5-21-07, 9:55 am

Author's note: The following is the text of a paper that I gave at the Conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA)/ Southern Labor Studies Association on May 18, at the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University. LAWCHA is the kind of scholar activist group that deserves support from anyone interested in understanding and contributing both the past and present struggles and advances of labor and the working class. The title of the panel was “The Backlash Against Labor History.'




The term 'backlash' came into popular usage in the late 1960s. It served as a mass media headline explanation for opposition and resistance to the Civil Rights movement generally and of course to Black militancy specifically, a sort of negation of the negation for those of us who are or were politically hip. I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at that time.

There were many things going on: student strikes to admit Blacks, and on many campuses student initiatives to establish Black and other minority studies programs.

A little later there were initiatives in which female faculty (often at real risk to their careers in our careerist society) played a much bigger role to establish women’s studies programs and encourage research on women’s history as part of the struggle that the many groupings of the women’s rights movement were making against male chauvinism and male supremacy.

Michigan was a strong labor state, and one of the prominent student leaders in the late 1960s was the son of a UAW leader. But labor, although students generally supported workers rights and unionization, was not in my memory a factor in the struggles that produced the new programs, even at the University of Michigan and in Michigan where the face of labor was Walter Reuther and not George Meany, who came from my old neighborhood in the South Bronx and whose most famous comment or addition to American mass culture was that he never walked a picket line.

Nor was labor history really much of a factor in the courses that I took at both at the University of Michigan and at City College before that. (At City College, a professor warned me about citing Philip Foner’s work positively in a term paper. He even called him “Philip Funny” an expression of those times and for some of course today, where even in death red-baiters seek to warn potential readers to “keep their noses clean” by avoiding Phil Foner at all costs).

My major professor, Sidney Fine, was an historian of the UAW Sit-down Strike, but someone who was very much of a traditionalist political historian in the courses that he taught and in his world-view, training his students to be generalists in modern U.S. history, which I still believe was the right thing to do. (Mel Dubofsky in his post emphasized much the same thing.)

What Labor history was there that we were expected to know when I was a student? We had to learn a little bit about the “Commons School,” which was taught pretty much as a minor footnote in the history of American exceptionalism—namely Commons was anti-Marxist and anti-Communist, and he and his students proved that class consciousness didn’t work in the United States. Phil Taft was seen as the most important historian of the Commons school and no one took Phil Taft seriously.

He was sort of a second tier political historian writing political histories about a second tier subject: labor. Labor was the history of unions first and strikes second and few took it seriously, not the traditionalist political historians frightened by young radicals and particularly a historian they like to call “William Appleton Williams,' not the “new social historians” who bounced around between theory and quantification, not the so-called new left radicals the traditionalists feared who among students looked to and often sought to copy the diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams, the by then late sociologist C. Wright Mills, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse along with many academic popularizers of feminism, ethno-cultural themes and the counter-culture.

'Backlash' is a very dubious term because there wasn’t much of a front lash in the 1960s or the 1970s. I also believe that Marc Stern and others were quite right to contend that the decline of the labor movement is certainly a factor in making labor history and labor historians “invisible” or narrowly pigeonholed in academic work. But the decline or rather the stagnation is a much longer process, than merely the Reagan regime of the last nearly three decades, its Republican partisans and Clinton Democratic appeasers. The decline is connected to the postwar political reaction against left and Communist led and influenced labor, in which labor ceased in the minds of most people and to some of its leaders to be a movement and became an interest group living off of the victories of the past and submerging itself in defensive democratic party politics and the liberal wing of the cold war consensus

I’m exaggerating of course, and among labor historians there were many important exceptions. There was Herb Gutman (seen as an American E. P. Thompson, a great labor history hope so to speak) and Jesse Lemisch and others like David Montgomery and Staughton Lynd who bridged two generations. There was an opening to the left, which lasted a relatively short time, less than a decade. And since the universities are usually behind rather than ahead of the time, this opening influenced universities largely in the 1970s rather than the 1960s.

There were and are scholars like my former Rutgers colleague, Alice Kessler Harris, the leading historian of women’s labor history, and Mel Dubofsky, James Green, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jim Barrett, Michael Honey, and even Leon Fink and Josh Freeman (who I am proud to say was a student whose dissertation I supervised) and others.

But, unlike scholars in other fields enhanced by the social movements of the 1960s, they did not have either the critical mass in universities or the constituencies among students and in the larger society to build enclaves for themselves, weather the storms, and even make small gains.

Let me make some suggestions about the present crisis in higher education and how it has affected Labor History and Labor Studies.

First, to summarize what many have noted, we have lived through and been numbed by a full generation of anti-public sector “cutbacks,” the whole public sector including public universities, in which university administrations have desperately sought to mimic corporate leadership and in effect increase greatly their own salaries as they undermine working faculty, expanding a “star” or celebrity scholar system that has increased the income and status gaps within faculties, in the public sector particularly. The salary differential between the better and/or richer private universities and the better public universities has grown substantially, so that a full professor at a rich private university may have as much as $20,000 to 30,000 in extra salary than a comparable full professor at the best public university.

Joe Berry’s point that full time tenured faculty now amount to 1/3 of the faculty work force is essential to this discussion and his book “Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education” is very important, even though we must remember that “academia,“ and that very term implies that it is a separate country, is about working as an individual producer to gain the favor of credentialed or pedigreed guild members which makes organizing, particularly for yourself, very difficult, since it needs a working class consciousness that academics are encouraged to deny in the very work process itself.

Analyzing and challenging the deeply conservative nature of the university system and advancing a public sector public university model (where tenure is granted after a relatively short period of time, publications are not fetishized as against all other work, and social outreach in the form of teaching and service is both encouraged rewarded, so that scholars can really be professors and historians instead of “doing history”) is the beginning, I think, to making the universities safe for labor based research and teaching and labor history more visible and stronger in academic work.

Based my experiences there is a “hunger” for labor history, particularly among older working students in trade unions for both the history of their unions and what happened to their unions and their movement, since it is either presented in small fragments or merely omitted in mass media and general education.

Where questions of race and gender are highlighted in general education from what the right likes to calls the left, they are often disconnected both theoretically and practically from class relations—meaning that minorities and women become in effect the “oppressed classes” and non minority non female humans either the oppressors or the agents of upper classes who profit from the oppression.

“Classism” is thrown in with “Racism” and “Sexism” by some highly visible members of the academic left in a trinity of ills which the academic right denounces and the academic center largely ignores.

The sort of argument that my good friend the late Victor Perlo made so forcefully about the capitalist and investor profits amassed through a racist and sexist structuring of the work force is largely invisible in the United States, except perhaps among scholars at this and similar conferences.

Polls show that the great majority of Americans support trade unions and see them as necessary. But polls unfortunately have little to do with policy and if they did we would have had a system of national health insurance and many other things in the U.S. decades ago

What we do have in the U.S. since Taft-Hartley (1947) is anti-union shop state laws which are called “right to work” laws and which exist in a near majority of states. We also have general labor law significantly below average when compared to most of the rest the developed capitalist world, if one supports the rights of workers as against employers.

Sadly, the institutional and numerical weakness of the labor movement in the United States is interrelated to the institutional and in terms of participation numerical weakness of American democracy, which also is, even in the narrow definitions of democracy, that is, electoral participation and institutional political structures that reflect and register majority sentiments, significantly below average in the developed liberal democratic world.

Redefining and broadening labor history may be good in themselves but they won’t solve the problem of full-time jobs, deal with the reserve army of academic labor called adjuncts, encourage corporate oriented university administrations that seek more and more private funding and see themselves as high paid fund-raisers to support labor studies, and labor history.

Let me make a few concluding comments about what I would like to see happen.

First we have got to re-invigorate labor studies programs and create a major labor history component to those programs. This means working politically with and through the labor movement to involve the labor movement in universities. The U.S. work force is increasingly a work force where college education plays the role of high school education for my father’s generation. The universities are both the center of an enormous and in terms of professional labor largely unorganized “information industry” which can help labor win members and regain influence in society as it helps corporations and the military by providing publicly funded research for them and a credentialing system for their workers.

Let me say that while there may be and are progressive business historians who are sympathetic to labor and may even win awards, the merging of labor and management programs in universities is in my opinion a very negative trend.

Also, the foundation and university funding for research in business related fields and the “academicizing” of research in labor has had the effect of discriminating against those scholars who try to do what the labor movement and labor history most needs, what the Communist narrative historian and editor of the U.S. labor movement, the still controversial Philip Foner did both before and after he was purged from the City College system in the famous Rapp Coudert purge of 1941, namely both write labor history for a general audience and provide as a writer and a speaker materials for the union movement to encourage pride in labor’s struggles.

There are labor historians who do that today, but in a context where there are few jobs generally, where refereed articles, books with establishment academic and trade publishers, a kind of publish or perish speedup is the rule. Labor historians are both operating at a major disadvantage and are encouraged to disassociate themselves more and more from the labor movement.

Labor historians are better in my opinion than most of their colleagues in what they are writing about and in the intellectual framework that they use. They are really the most knowledgeable scholars, given their research backgrounds, about what is happening in academic work. They are the least likely to be enchanted with the reigning myths of “academia” as not so much an ivory tower but a separate country that is an artisan’s paradise, or as a famous Russian V.I. Lenin noted a mixture of the old regime with its ranks and titles, and artisan guilds.

They are more ready to analyze the way university administrations operate and, particularly in public universities, to seek political action to protect faculty. They are also the most likely to play at most a leading role and at least a supportive one in the organization of faculty, both full-time tenure track, non-tenure track, and the reserve army of adjuncts.

That is the way, I think, to try to make labor history visible and influential again. Work with and strengthen the social forces that seek to make labor both strong, progressive and influential in the society. Work in the universities against the corporatizers who, if they get their way, will create research institutes with a small cadre of wealthy professor supervisors over poorly paid researchers, and a factory teaching system of poorly paid lower faculty (drawn from the overproduction of PhD’s) and adjuncts and graduate students stamping out grades for large numbers of students while a small number of celebrity teachers reach students through the internet and train the poorly paid lower faculty and institute researchers of the future in graduate programs.

What happens to labor history isn’t separate from what happens to universities especially public universities who constitute two thirds of the university system. Just as the first three decades of the postwar era saw, even with the McCarthyite repression, the working class literally live off the capital created by labor’s victories in the 1930s and 1940s, we over the last thirty years have lived with the consequences of labor’s defeats.

We must work to change that society to advance labor history. And labor itself, class conscious politically active and inclusive labor, is the force that can and must change that society. This means seeking acceptance in the careerist world of corporatizing university but struggling to revive the comprehensive public university and make labor history and labor studies and research and teaching about the working class a foundation of that university.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.