close readings of local primary sources—initially in working-class newspapers in small towns, industrial cities, and coal mining communities in the old Midwest. Gutman believed these local sources held the key to uncovering how and in what ways working people had responded to the dramatic transformations wrought by US industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age.Gutman's pioneering methodology allowed him to ask new questions about old historical issues. In “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” arguably his most consequ
{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Stephen Brier","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329834","url":null,"abstract":"Along with the late distinguished historian Ira Berlin, my colleagues and I at CUNY's American Social History Project (ASHP) had the privilege of being the people who worked most closely with Herb Gutman in the final half-dozen years of his all-too-short life and career. In his final years, as he had for much of the previous three decades of his work, Herb remained deeply committed to questioning accepted historical truths and using new methodologies to transform historical analysis and to popularize the writing of American history for a broad public audience. In pursuit of these connected goals, Gutman constantly posed difficult questions about the past to his colleagues, collaborators, and students: What are the proper subjects of historical inquiry? How can we conduct the most effective scholarly research? How do we evaluate and best present the results of that research? In addition to being an innovative scholar, Herb was also an inspired teacher who always challenged all who came in contact with him to discover innovative ways to convey what happened in the past and to rethink its larger meaning for American society in general and for the writing and rewriting of American history in specific.At the outset of his academic career in the 1950s, rather than focusing on the institutional history of unions, radical parties, and labor leaders or seeing workers as mere “factors of production,” Gutman set out to uncover what ordinary working people had believed, and how they had behaved in their disparate responses to the rise of industrial capitalism in local communities and workplaces. And while he was always interested in writing about strikes and what happened in the workplace (the standard fare of labor historians), he was even more engaged by the diverse cultural and social forms of multiethnic/multiracial working-class activity. Gutman's early scholarly work emerged from two basic premises: the often hidden history of working people needed to be uncovered for the light it would shed on larger historical issues and questions; and working people were active agents in the historical process rather than its passive victims. Gutman's early work drew heavily on the pioneering historical scholarship of Edward Thompson and the cultural anthropology of Sidney Mintz. His early methodology (as embodied in the various essays published in the 1976 collection of his early work, Work, Culture, and Society) centered on close readings of local primary sources—initially in working-class newspapers in small towns, industrial cities, and coal mining communities in the old Midwest. Gutman believed these local sources held the key to uncovering how and in what ways working people had responded to the dramatic transformations wrought by US industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age.Gutman's pioneering methodology allowed him to ask new questions about old historical issues. In “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” arguably his most consequ","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329946
Sebastian Voigt
Founded in 1863, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD; Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) became the strongest political outfit in Imperial Germany prior to World War I. It was also a cultural mass movement in which its members immersed themselves from cradle to grave. Until the ascension of National Socialism in 1933, the German labor movement was the numerically strongest and best-organized specimen of its kind globally.Thus, it was an object of intense historical research until 1990. Researchers mainly analyzed theoretical discussions between the different wings of the party, its programs, and its relation to state and government. The Australian historian Andrew G. Bonnell chooses a different approach. He focuses not on the party elite or its main theorists but on its rank-and-file membership. He shows how the party successfully mobilized its base by addressing real-life issues of workers, on the one hand, and offering a transformative perspective for overcoming a classed society (i.e., capitalism), on the other.The lucidly written book is based on extensive archival research in Germany, including the Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn. Bonnell does not present a chronological history of the socialist movement; rather, he explores its mobilization efforts by focusing on specific topics. This innovative structure sheds light on many aspects of German social democracy that have hitherto largely been neglected.As German labor history in general has been marginalized in historiography in the last decades and is only slowly making a comeback, it is refreshing to read a book about social democracy in Imperial Germany. Yet Bonnell's study is more than labor history, not least because the research perspective on the Kaiserreich has changed in the last years: from viewing it as a reactionary, oppressive, and class-based system that paved the way for Nazism to stressing its lively middle class, organizational life, and progressive aspects. Bonnell makes a counterpoint by writing labor history from the perspective of Social Democratic workers and rank-and-file party members: “Returning the focus to the working class and the organised labour movement, and their confrontation with an authoritarian state structure, can restore the balance in how we look at Imperial Germany, and correct some of the more rose-coloured depictions of recent times” (3).The first chapter deals with the personality cult around Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein; ADAV), one of the SPD's precursor organizations. After his death in a duel in 1864, a veritable cult evolved around Lasalle. He became a legendary figure; people wrote songs and poems about him. Although the party moved away from his idea of a people's state (Volksstaat), moving in a Marxist direction, he remained a stylized reference point, especially during hard times, such as in the period of the ant
{"title":"Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914","authors":"Sebastian Voigt","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329946","url":null,"abstract":"Founded in 1863, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD; Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) became the strongest political outfit in Imperial Germany prior to World War I. It was also a cultural mass movement in which its members immersed themselves from cradle to grave. Until the ascension of National Socialism in 1933, the German labor movement was the numerically strongest and best-organized specimen of its kind globally.Thus, it was an object of intense historical research until 1990. Researchers mainly analyzed theoretical discussions between the different wings of the party, its programs, and its relation to state and government. The Australian historian Andrew G. Bonnell chooses a different approach. He focuses not on the party elite or its main theorists but on its rank-and-file membership. He shows how the party successfully mobilized its base by addressing real-life issues of workers, on the one hand, and offering a transformative perspective for overcoming a classed society (i.e., capitalism), on the other.The lucidly written book is based on extensive archival research in Germany, including the Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn. Bonnell does not present a chronological history of the socialist movement; rather, he explores its mobilization efforts by focusing on specific topics. This innovative structure sheds light on many aspects of German social democracy that have hitherto largely been neglected.As German labor history in general has been marginalized in historiography in the last decades and is only slowly making a comeback, it is refreshing to read a book about social democracy in Imperial Germany. Yet Bonnell's study is more than labor history, not least because the research perspective on the Kaiserreich has changed in the last years: from viewing it as a reactionary, oppressive, and class-based system that paved the way for Nazism to stressing its lively middle class, organizational life, and progressive aspects. Bonnell makes a counterpoint by writing labor history from the perspective of Social Democratic workers and rank-and-file party members: “Returning the focus to the working class and the organised labour movement, and their confrontation with an authoritarian state structure, can restore the balance in how we look at Imperial Germany, and correct some of the more rose-coloured depictions of recent times” (3).The first chapter deals with the personality cult around Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein; ADAV), one of the SPD's precursor organizations. After his death in a duel in 1864, a veritable cult evolved around Lasalle. He became a legendary figure; people wrote songs and poems about him. Although the party moved away from his idea of a people's state (Volksstaat), moving in a Marxist direction, he remained a stylized reference point, especially during hard times, such as in the period of the ant","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329778
Samuel Cohn
Abstract From the perspective of the Black Death, the economic consequences for laborers in our unfolding pandemic, COVID-19, might come as a surprise. Instead of labor shortages benefiting workers, especially the unskilled, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, our pandemic has sent economic inequality racing forward across the world with laborers’ health and material well-being plummeting. However, a closer examination of the Black Death suggests that the consequences for labor of the two pandemics may not be as different as first assumed. This essay explores the silver lining for labor after the dramatic crash in population caused by the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague during the second half of the fourteenth century. By first turning to Europe as a whole and then concentrating on Italy, this essay challenges notions that labor conditions and standards of living improved immediately after the Black Death's halving of populations and that these changes were almost universal across Europe or even within city-states, such as Florence, or in rural areas hosting different sorts of agricultural workers. In Italy, where real wages have been calculated, the Black Death's silver lining for laborers failed to arrive until two or three generations after 1348. Moreover, compressing economic inequality from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries spurred reactions from elites that wrought new inequalities in other spheres of activity.
{"title":"The Black Death and Consequences for Labor","authors":"Samuel Cohn","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329778","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract From the perspective of the Black Death, the economic consequences for laborers in our unfolding pandemic, COVID-19, might come as a surprise. Instead of labor shortages benefiting workers, especially the unskilled, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, our pandemic has sent economic inequality racing forward across the world with laborers’ health and material well-being plummeting. However, a closer examination of the Black Death suggests that the consequences for labor of the two pandemics may not be as different as first assumed. This essay explores the silver lining for labor after the dramatic crash in population caused by the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague during the second half of the fourteenth century. By first turning to Europe as a whole and then concentrating on Italy, this essay challenges notions that labor conditions and standards of living improved immediately after the Black Death's halving of populations and that these changes were almost universal across Europe or even within city-states, such as Florence, or in rural areas hosting different sorts of agricultural workers. In Italy, where real wages have been calculated, the Black Death's silver lining for laborers failed to arrive until two or three generations after 1348. Moreover, compressing economic inequality from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries spurred reactions from elites that wrought new inequalities in other spheres of activity.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329961
Eileen Boris
In writing history, beginnings and endings matter. “I had originally intended to conclude this book on a triumphant note with the success of the union campaign in 1937 and with subsequent achievement of industry-wide agreements that secured higher wages, shorter hours, paid vacation and sick days, arbitration machinery to mediate workplace grievances and a closed shop,” confessed Jenny Carson (6). By moving the time frame forward, she instead offers a sobering study of New York City's laundry worker unionism that accounts for the subsequent purge of communist organizers and the postwar defeat of the civil rights–and community-based “democratic initiative” led by Black women (127). The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the union where the laundry workers found a home, installed a cadre that maintained white male power while suppressing rank-and-file decision-making and sustaining the racialized gender division of labor in the industry. Nonetheless, Carson finds inspiration in the laundry workers’ long fight for “racial justice, economic dignity, and gender equality” against mobbed-up bosses and self-serving union bureaucrats (9).Grounded in recent scholarship, A Matter of Moral Justice combines structural analysis of the industry with deft mini-biographies and astute assessments of industrial feminism, left organizations, and the CIO itself. While home washing and hand laundries never completely faded away, new technologies allowed for power laundry expansion in the 1920s. The association of Black women with the southern washerwoman and dirty work justified employer hiring of recent migrants into this low-wage occupation. Against standard interpretations that stress the undesirability of laundry jobs, Carson argues that “African American women embraced power laundry work as a rare and coveted opportunity to leave domestic service” (21). Still, they faced a Jim Crow organization of production in which customer and employer preference for white men as drivers and white women as markers and office staff highlighted racialized understandings of skill. Inside work further reflected gendered notions of men as best able to handle machines that were thought to require scientific exactitude. As shakers and ironers, Black women did the most manual labor for the least pay under the worst conditions, including constant sexual harassment. Carson concludes that more privileged male workers sought to maintain their economic advantages, joining employers in stymieing “workplace solidarities, while simultaneously providing opportunities for women and people of color to mobilize in independent and oftentimes empowering spaces where they forged race- and gender-based coalitions with allies in the labor movement” (40). Chinese hand laundries retained a niche and remained an unorganized sector throughout the century.Carson's revisionism extends to the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), which appears more committed to organizing than previously acknowledg
在书写历史时，起点和终点很重要。“我原本打算以一种胜利的口吻来结束这本书:1937年工会运动的成功，以及随后达成的全行业协议，这些协议确保了更高的工资、更短的工作时间、带薪假期和病假、调解工作场所不满的仲裁机制和关闭的工厂。”珍妮·卡森承认(6)。通过将时间框架向前推进，她对纽约市的洗衣工人工会主义进行了发人深思的研究，这解释了随后对共产主义组织者的清洗和战后民权运动的失败，以及黑人妇女领导的以社区为基础的“民主倡议”(127)。美国服装工人联合会(ACWA)是洗衣工人找到家的工会，它设立了一个骨干组织，维持白人男性的权力，同时压制普通员工的决策，维持行业中种族化的性别分工。尽管如此，卡森还是从洗衣工人为“种族公正、经济尊严和性别平等”而进行的长期斗争中找到了灵感，这些斗争反对群体性的老板和自私自利的工会官僚(9)。基于最近的学术研究，《道德正义的问题》结合了对洗衣行业的结构分析，以及对工业女权主义、左翼组织和CIO本身的敏锐评估。虽然家庭洗衣和手洗从未完全消失，但新技术使电动洗衣在20世纪20年代得到了发展。黑人妇女与南方洗衣妇和肮脏工作的联系为雇主雇用新移民从事这一低工资职业提供了理由。与强调洗衣工作不受欢迎的标准解释相反，卡森认为“非裔美国妇女将洗衣工作视为离开家政服务的难得和令人垂涎的机会”(21)。尽管如此，他们仍然面临着一个种族歧视的生产组织，在这个组织中，客户和雇主更倾向于让白人男性担任司机，让白人女性担任标记，而办公室员工则突出了对技能的种族化理解。内部工作进一步反映了性别观念，即男性最能操作被认为需要科学准确性的机器。作为摇衣机和熨衣机，黑人女性在最恶劣的条件下，以最少的报酬从事最多的体力劳动，包括不断的性骚扰。卡森的结论是，更多享有特权的男性工人寻求保持他们的经济优势，与雇主一起阻碍“工作场所的团结，同时为妇女和有色人种提供机会，让他们在独立的、往往是赋权的空间中动员起来，与劳工运动中的盟友结成基于种族和性别的联盟”(40)。中国的手工洗衣店在整个世纪都保持着一个小众市场，仍然是一个无组织的行业。卡森的修正主义延伸到了妇女工会联盟(WTUL)，该联盟似乎比之前承认的更致力于组织。由于纽约领导人罗斯·施奈德曼(Rose Schneiderman)的努力，它也是白人主导的组织中最不种族主义的组织，她自己的反犹太主义和男性偏见的经历产生了我们今天所说的对“有色人种女性所经历的压迫”的交叉理解(69)。然而，卡森认为，施奈德曼的性别视角导致她低估了男性工人的种族主义反对，这是共产主义组织者强调的一个障碍。在大萧条时期，WTUL通过雇佣组织者来支持洗衣工人，影响纽约新成立的最低公平工资咨询委员会，并在1934年布鲁克林罢工期间派遣“貂皮旅”纠察队。它与市长菲奥雷拉·拉·瓜迪亚(Fiorella La Guardia)的“政治关系”使雇主达成了一项从未得到适当执行的和解。尽管哈莱姆区和布朗克斯的共产主义者也组织了类似的活动，“雇主反工会主义、工人的贫困和国家的不可靠……”在没有广泛团结和缺乏深层组织资源的环境中阻碍组织(106)。在瓦格纳法案和第二次新政的有利气候之后，洗衣工人能够将早期的团结转化为CIO领导下的胜利。卡森更喜欢更激进的女性购物者联盟，而不是WTUL，但她对专注的女性活动家表示钦佩:犹太共产主义者杰西·塔夫特·史密斯和比阿特丽斯·夏皮罗·兰普金;以及黑人组织者夏洛特·阿德尔蒙德，她是一名加维派民族主义者，还有多利·洛瑟·罗宾逊。卡森依靠对史密斯和兰普金的口头采访来恢复这段跨种族组织的历史，并评估各种运动。她称赞史密斯和兰普金在1933年帮助建立的洗衣工人工业联盟(Laundry Workers Industrial Union)的对抗行动，该联盟促进了种族团结，使司机和内部工人不分种族和性别团结在一起。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329848
Stefan Berger
I first encountered Herbert Gutman's work as a PhD student at the University of Oxford in 1988 when I was working on my thesis comparing the experiences of the German Social Democrats and the British Labour Party during the first three decades of the twentieth century.1 A friend of mine introduced Gutman to me with these words: “This is the American E. P. Thompson.” When I first read Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, its author had already been dead for almost three years, but his reputation was huge. Memory is a fickle thing, but if I recall it correctly thirty-five years later, I was as impressed with Gutman as I was with Thompson. Not only did I cherish both as engaged historians—Thompson's campaigning on behalf of European Nuclear Disarmament and Gutman's work with trade unionists, on the American Social History Project and his teaching at Black colleges in the United States, I was also intrigued by their common insistence on the agency of ordinary working people and the importance of working-class cultures in explaining their beliefs and behaviors. It was highly significant that Thompson visited Gutman in 1964 and a sign that they recognized each other as kindred spirits, both deeply influenced by Marxism, both unorthodox in their adaptation of Marxist ideas, and both insistent that the reaction of working people to industrial capitalism, both in England and in the United States, had much to do with preindustrial traditions and values.Like Thompson in Britain, Gutman in the United States was often associated with the move of the “New Labor History” from organizational and institutional histories of labor to the study of ordinary workers and their everyday surroundings and experiences. In my native Germany, historians of everyday life, such as Alf Lüdtke, Hans Medick, and Thomas Lindenberger, were the earliest historians receptive to this New Labor History. They were also interested in exploring the lifeworlds of ordinary workers rather than studying the labor movement. As someone who had just started a comparative study on the labor movements of two European countries that had developed some of the strongest labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I was taken aback by that dichotomy between “ordinary workers,” on the one hand, and “organized labor,” on the other. Surely it remained important not to see the two as entirely separate, even if one could have a lot of sympathy with the claim that one should not only study organized labor and that there was a difference between the worlds of organized labor and the worlds of working people. Hence, I was relieved to find many years later that Marcel van der Linden had been making very similar arguments, finding enormous value and inspiration in the new labor histories, exemplified in Germany by Alf Lüdtke, in Britain by E. P. Thompson, and in the United States by Herbert Gutman, while at the same time insisting that historians should also pay atten
1988年，当我还是牛津大学的一名博士生时，我第一次接触到赫伯特·古特曼的著作，当时我正在写论文，比较德国社会民主党和英国工党在20世纪头30年的经历我的一个朋友向我介绍古特曼时说:“这是美国的e·p·汤普森。”当我第一次读到《美国工业化中的工作、文化与社会》时，作者已经去世将近三年了，但他的名声却非常大。记忆是变幻无常的，但如果35年后我能准确地回忆起来，我对古特曼的印象和对汤普森的印象一样深刻。作为从事历史研究的历史学家，我不仅珍视他们——汤普森为欧洲核裁军而进行的运动，古特曼与工会会员合作的美国社会历史项目，以及他在美国黑人大学的教学，而且他们对普通劳动人民的能动性和工人阶级文化在解释他们的信仰和行为方面的重要性的共同坚持，也引起了我的兴趣。汤普森在1964年拜访了古特曼，这是一个非常重要的迹象，表明他们认识到彼此是志趣相投的人，他们都深受马克思主义的影响，都对马克思主义思想的改编是非正统的，都坚持认为，无论是在英国还是在美国，劳动人民对工业资本主义的反应都与前工业传统和价值观有很大关系。与英国的汤普森一样，美国的古特曼也经常与“新劳工史”从劳工的组织和制度史转向对普通工人及其日常环境和经验的研究联系在一起。在我的祖国德国，研究日常生活的历史学家，如阿尔夫·莱尔德特克、汉斯·梅迪克和托马斯·林登伯格，是最早接受这种新劳工史的历史学家。他们也对探索普通工人的生活世界感兴趣，而不是研究劳工运动。作为一个刚刚开始对两个欧洲国家的劳工运动进行比较研究的人，这两个国家在19世纪末和20世纪初发展了一些最强大的劳工运动，我对一方面是“普通工人”，另一方面是“有组织的工人”之间的二分法感到惊讶。当然，重要的是不要把这两者完全分开，即使我们很赞同这样一种说法，即我们不应该只研究有组织的劳工，也不应该只研究有组织的劳工世界和劳动人民的世界是有区别的。因此，多年以后，当我发现马塞尔·范德林登(Marcel van der Linden)一直在提出非常类似的论点时，我感到宽慰，他从德国的阿尔夫·莱尔德特克(Alf ldtke)、英国的e·p·汤普森(E. P. Thompson)和美国的赫伯特·古特曼(Herbert Gutman)等新劳工史中发现了巨大的价值和灵感，同时坚持认为历史学家也应该关注这些世界重叠和相互作用的地方事实上，回到赫伯特·古特曼的工作，在我看来，这是特别有价值的，因为他可以说一直非常清楚地意识到这些重叠。在我第一次拿起《工作、文化与社会》这本书的35年后，重读古特曼的著作，我在记忆中感到无比肯定:虽然他为关注普通劳动者的劳动史铺平了道路，但他也关注了有组织的劳工。尽管他在自己的引言中强调，《新劳工史》关注的是劳动人民，而《旧劳工史》关注的是工会等组织，但在文章中，古特曼不仅谈到了劳动人民，也谈到了工会主义者和那些参加劳工运动的人。在他对工人阶级文化的所有探索中，他坚持将文化与反对剥削和社会中不平等权力关系的问题联系起来，大卫·罗迪格(David Roediger)在为古特曼辩护时也强调了这一点，反对他的一些强有力的批评者。由于我不是研究美国劳工的历史学家，我自己的阅读并不真正关心诸如古特曼对美国劳工的解释在多大程度上经受住了时间的考验，或者他的哪些论点需要修改等问题。这次评论研讨会上的其他人比我更有资格做这项必要的批判性重新评估工作。相反，我在阅读古特曼的经典论文集时，着眼于问他在哪些方面影响了美国以外的劳动历史学家的议程，以及这些议程在哪些方面与当代劳动历史学家保持相关，而不管他们的地理专业。这本文集以他最具代表性的两篇文章开头。 在《美国工业化中的工作、文化和社会，1815-1919》一书中，古特曼对三个时期的工业劳动力的出现进行了精湛的调查，他认为这三个时期是相当不同的。第一个时期，从1815年到1843年，工厂还相对较新，工厂里的大多数工人更习惯于工业化前的节奏和生活方式，正如他引用洛厄尔磨坊女孩的例子所说明的那样。根据古特曼的说法，在1843年到1893年之间，工业社会彻底改变了美国。手工的工作和生活方式被产业工人的方式所取代——并非没有阻力和紧张。最后，在1893年到1919年之间，美国发展成为全球领先的工业社会。在这三个时期中的每一个时期，古特曼都敏锐地意识到，来自欧洲、亚洲和拉丁美洲不同地区的大量劳动力移民给美国带来了截然不同的种族亚文化，从而带来了紧张局势。他对这些工人的多种亚文化的关注贯穿于人类学家，如埃里克·沃尔夫(Eric Wolf)和西德尼·w·明茨(Sidney W. Mintz)以及社会学家，尤其是齐格蒙特·鲍曼(Zygmunt Bauman)的工作中。在我看来，古特曼坚持认为人类学和社会学这两门学科对劳动历史学家都是有用的，这是一个令人耳目一新的观点，因为在他工作之后的几十年里，倾向于人类学和倾向于社会学的人经常被视为在关于劳动历史应该走向何方的辩论中处于对立的两方。相反，我倾向于同意，将社会学和人类学的观点(以及其他学科的观点)结合在一起，劳动史将受益匪浅。在他关于美国劳工史的著作中，值得注意的是他敏锐的比较眼光，尤其是对英国和英国劳工历史学家的比较——例如，与卢德主义和粮食骚乱的关系。根据他的主要论点，新的工业秩序必须在很长一段时间内反对主要形式的抵抗——不仅在美国，在其他地方也是如此。再一次，古特曼作品中隐含的比较主义启发了他之后一代又一代的比较劳动历史学家，至少在我看来，这仍然是一个非常富有成效的探索途径。此外，我发现古特曼从布罗代尔(Fernand Braudel)那里获得的一种有趣的意识，即过去的任何时刻都提供了通往未来的若干轨迹。走了一条路，就意味着没有走另外几条路。这种对历史转折的流动性和偶然性的坚持对于历史学家在他们自己的存在中的定位以及他们作为从事历史学家寻求影响美国社会走向未来的轨迹的工作是很重要的。莱因哈德·科塞莱克(Reinhard Koselleck)关于“过去的未来”(futures past)的研究也指向了类似的方向，而且近年来，它在强调任何给定的现在对未来的开放性方面，可以说是非常有用的劳工历史学家在研究劳动人民的生活时，可以把这些见解牢记在心，包括他们为促进自己的特殊利益而建立组织的努力。与其产生向后导向的目的论，任何历史的现在都必须以一种探索过去任何时刻可用的多种未来的观点来审视，并解释为什么在哪种特定的情况下采取了特定的道路，以及意识到没有采取的道路是否有意义，特别是如果这些道路可以在当代的斗争中实现，以寻找通往未来的方式，为劳动人民的利益服务。该文集的第二篇文章是经典的《新教与美国劳工运动》(Protestantism and The American Labor Movement)，首次发表于1966年的《美国历史评论》(American Historical Review)，奠定了古特曼作为美国新劳工史关键人物之一的声誉。在这里，他研究了新教对美国工人带入新工厂的一些关键思想和价值观的影响。宗教为工人们提供了道德指南针，指引他们穿越新工业社会的迷宫。新教以多种方式影响了美国工人的道德立场，正如古特曼在这里所展示的，我仍然觉得他的探索非常有力，因为他们指出，需要理解新兴资本主义不仅是一种经济秩序，也是一种道
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329876
Joe William Trotter
It is a pleasure to join this fiftieth anniversary celebration of historian Herbert G. Gutman's seminal collection of essays, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. Historians of US and African American urban, labor, and working-class history owe a special debt to Gutman's groundbreaking essay on the Black coal miner and labor leader Richard L. Davis, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America.” This essay was first read as a paper at the 1966 meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Baltimore, Maryland. Before appearing in Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society, the essay was first published in an anthology edited by labor historian Julius Jacobson, The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968).Set in the larger context of Gutman's growing interest in a new social history of American workers, initially a focus on Blacks in the United Mine Workers union might seem a bit incongruous. In his essay “Work, Culture, and Society,” published some five years after the Davis piece, Gutman embraced the work of E. P. Thompson and other British historians and labor scholars seeking a more bottom-up perspective on workers’ lives and labor. As he explained, “The pages that follow give little attention to the subject matter usually considered the proper sphere of labor history (trade union development and behavior, strikes and lockouts, and radical movements) and instead emphasize the frequent tension between different groups of men and women new to the machine and a changing American society” (12). Together, though, these two essays advanced the larger project of reconceptualizing and interpreting the history of American workers from below. They influenced an entire generation of young labor and working-class historians and had a profound impact on my own framing of research on the Black working class. Gutman's scholarship not only helped to answer a series of thorny intellectual and practical political questions that many of us brought to graduate studies in history but also suggested a fruitful way forward, politically and ideologically, in social movement terms.In 1975, when I enrolled in graduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota, I had just completed a six-year career as a high school teacher in the public schools of Kenosha, Wisconsin. During my high school teaching years, in order to help unload student loans, I combined teaching with a number of part-time evening jobs (as dishwasher in a local restaurant, as night clerk in a YMCA in nearby Racine, and, during the final two years, as a full-time factory worker at the Snap-On Tools Corporation, located next door to Tramper Senior High School, where I taught school during the day). In addition, especially during my first four years as a public high school teacher, I maintained an intense schedule of community organizing activities—first among students and then among their parents, and the larger community. During these years, my community
很高兴参加历史学家赫伯特·g·古特曼(Herbert G. Gutman)开创性文集《美国工业化中的工作、文化与社会》出版50周年纪念活动。研究美国和非裔美国人城市、劳工和工人阶级历史的历史学家对古特曼关于黑人矿工和劳工领袖理查德·l·戴维斯的开创性文章《美国黑人和联合矿工》(the Negro and United Mine Workers of America)功不可没。1966年，在马里兰州巴尔的摩市举行的黑人生活与历史研究协会会议上，这篇文章首次作为论文发表。在出现在古特曼的《工作、文化和社会》之前，这篇文章首先发表在由劳工历史学家朱利叶斯·雅各布森编辑的选集《黑人和美国劳工运动》(1968)中。在更大的背景下，古特曼对美国工人的新社会历史越来越感兴趣，最初关注联合矿工工会的黑人似乎有点不协调。在戴维斯那篇文章发表大约五年后，古特曼发表了一篇文章《工作、文化和社会》(Work, Culture, and Society)。在这篇文章中，他采纳了e.p.汤普森(E. P. Thompson)和其他英国历史学家和劳工学者的研究成果，从更自下而上的角度研究工人的生活和劳动。正如他所解释的那样，“接下来的几页很少关注通常被认为是劳工历史的适当领域的主题(工会的发展和行为，罢工和停工，激进运动)，而是强调新机器和不断变化的美国社会的不同群体之间频繁的紧张关系”(12)。然而，这两篇文章共同推进了一个更大的项目，即从底层重新概念化和解释美国工人的历史。他们影响了整整一代年轻的劳工和工人阶级历史学家，并对我自己研究黑人工人阶级的框架产生了深远的影响。古特曼的学术研究不仅帮助我们回答了一系列棘手的知识和实际政治问题，这些问题是我们许多人在研究生学习历史时提出的，而且还从社会运动的角度，在政治和意识形态上提出了一条富有成效的前进道路。1975年，当我进入明尼苏达大学攻读历史研究生课程时，我刚刚结束了在威斯康星州基诺沙公立学校的六年高中教师生涯。在我的高中教学生涯中，为了帮助偿还学生贷款，我把教学和一些晚上的兼职工作结合起来(在当地一家餐馆做洗碗工，在附近拉辛的基督教青年会做夜班职员，在最后两年里，在traper高中隔壁的实耐宝工具公司做全职工厂工人，白天我在那里教书)。此外，特别是在我担任公立高中教师的头四年里，我保持着密集的社区组织活动时间表——首先是在学生中，然后是在他们的父母中，以及更大的社区中。这些年来，我的社区组织活动旨在帮助将城市的民权运动转变为新兴的黑人权力运动。“种族优先”的观念以及非洲人民在全球范围内的亲族关系支配着我的意识形态和政治，但一场关于阶级与黑人权力斗争的相关性的深刻辩论很快爆发，并在《黑人学者》(Black Scholar)等流行期刊上发表了越来越多的文章。就像那个时期的许多其他年轻活动家一样，我发现自己在努力调和黑人生活中关于阶级和种族的不同但又相互交叉的想法，无论是过去还是现在。正是在我个人生活和职业生涯发生这些变化的背景下，我报名参加了明尼苏达大学历史学的研究生学习。在我的同学、导师以及对非裔美国人、加勒比人、美国人、非洲人和非裔美国人历史的广泛研讨会阅读的许多不同和重叠的影响中，赫伯特·古特曼的文章为我作为非裔美国人、美国劳工和工人阶级历史的专业历史学家的职业生涯提供了一个路线图。他的影响在我早期关于黑人工人及其社区的出版物中尤为明显，并在21世纪开始时继续影响着我随后关于这一主题的工作。在我的第一本书和第二本书《黑人密尔沃基:1915 - 1945年工业无产阶级的形成》(1985年)和《煤炭、阶级和肤色:1915 - 1932年西弗吉尼亚州南部的黑人》(1990年)中，我热情地借鉴了两位早期学者的作品，理查德·沃尔特·托马斯和彼得·戈特利布，他们接受了古特曼关于在黑人经历研究中更敏感地研究非裔美国工人阶级历史的呼吁。那时，古特曼已经完成了他关于美国工业化过程中美国出生的白人工人、移民和工匠的综合性论文。 因此，我那群在20世纪70年代中期进入研究生院的学生开始阅读古特曼的戴维斯论文，因为他后来对理解农村白人从“前工业化”(主要是农村，但也有工匠的根源)进入美国城市-工业环境的连续浪潮的生活做出了有影响力的贡献。在第一次阅读劳工迁移和熟练工匠的文章时，我很高兴地看到古特曼在他关于白人工人的故事的时间维度之前、之内和之外，添加了一个关于其他民族和种族群体(包括亚裔美国人和非洲裔美国人)进入美国城市工业的词。用古特曼的话来说，“这些群体(包括旧南方早期被奴役的黑人工厂工人)也受到(旧世界文化与现代机器世界之间)紧张关系的影响……这一事实强调了他们在任何关于美国工作习惯和改变美国工人阶级行为的全面研究中都应该占据的中心地位”。除了鼓励对非裔美国人经历的研究之外，古特曼的学术研究还阐明了各种各样的问题和主题，这些问题和主题吸引了我们这一代研究非裔美国工人阶级的历史学家的注意。这项研究最值得注意的是，对土著黑人劳工领袖和活动家(如理查德·l·戴维斯)的生活、思想和工作历史的细节进行了不懈的探索。在撰写戴维斯论文的过程中，古特曼反复提醒人们注意，他的证据在短短十年的时间里是不完整的，而且没有手稿收藏和其他传统历史记录的帮助，无法更全面、更完整地描绘工人的生活和劳动。尽管如此，利用戴维斯撰写并发表在《美国联合矿工》杂志上的大量信件，古特曼对美国工业化时期黑人工人的历史提供了一个新的视角。他创造性地利用《联合矿工杂志》上的信件，不仅为戴维斯构建了一个有益的劳工传记，而且记录了他在有争议的种族和阶级问题上的立场;阐明戴维斯对跨种族工人阶级团结的承诺;并最终提供另一种自下而上的视角，来看待在布克·t·华盛顿和w·e·b·杜波依斯等黑人精英主导的时期，非裔美国人的生活。通过强调戴维斯对劳工运动的坚定承诺，以及他相信所有工人的未来取决于建立跨越种族鸿沟的团结，古特曼的奖学金在反击黑人工人(在劳工运动内外)作为“痂种族”的普遍种族刻板印象方面发挥了重要作用。迄今为止，除了在美国工业化的劳工斗争中作为罢工破坏者，古特曼的研究几乎没有详细描述黑人工人的生活，但他的研究展示了戴维斯职业生涯中阶级和种族动态的复杂交叉趋势。我们了解到戴维斯是如何移民到西弗吉尼亚州南部，并在新开的卡纳瓦和新河煤田找到了他的第一份工作——一名矿工。不到一年，他就搬到了俄亥俄州的伦德维尔，这是霍金谷地区的一个采矿小镇，他在那里结婚，养家糊口，一直工作到1900年死于肺衰竭。然而，在他去世之前，他作为美国黑人工会的黑人劳工领袖，作为第六区(俄亥俄州)执行委员会的成员，后来成为全国执行委员会的成员，这是非洲裔美国人在美国黑人工会中担任的最高职位。因此，戴维斯的影响渗透到劳工运动的各个层面——地方的、地区的和国家的——当时黑人面临着美国最高法院在全国范围内所称的“隔离但平等”制度的暴力爆发。1892年，伦德维尔(Rendville)的一家矿场开始实行劳动力隔离，组建了一支全是黑人的工作队伍，付给他们的工资比以前的种族隔离工作场所要低，但戴维斯很快就团结了黑人和白人工人，反对公司按种族划分工人的做法。《黑人与美国煤矿工人联合会》也阐明了戴维斯如何保持他强烈的黑人民族主义意识和对自己种族的自豪感。有一次，在提到那些用黑鬼这个词
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330003
Calvin Schermerhorn
Justene Hill Edwards's brilliant book argues that the business ventures of enslaved people from colonial times to emancipation were integrated into the broader political economy of slavery in South Carolina. African-descended South Carolinians did not just labor for enslavers. Many worked for themselves in small enterprises and networks that permitted them, in many cases, a return. The book's graceful prose and lucid argumentation will appeal to students and specialists. Unfree Markets explores changes over time, arguing that enslavers’ efforts to regulate Black business activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to predatory involvement in enslaved people's dealings in the nineteenth century, partly because of the state's shift from rice to cotton as the primary economic activity. This shift prefigured predatory capitalism of later eras. From 1686 onward, the colonial legislature worked to establish a legal framework that sanctioned independent Black business activities while bringing them under the control of enslavers.As South Carolina became a majority Black plantation society, its leaders worked assiduously to exert control over African-descended people's independent economic activities while at the same time sponsoring them. The task labor system of cultivating rice was exquisite industrial psychology that left labor time for self-directed enterprises. Enslavers also permitted bondspersons to cultivate marginal lands and hire themselves out for wages. The result was a seemingly widespread practice of marketing produce, poultry, and other consumables and a Black consumer market for goods, including, notably, alcohol. That symbiosis seems to have helped diversify the colony's economy, and enslaved people sold necessities to whites despite being legal chattel property themselves.Nineteenth-century South Carolina enslavers found self-serving reasons to prey on the economic activities they insisted enslaved people do. Charles C. Pinckney (nephew of South Carolina's constitutional delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) was adamant that enslaved people cultivate their own food and trade surpluses for “luxuries of life” (133). In Hill Edwards's view, enslavers like Pinckney were predatory paternalists whose self-serving rationale twisted a novel form of exploitation into a defense of race-based slavery.Both enslaved and enslavers practiced recognizable forms of capitalism, which Hill Edwards understands as economic actors investing resources in activities designed to generate returns. It was not uncommon for an enslaver to encourage enslaved people to steal cotton, which that enslaver paid for in whiskey. The resulting configuration of capitalism was expansive. And Hill Edwards's definition provides enough space for enslaved market actors to be petty capitalists based on the concept of free time rather than freedom. One of the book's interventions is “how the rise of capitalism in the early nineteenth century undermined racial s
贾斯汀·希尔·爱德华兹(justine Hill Edwards)的杰出著作认为，从殖民时期到解放时期，被奴役者的商业冒险融入了南卡罗来纳州奴隶制的更广泛的政治经济。非裔南卡罗来纳人不仅为奴隶主工作。许多人在小型企业和网络中为自己工作，在许多情况下，这些企业和网络允许他们获得回报。这本书优美的文笔和清晰的论证将吸引学生和专家。《非自由市场》探讨了随着时间的变化，认为奴隶在17和18世纪对黑人商业活动的监管让位于19世纪对奴隶交易的掠夺性参与，部分原因是国家从大米转向棉花作为主要的经济活动。这种转变预示着后来的掠夺性资本主义。从1686年开始，殖民地立法机构努力建立一个法律框架，在允许独立的黑人商业活动的同时，将他们置于奴隶主的控制之下。随着南卡罗莱纳成为一个黑人占多数的种植园社会，其领导人努力控制非洲人后裔的独立经济活动，同时资助他们。种植水稻的任务劳动制度是一种精巧的工业心理，它把劳动时间留给了自主经营的企业。奴隶主还允许奴隶耕种边缘土地，并雇佣他们自己来获得工资。其结果是销售农产品、家禽和其他消耗品的做法似乎普遍存在，并形成了商品(特别是酒类)的黑色消费市场。这种共生关系似乎有助于使殖民地的经济多样化，被奴役的人向白人出售必需品，尽管他们自己是合法的动产。19世纪，南卡罗来纳的奴隶主们找到了一些自私自利的理由，来掠夺他们坚持让奴隶从事的经济活动。查尔斯·c·平克尼(南卡罗来纳州宪法代表查尔斯·科茨沃斯·平克尼的侄子)坚定地认为，被奴役的人种植自己的食物和贸易盈余，以换取“奢侈的生活”(133)。在希尔·爱德华兹看来，像平克尼这样的奴隶贩子是掠夺性的家长主义者，他们自私自利的理由将一种新的剥削形式扭曲成对基于种族的奴隶制的辩护。奴隶和奴隶主都实行可识别的资本主义形式，希尔·爱德华兹将其理解为经济行为者将资源投资于旨在产生回报的活动。一个奴隶鼓励被奴役的人偷棉花是很常见的，这个奴隶用威士忌来换取棉花。由此产生的资本主义结构是扩张性的。希尔·爱德华兹的定义为受奴役的市场参与者提供了足够的空间，使他们成为基于自由时间而非自由概念的小资本家。该书的一个干预是“19世纪早期资本主义的兴起如何破坏了南卡罗来纳白人之间的种族团结，同时仍然使被奴役的人受到束缚”(83)。这是至关重要的一点。种族团结在奴隶制的资本主义中解体，在南卡罗来纳州，这意味着奴隶主通过批准黑人企业来保护和扩大奴隶制的经济利益。“商人们急于向被奴役的人出售商品，并与之进行易货交易，在此过程中，他们对反对与奴隶交易的白人同胞不屑一顾”(165)。奴隶制的资本主义使贫穷的白人和被奴役的人处于不利地位，但原因是富人、穷人和被奴役的人之间存在分歧。这种细微的区别是劳工历史学家将从这种特殊的学术研究中受益的原因之一。在奴隶和被奴隶的语境中，希尔·爱德华兹巧妙地扩展了资本主义和劳动价值的范畴。像Diana Ramey Berry这样的历史学家成功地将资本主义的新历史与被奴役人民的生活现实联系起来，使他们在一个精心调整的系统中扮演人类角色，以使他们的劳动、身体、性等等商品化。《非自由市场》建立在这一见解的基础上，结合了奴隶的策略和被奴役者的对策，表明即使是奴隶之间复杂而强大的商业活动也受到了奴隶和其他白人市场参与者的掠夺性操纵。在这里，奴隶制本身并没有填补资本主义的概念空间，也没有填补这一时期资本主义的掠夺性形式，因为许多不是奴隶的市场参与者利用了非洲裔供应商和生产商缺乏公民权利的机会。在一个奴隶制与种族主义紧密结合的社会中，向被奴役的商人支付低于市场的价格似乎是一种黑人税。被奴役的人在商业的某些方面的成功并不意味着他们赢得了与奴隶主的竞争。 《非自由市场》指出了解放后的资本主义格局，它使自由的南卡罗莱纳的非洲裔处于不利地位，更广泛地说，是后来时代的掠夺性包容。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330017
Jason Resnikoff
In 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published a paper claiming that 47 percent of jobs in the United States were in danger of being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). The paper made quite a splash at the time. Apparently even Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors took it quite seriously (322).A decade later, Frey's fears haven't quite come to pass. (A Bureau of Labor Statistics report from July 2022 in fact finds little evidence that AI has made any appreciable difference in the rate or character of job loss in the United States.) Still, out of that 2013 paper came Frey's most recent book, a survey of the history of mechanization in Europe (mainly England) and the United States. In it, he claims that we currently stand on the threshold of a “technology trap.” Until the ascent of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, Frey argues, European authorities generally outlawed the introduction of machines that threatened the livelihood of craftspeople. The result was to delay industrialization and all its benefits. This was the first technology trap: when those with political power blocked mechanization, or what Frey calls, simply, “progress.”Of course, industrialization dispossessed many working people, as Frey acknowledges. It is one of his axioms that workers automatically attack machines that threaten their income—evidently regardless of the influences of culture, politics, law, and so on. As a result, machine wrecking was a “rational response” by Luddite English workers at the turn of the nineteenth century (125). With AI, Frey continues, workers once again find their incomes threatened, but with one important difference: “Unlike the situation in the days of the Industrial Revolution,” he writes, “workers in the developed world today have more political power than the Luddites did” (xiii). That is to say, while Luddites could only attack machines, working people today may attempt to regulate the rate or character of technological change through democratic governance. This, Frey tells us, would be bad, for he is adamantly opposed to “slowing down the pace of progress or restricting automation” (xiii). To oppose the degradation of working conditions wrought by “automation,” in other words, would be to slow down or restrict progress. It therefore falls to society to ameliorate the lives of those who will lose from automation, Frey holds, so that they don't short-circuit “progress” by way of that troublesome institution, democracy.I must be frank. I did not think it was still possible to write a book like The Technology Trap. Perhaps the single most important contribution to come out of the history of technology in the past half century has been its debunking of the fallacy of technological determinism, the idea that technology is a pure force of history that develops itself autonomously. Frey seems unaware of this major (and not particularly recent) insight as he narrates the history of mechanization from European antiquity
2013年，卡尔·本尼迪克特·弗雷和迈克尔·奥斯本发表了一篇论文，声称美国47%的工作岗位有被人工智能取代的危险。这篇论文当时引起了不小的轰动。显然，就连巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)的经济顾问委员会(Council of Economic Advisors)也相当认真地对待此事(322件)。十年后，弗雷的担忧并没有完全成为现实。(事实上，美国劳工统计局(Bureau of Labor Statistics) 2022年7月的一份报告发现，几乎没有证据表明人工智能对美国失业的速度或性质产生了任何明显的影响。)尽管如此，弗雷还是从2013年的那篇论文中得出了他最近的一本书，这本书调查了欧洲(主要是英国)和美国的机械化历史。在这篇文章中，他声称我们目前正站在“技术陷阱”的门槛上。弗雷认为，直到18世纪资产阶级崛起之前，欧洲当局普遍禁止引进威胁到手工业者生计的机器。其结果是推迟了工业化及其所有好处。这是第一个技术陷阱:当那些拥有政治权力的人阻碍机械化，或者弗雷所说的简单的“进步”。当然，正如弗雷所承认的那样，工业化剥夺了许多劳动者的权利。他的公理之一是，工人们会自动攻击威胁到他们收入的机器——这显然不受文化、政治、法律等因素的影响。因此，在19世纪初，破坏机器是英国工人的“理性反应”(125)。弗雷继续说，有了人工智能，工人们再次发现他们的收入受到威胁，但有一个重要的区别:“与工业革命时期的情况不同，”他写道，“今天发达国家的工人比卢德分子拥有更多的政治权力”(xiii)。也就是说，虽然卢德分子只能攻击机器，但今天的劳动人民可能试图通过民主治理来调节技术变革的速度或特征。弗雷告诉我们，这将是不好的，因为他坚决反对“放慢进步的步伐或限制自动化”(xiii)。反对“自动化”造成的工作条件退化，换句话说，将会减慢或限制进步。因此，弗雷认为，社会有责任改善那些将因自动化而遭受损失的人的生活，这样他们就不会因为那个麻烦的制度——民主——而阻碍“进步”。我必须坦率地说。我不认为还能写出《技术陷阱》这样的书。也许在过去的半个世纪里，科技史上最重要的贡献是它揭穿了技术决定论的谬误，技术决定论认为技术是一种纯粹的历史力量，可以自主发展。弗雷在叙述机械化从欧洲古代到现代全球化的历史时，似乎没有意识到这个重要的(而且不是最近的)见解。用他的话来说，技术是“一种神秘的力量”，其中“变化产生变化，就像进步的自我强化的瀑布创造了现代世界”(144,7)。弗雷提到，“社会发明”——我们其他人可能称之为政治——在这一切中发挥了一定作用，但它们“超出了本书的范围”(145,161)。这种方法导致了一系列可以预见的离谱的历史主张:技术本身导致了中产阶级的兴起(和消亡)(145);妇女已经从家务劳动中解放出来，这主要归功于家庭的机械化(3,160 - 61);这项技术创造了现代民主(267)。举一个很有说服力的例子:根据弗雷的说法，三角衬衫工厂的火灾不是因为管理层把工人锁在拥挤的血汗工厂里(弗雷没有提到这一点，就像他没有提到工人要求提高安全水平一样)，而是因为缺乏技术发展。电灯使工作场所更安全，你看，而三角衬衫工厂，不幸的是，没有通电。(显然弗雷也没有意识到，火灾很可能不是由煤气灯引起的，而是由一支偏离方向的香烟引起的。)按照弗雷的说法，电气化——而不是工会、老板或分包制度——是这一时期(193-94)唯一重要的历史因素。这些都不是新鲜事。弗雷的观点是典型的自动化论述，这是一个技术决定论的故事，将雇主的控制和他们对工作条件的恶化描述为进步的代名词。话语将政治和历史的偶然性隐藏在一个看似中立的技术大厦后面，在那里，生产资料的变化自行发生。当资本赢了而工人输了，这是一种“神秘”力量的结果。 因此，弗雷的政策建议中没有一条涉及通过民主制度来监管(或征税)生产资料，这并不奇怪。他提出的工资保险、住房补贴和税收抵免等建议，是基于这样一种假设:问题最终出在劳动人民自己身上，而不是经济结构。弗雷建议提高教育水平，作为帮助劳动者加入“认知精英”行列的一种手段，这些人在表面上是自动化的未来所需要的。事实上，当弗雷引用《钟形曲线》的查尔斯·默里来证实他关于认知精英主义的讨论时，我不得不揉了揉眼睛，因为他声称穷人不太可能拥有本科或研究生学位，因为“低收入家庭的孩子往往缺乏来自家庭阅读和日常对话的智力刺激，而这些在父母一方或双方都完成大学学业的家庭中是如此普遍”(252,350 - 51)。当人们考虑到Frey所描述的自动化“革命”可能根本没有发生时，这种讨论当然变得毫无意义。想想Aaron Benanav对21世纪早期劳动生产率的研究;凯特·克劳福德(Kate Crawford)最近批评人工智能是一种提取技术;或者格雷和苏瑞关于计算机“幽灵作业”的奖学金;或者杰森·史密斯对服务工作的描述。即使像弗雷那样只停留在经济学文献中，美国劳工统计局最近的报告也指出，在过去20年的大部分时间里，劳动生产率(在一场“自动化”革命中，劳动生产率应该是直线上升的)实际上一直处于非常低的水平。Frey预料到了这种批评，他解释说，低生产率“可能发生在技术处于实验阶段的时候”(327)。换句话说，根据Frey的说法，没有自动化的证据就是自动化的证据。尽管《技术陷阱》作为一部历史或经济学著作可能没什么价值，但它并非毫无价值。有用的是，它阐明了自动化论述中通常只是潜台词的内容。我们从中了解到，技术官僚面临的真正危险根本不是技术陷阱，而是一种完全不同的威胁:民主。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329764
Jacob A. C. Remes
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic and social disruption that it precipitated have brought increased attention to the intersections of disaster studies and labor and working-class history. This historiographical essay lays out four places where disaster intersects with work: first, all disasters are workplace disasters for somebody; second, disasters create labor; third, disasters can reveal what always existed about labor, class relations, and working-class life; and fourth, disasters can remake living and working conditions by providing new grounds to contest them.
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