Download or read book Labor in State Socialist Europe 1945 1989 written by Marsha Siefert and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.

Download or read book We Own the Future written by Kate Aronoff and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunningly original and timely collection that makes the case for "socialism, American style" It's a strange day when a New York Times conservative columnist is forced to admit that the left is winning, but as David Brooks wrote recently, "the American left is on the cusp of a great victory." Among Americans under thirty, 43 percent had a favorable view of socialism, while only 32 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans questioned the fundamental tenets of capitalism and expressed openness to a socialist alternative. We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style offers a road map to making this alternative a reality, giving readers a practical vision of a future that is more democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable. The book includes a crash course in the history and practice of democratic socialism, a vivid picture of what democratic socialism in America might look like in practice, and compelling proposals for how to get there from the age of Trump and beyond. With contributions from some of the nation's leading political activists and analysts, We Own the Future articulates a clear and uncompromising view from the left—a perfectly timed book that will appeal to a wide audience hungry for change. Table of Contents Part I: Is a New America Possible? Introduction Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreier, and Michael Kazin How Socialists Changed America Peter Dreier and Michael Kazin Toward a Third Reconstruction Andrea Flynn, Susan Holmberg, Dorian Warren, and Felicia Wong A Three-Legged Stool for Racial and Economic Justice Darrick Hamilton Democratic Socialism for a Climate-Changed Century Naomi Klein Part II: Expanding Democracy Governing Socialism Bill Fletcher Jr. We the People: Voting Rights, Campaign Finance, and Election Reform J. Mijin Cha Confronting Corporate Power Robert Kuttner Building the People's Banks David Dayen Democracy, Equality, and the Future of Workers Sarita Gupta, Stephen Lerner, and Joseph A. McCartin Who Gets to Be Safe? Prisons, Police, and Terror Aviva Stahl On Immigration: A Socialist Case for Open Borders Michelle Chen On Foreign Policy: War from Above, Solidarity from Below Tejasvi Nagaraja Part III: The Right to a Good Life Livable Cities Thomas J. Sugrue What Does Health Equity Require? Racism and the Limits of Medicare for All Dorothy Roberts The Family of the Future Sarah Leonard Defending and Improving Public Education Pedro Noguera Reclaiming Competition: Sports and Socialism David Zirin What About a Well-Fed Artist? Imagining Cultural Work in a Democratic Socialist Society Francesca Fiorentini How Socialism Surged, and How It Can Go Further Harold Meyerson Afterword: A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen Michael Walzer

Download or read book The Edge of Anarchy written by Jack Kelly and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Timely and urgent...The core of The Edge of Anarchy is a thrilling description of the boycott of Pullman cars and equipment by Eugene Debs’s fledgling American Railway Union..." —The New York Times "During the summer of 1894, the stubborn and irascible Pullman became a central player in what the New York Times called “the greatest battle between labor and capital [ever] inaugurated in the United States.” Jack Kelly tells the fascinating tale of that terrible struggle." —The Wall Street Journal "Pay attention, because The Edge of Anarchy not only captures the flickering Kinetoscopic spirit of one of the great Labor-Capital showdowns in American history, it helps focus today’s great debates over the power of economic concentration and the rights and futures of American workers." —Brian Alexander, author of Glass House "In gripping detail, The Edge of Anarchy reminds us of what a pivotal figure Eugene V. Debs was in the history of American labor... a tale of courage and the steadfast pursuit of principles at great personal risk." —Tom Clavin, New York Times bestselling author of Dodge City The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America. The Edge of Anarchy by Jack Kelly offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the U.S. Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities. This epochal tale offers fascinating portraits of two iconic characters of the age. George Pullman, who amassed a fortune by making train travel a pleasure, thought the model town that he built for his workers would erase urban squalor. Eugene Debs, founder of the nation’s first industrial union, was determined to wrench power away from the reigning plutocrats. The clash between the two men’s conflicting ideals pushed the country to what the U.S. Attorney General called “the ragged edge of anarchy.” Many of the themes of The Edge of Anarchy could be taken from today’s headlines—upheaval in America’s industrial heartland, wage stagnation, breakneck technological change, and festering conflict over race, immigration, and inequality. With the country now in a New Gilded Age, this look back at the violent conflict of an earlier era offers illuminating perspectives along with a breathtaking story of a nation on the edge.

Download or read book Work Work Work written by Michael D. Yates and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-07-23 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A potent glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workplace control mechanisms which prevent workers from defending themselves from exploitation For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Walton family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos. In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.

Download or read book The Object of Labor written by Martha Lampland and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-12 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did socialist policies leave the economies of Eastern Europe unprepared for current privatization efforts? Under communist rule, were rural villages truly left untouched by capitalism? In this historical ethnography of rural Hungary, Martha Lampland argues not only that the transition to capitalism was well under way by the 1930s, but that socialist policies themselves played a crucial role in the development of capitalism by transforming conceptions of time, money, and labor. Exploring the effects of social change thrust upon communities against their will, Lampland examines the history of agrarian labor in Hungary from World War I to the early 1980s. She shows that rural workers had long been subject to strict state policies similar to those imposed by collectivization. Since the values of privatization and individualism associated with capitalism characterized rural Hungarian life both prior to and throughout the socialist period, capitalist ideologies of work and morality survived unscathed in the private economic practices of rural society. Lampland also shows how labor practices under socialism prepared the workforce for capitalism. By drawing villagers into factories and collective farms, for example, the socialist state forced farmers to work within tightly controlled time limits and to calculate their efforts in monetary terms. Indeed, this control and commodification of rural labor under socialism was essential to the transformation to capitalism.

Download or read book Labor and the Fight for Socialism written by and published by Resistance Books. This book was released on 1988 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Parliamentary Socialism written by Ralph Miliband and published by . This book was released on 2005-08-31 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic-not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system. This is not simply to say that the Labour Party has never been a party of revolution: such parties have normally been quite willing to use the opportunities the parliamentary system offered as one means of furthering their aims. It is rather that the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political action which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system. The Labour Party has been a party deeply imbued by parliamentarism. And in this respect, there is no distinction to be made between Labour's political and its industrial leaders. Both have been equally determined that the Labour Party should not stray from the narrow path of parliamentary politics. The Labour Party remains, in practice, what it has always been-a party of modest social reform in a capital-ist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted.

Download or read book Horace Greeley s New York Tribune written by Adam-Max Tuchinsky and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians and biographers have struggled to reconcile these seemingly contradictory tendencies. Tuchinsky's history of the Tribune, by placing the newspaper and its ideology squarely within the political, economic, and intellectual climate of Civil War-era America, illustrates the connection between socialist reform and mainstream political thought. It was democratic socialism--favoring free labor, and bridging the divide between individualism and collectivism--that allowed Greeley's Tribune to forge a coalition of such disparate elements as the old Whigs, new Free Soil men, labor, and staunch abolitionists. This progressive coalition helped ensure the political success of the Republican Party. Indeed, even in 1860, proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh referred to socialism as Greeley's "lost book"--The overlooked but crucial source of the Tribune's and, by extension, the Republican Party's antagonism toward slavery and its more general free labor ideology.

Download or read book Weavers of Revolution written by Peter Winn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reinterpretation of the Salvador Allende era in Chile, Weavers of Revolution is also a compelling drama of human triumph and tragedy that exemplifies "the new narrative history" at its authentic best.

Download or read book It Didn t Happen Here written by Seymour Martin Lipset and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why socialism has failed to play a significant role in the United States - the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism - has been a critical question of American history and political development. This study surveys the various explanations for this phenomenon of American political exceptionalism.

Download or read book Women and American Socialism 1870 1920 written by Mari Jo Buhle and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1983-04-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist women faced the often thorny dilemma of fitting their concern with women's rights into their commitment to socialism. Mari Jo Buhle examines women's efforts to agitate for suffrage, sexual and economic emancipation, and other issues and the political and intellectual conflicts that arose in response. In particular, she analyzes the clash between a nativist socialism influence by ideas of individual rights and the class-based socialism championed by German American immigrants. As she shows, the two sides diverged, often greatly, in their approaches and their definitions of women's emancipation. Their differing tactics and goals undermined unity and in time cost women their independence within the larger movement.

Download or read book Class Struggle Unionism written by Joe Burns and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those who want to build a fighting labor movement, there are many questions to answer. How to relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? Whether to work in the rank and file of unions or staff jobs? How much to prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How to relate to foundation-funded worker centers and alternative union efforts? And most critically, how can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us? Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy. Drawing on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition Joe Burns outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democtractic and fighting labor movement.

Download or read book Planning Labour written by Alina-Sandra Cucu and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of “primitive socialist accumulation” whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers’ consumption in support of industrial growth. Focusing on the daily operations of planning in the ethnically mixed city of Cluj from 1945 to 1955, this book argues that socialist accumulation was deeply contradictory: it not only inherited some of the classical tensions of capital accumulation, but also generated its own, which derived from the multivocal nature of the state socialist worker as a creator of value, as living labour, and as a subject of emancipatory politics.

Download or read book The Jewish Unions in America written by Bernard Weinstein and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.

Download or read book Nationalism and the International Labor Movement written by Michael Forman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the idea of the nation among internationalist thinkers, suggesting that major figures associated with international labor organizations never underestimated the attraction of nationalism. Each chapter begins with a discussion of main issues that framed the international labor movement's concern with the nation in different periods, then analyzes the ideas of major thinkers who stand for the main trends at each point. Coverage includes the International Working Men's Association of the mid-19th century, the apogee of the Second International between 1895 and the onset of WWI, the Third International, the Comintern--1919-43, and the influence of Stalin and Lenin. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Socialism Markets and the Critique of Money written by Tsuyoshi Yuki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical and international debates on the theory of “labor money” or “labor notes.” These debates exist in a triangular context of market socialism, communism (community-based socialism), and local currency, joining numerous socialists, anarchists, and Marx and Engels. Labor note theory encompasses theoretical, ideological, and practical doctrines aimed at designing a fair and desirable labor-based market or non-market economy by reforming the monetary and credit system. This theory was considered an unfeasible utopian idea in the context of orthodox Marxism, which is typically based on a historical study of surplus value doctrines. However, this book eschews Marx’s critique of “labor money” that limits the debate regarding a concrete alternative society, and instead proposes practical and gradual approaches to social reform by scrutinizing the primary sources of labor money theories and practical experiences and reconstructs their theoretical relationships.

Download or read book Grand Army of Labor written by Matthew E. Stanley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlisting memory in a new fight for freedom From the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, labor movements reinterpreted Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of working people while workers equated activism with their own service fighting for freedom during the war. Matthew E. Stanley explores the wide-ranging meanings and diverse imagery used by Civil War veterans within the sprawling radical politics of the time. As he shows, a rich world of rituals, songs, speeches, and newspapers emerged among the many strains of working class cultural politics within the labor movement. Yet tensions arose even among allies. Some people rooted Civil War commemoration in nationalism and reform, and in time, these conservative currents marginalized radical workers who tied their remembering to revolution, internationalism, and socialism. An original consideration of meaning and memory, Grand Army of Labor reveals the complex ways workers drew on themes of emancipation and equality in the long battle for workers’ rights.