“‘If Business and the Country Will Be Run Right:’ The Business Challenge to the Liberal Consensus, 1945–1964,” by Kim Phillips-Fein, looks at the mobilization of conservative businessmen against the liberal political economy that emerged from the New Deal and the Second World War. These businessmen were sharply critical of the expanded federal government and strong labor unions throughout the postwar period. They sought to challenge the liberal economic order by helping to build think tanks critical of liberalism, by fighting labor unions, and ultimately by participating in political activities like the right-to-work campaigns of 1958, the gubernatorial bid of William F. Knowland in California that same year, and the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. By demonstrating the development of a network of conservative businessmen during this period, the article challenges the idea that “consensus” is the appropriate framework for thinking about postwar political economy. It also suggests the centrality of issues of political economy in the rise of conservatism in the postwar United States.

“You know what Victor Hugo say?” asked José Vega Díaz. Thus began a lengthy recitation, the product of decades of labor agitation, listening to Les Miserables, and rolling cigars. He had been asked to explain the influence of el lector (the reader) on the lives of cigar workers. The answer filtered through ninety-five years of experience in Cuba and Florida.“You know what Victor Hugo say? In all the towns, in every place, they have a schoolteacher. And in every town, the schoolteacher is the light. He lights the candle. But in every town they try to blow away the light. The preachers, the priests. That's why they [the church, the owner] don't want the reader. The reader lights the candle. It was a good thing.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century the provision of better education for working-class men and women became one of the various and broad-ranging set of preoccupations of the cooperative movement in Britain. Much early cooperation was economic, concerning alternative means of production and distribution. However, local societies also turned themselves toward other forms of societal improvement, including creating the facilities and contexts that would promote and support the education and learning of adults. The archive of the Lincoln Equitable Co-operative Industrial Society offers a rich body of source material for a microhistorical investigation of the expansion and diversification of one local cooperative up to the First World War. The members’ magazine of this local society in particular records the evolution of its purpose—economic, political, social, and cultural. This included achieving progress through various forms of educational provision—although the opportunities for men contrasted with those made available for women. This research illuminates what is a relatively underresearched area—that is, exploration of the complexities, dynamism, and phenomenology of local cooperative adult education and the significance of what it had to offer the development of the labor movement in particular places.

This article explores the trajectory of Chilean labor history and its recent efforts to study workers’ experiences under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Influenced by the impact of dictatorship on Chilean society as well as global historiographical debates, Labor Studies became an interdisciplinary and transnational field in Chile. This article focuses on the different academic traditions that have intersected with and contributed to the study of workers’ experiences under the dictatorship. It considers the multiple origins of New Labor Studies and includes the social history of both rural and urban movements, labor sociology, feminist historiography, and transnational history. It also looks at the multiple debates taking place in Chile and in other parts of the world. Bringing them together offers the opportunity to see the intersections, collaborations, and influences that have made the study of Chilean workers a dynamic field.

In 1935 George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England. This book, which soon became a classic of sorts, claimed to explain the passing away of a political tradition allegedly unable to thrive in the postwar climate. Nationalism, class politics, and militant trade unionism were the characteristics of the mature twentieth century. However, Dangerfield's condolences were premature. In April 1992, almost sixty years after the publication of this famous obituary, issue No. 7755 of The Economist appeared with a surprising cover illustration: It represented William Ewart Gladstone, the Victorian statesman, wearing a flowery (postmodern?) waistcoat and surrounded by the microphones of journalists obviously eager to pick his brain on the current political situation. The caption was: “A prophet for the left.” The leading article presented Gladstone not as a historical figure but as a model for the Labour party. This was certainly remarkable, especially after twelve years of Conservative governments which claimed to be intent on restoring some of the traditional values and policies associated with Gladstonian liberalism.S. Evans, “Thatcher and the Victorians: A Suitable Case for Comparison?,” History 82 (1997):601–20. After a century of political oblivion, old Gladstone had suddenly become fashionable again, and his mantle was apparently being fought over by the three main parties.

From December 10–11, 1999, the Department of History of the University of Salzburg, Austria, hosted around forty scholars to reflect on the combination of women, work, and the breadwinner ideology. The conference was cofinanced by the Austrian government. This can be called a significant gesture in a country where the extreme right-wing politician Jorg Haider recently proposed in his victorious election campaign to increase the child allowance for Austrian couples if the mother opted to stay at home. Should Haider's proposal be carried out, it would constitute yet another example of successful breadwinner ideology in practice. Indeed, western European society seems to have been trapped for centuries in set ideas on the division of work, care, and income between the sexes. But could this be an illusion?

Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.

A set of politics that uses rhetoric, imagery, music, and performance to promote interests that are distinctively and explicitly identified with the working class, Burgmann productively suggests, might revitalize the labor movement. Yet the effort to apply lessons from “identity politics” to “class politics” reproduces two problems in contemporary radicalism. First, by reducing the movements of ethno-racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians to “identity politics” Burgmann underestimates those movements' claims to civil rights, human rights, socioeconomic improvement, and their general democratic nature. Second, the use of “class” to explain the antiglobalization movement is anachronistic and inadequate to the task of understanding radical politics today.

Since the publication of David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), the study of “whiteness” has become a dominant organizing principle in US labor history as well as other fields. In the last eleven years, historians have churned out an innumerable number of articles and books using the concept of whiteness to reshape the way the field. On November 30, 2001, a couple hundred graduate students, academics, and activists packed a New York University hall to hear seven prominent scholars, who have written on both labor and race, debate the impact of whiteness studies on US labor history. The evening began with Eric Arnesen (University of Illinois at Chicago) offering his assessment. Arnesen was followed by the six other scholars who responded to him and offered their own views on whiteness studies. The editors of International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) organized this public forum because of the interest generated by the symposium on the same issue that appeared in the fall 2001 issue of their journal. Along with ILWCH, the event was sponsored by the New York University History Department and the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. The forum was quite a success as the panelists and the audience engaged in lively and occasionally heated discussion on the relative strengths and political ramifications of whiteness studies.

Throughout the literature on contemporary populism in Europe, scholars point to increasing precarity brought about by post-Fordist labor relations as a central component in outrage on both the Left and the Right. Focusing on the case of Madrid and its right to housing movement, I instead argue that current mobilizations need to be understood as the product of the long absence of Fordist urban economic arrangements. I demonstrate how the working class was only able to attain full membership in the city during the recent economic boom. With the property crash, that membership appeared fleeting, triggering both inequality and outrage. Ultimately, I insist on the role of housing in the production of class formation and subjectivities.

Since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, images of suicide bombings, religious violence, and general chaos have come to mind when most Americans have thought about Iraq. Counterposed are thoughts of US military efforts to separate the combatants and restore order. Whether one has supported or opposed the US actions in Iraq, the actual Iraqi people, almost all of them ordinary working people, remain remote and unknown.

On May 15–17, 1998, over one hundred and fifty labor historians and union and student activists attended the thirtieth annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association (PNLHA) at Portland State University. The conference was cosponsored by the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and over a dozen labor unions and other organizations.

The story of the International Fishermen and Allied Workers' of America (IFAWA), a Pacific North American trade union, allows a closer look at the relation between class-consciousness and common property natural resources. In light of this story, I reexamine the range of organizational forms considered in the literature on common property natural resource management, and conventional assumptions about the context of union organization, to demonstrate that both are excessively narrow. The characterization of fishers and other smallholders as independent entrepreneurs belies the relations of production and class that hold in the fisheries, and organized labor can represent an effective attempt to restructure a particular political ecology. Working-class consciousness emerged among Pacific coast fishers during the first half of the twentieth century, and collective efforts to manage common property reflected that class-consciousness.