This is the first thread for the Libcom Study Group, discussed in the organise subforumHere. The first book we will be reading and discussing is Strike! by Jeremy Brecher.
Strike! is broken up into a first and second part; Part 1 'The History Of American Strikes' contains the Prologue and Chapters 1 - 6. Part 2 'The Significance Of American Strikes' contains Chapters 7 - 9 and the Afterword and Index (this is going by the hardcover 1972 1st Edition). Details concerning which editions of the book are the best (and worst), and where to find a used copy, can be found in the thread linked to earlier.
The purpose of the study group:
There's a large body of work and a very big, largely unknown social history of American communist politics- a large volume of theoretical work and debates, personal histories, which deserve a thorough look. I think the legacy of American communism from 1917-1970 and the history of working class militancy in the US needs to be unearthed and sifted through, discussed and debated, looking for a heritage to add to that of the European communist movement.Are there American communists interested in engaging in a project like this? Practically I'd imagine it would act like a book club, internet discussion forum or e-mail listserve, study group and political discussion society combined, with the purpose of clarification and theoretical work to be published online in the form of articles, essays, etc. Not linked to any political group or ideology, only a mutually agreed interest in processing, discussing, debating and clarifying the [little known] history of American communist tendencies and working class events.
This will be the first project of the group. Discussion will be centered in this thread- if a participant in the group wishes to discuss or debate a specific topic in-depth, or doesn't feel it is getting the attention it deserves here, can start a seperate thread in the history subforum. If this is the case, please start with the initials "LSG" in the title of your new thread so we all know it pertains to the study group and the discussion and debate around Strike! (example of a new thread would be titled, "LSG - The Importance of Race in the Great Upheavel of 1877").
We will need a time frame to keep things moving along. This can be changed along the way if the participants feel we are moving too fast or too slow, but to begin with let's divide our reading up into 1 chapter blocks with approx. 4 weeks for everyone to read and begin discussions for each block. On the 15th of every month, we move on to the next 1 Chapter block.
Please direct questions and concerns about the study group and project to the thread in the Organise subforum Here so that we may leave this thread for discussion.
Deadline: February 15th for Chapter 1 'The Great Upheaval' .
I made some procedural comments on the other thread about organizing this, but would like to give some background of why I think this discussion is necessary.
Jean Anyon’s essay "Ideology in United States History Textbooks," in Harvard Educational Review 49, demonstrates that nearly all high school textbooks only mention three strikes ― the 1877 Great Upheaval railroad strike, the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike, and the 1894 Pullman Strike on the railroads ― that were brutally violent and all three ended in bitter defeat. The message is that striking is something that happened in the 19th century and to cast doubt on striking as a valid course of action today. Class-against-class violence was something that ended in the past, so negotiating contracts and arbitration of grievances is not about class struggle but is about "industrial relations." Unions are then seen to be representing workers as a special interest group, with their purpose being the substitution of civilized collective bargaining for "jungle warfare."
She says:
But instead, textbooks teach us that working class forms of organization:
The mainstream leftist version, preached by AFL-CIO officialdom today, goes like this:
She points out that the average textbook coverage of labor history is six "unsympathetic" and "narrow" pages. Yet there were well over 30,000 strikes in the period from the Civil War to World War I. In the more radical textbook The Reader's Companion to American History, authors Eric Foner and John Garraty point out that:
Contrasted to this, in defense of the status quo, German sociologist Werner Sombart ― in his Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? in 1906 ― claims that the success of capitalism made the American worker:
It is against this ideological obfuscation that we must struggle, here in this discussion and in our everyday involvement in the class war.