Nelson Lichtenstein - Böcker

For more than thirty years Nelson Lichtenstein has deployed his scholarship--on labor, politics, and social thought--to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture.

For more than thirty years Nelson Lichtenstein has deployed his scholarship--on labor, politics, and social thought--to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture.

A lively and informed argument that highlights the continuing importance of unions in both shaping the economy and inspiring social and political activismFrom the coffee shop to the college quad, the trade union idea is once again alive as a new American generation discovers that working-class collective action offers a pathway to both economic security and the fulfillment of some of their most expansive aspirations. Using contemporary accounts drawn from his own interviews and reporting, Nelson Lichtenstein shows why trade unionism matters in a world where, even in West Virginia, Walmart employees far outnumber coal miners, where baristas exhibit more militancy than construction workers, and where the very definition of who is a worker and who is a boss has been legally, organizationally, and managerially transformed so as to render contemporary labor law largely ineffectual.Lichtenstein demonstrates how a militant and expansive unionism can subvert and limit authoritarianism not just in the workplace but also in the public sphere. He shows how such trade unions can raise income, reduce racial and gender inequalities, and mobilize workers to become more socially and politically active. Why Labor Unions Matter also reveals how general strikes, from San Francisco to Gdańsk and São Paulo, have been crucial to the replacement of authoritarian regimes with a radically transformative democracy.

Wal-Mart is the world's largest company and it sets the standard - both social and commercial - for a huge swath of the global economy. In this probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein shows how the company's success has spread evangelical Protestantism into the workplace, made South China an American workshop, and pushed American politics to the right. At the same time, he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire. Insightful, original, and steeped in the culture of retail life, "The Retail Revolution" gives a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has reshaped international commerce.

Industrial Democracy in America begins its close examination of what came to be known among collars of any colour as 'the labour problem' with the railroad strikes of the 1870s. The contributors cover the theory and practice of the American labour movement, the promise and demise of industrial jurisprudence, the law of collective bargaining, workplace contractualism, and shop-floor reality in the United States auto industry, and compare these with employment systems in Japan. This book contemplates America's industrial decline and will provoke questions, even within management circles, of the long-run viability of a work regime that does not respect or motivate its workers.

Industrial Democracy in America begins its close examination of what came to be known among collars of any colour as 'the labour problem' with the railroad strikes of the 1870s. The contributors cover the theory and practice of the American labour movement, the promise and demise of industrial jurisprudence, the law of collective bargaining, workplace contractualism, and shop-floor reality in the United States auto industry, and compare these with employment systems in Japan. This book contemplates America's industrial decline and will provoke questions, even within management circles, of the long-run viability of a work regime that does not respect or motivate its workers.

In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce.Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations. This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein engages with many of those who have offered commentary on State of the Union and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged in the decade since the book's initial publication.He also brings his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter, "Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions."

How the Clinton administration betrayed its progressive principles and capitulated to the rightWhen Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation’s economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton’s expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration’s progressive reformers—people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz—were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in—which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a “fabulous decade”—ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented.A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency’s progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful.

How the Clinton administration betrayed its progressive principles and capitulated to the rightWhen Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation’s economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton’s expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration’s progressive reformers—people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz—were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in—which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a “fabulous decade”—ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented.A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency’s progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the legitimacy of American capitalism seems unchallenged. The link between open markets, economic growth, and democratic success has become common wisdom, not only among policy makers but for many intellectuals as well. In this instance, however, the past has hardly been prologue to contemporary confidence in the free market. American Capitalism presents thirteen thought-provoking essays that explain how a variety of individuals, many prominent intellectuals but others partisans in the combative world of business and policy, engaged with anxieties about the seismic economic changes in postwar America and, in the process, reconfigured the early twentieth-century ideology that put critique of economic power and privilege at its center.The essays consider a broad spectrum of figures-from C. L. R. James and John Kenneth Galbraith to Peter Drucker and Ayn Rand-and topics ranging from theories of Cold War "convergence" to the rise of the philanthropic Right. They examine how the shift away from political economy at midcentury paved the way for the 1960s and the "culture wars" that followed. Contributors interrogate what was lost and gained when intellectuals moved their focus from political economy to cultural criticism. The volume thereby offers a blueprint for a dramatic reevaluation of how we should think about the trajectory of American intellectual history in twentieth-century United States.

The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to the uproar in Wisconsin and other union strongholds in 2011 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political and ideological hostility to the very idea of trade unionism put forward by a conservative movement whose roots go as far back as the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The controversy in Madison and other state capitals reveals that labor's status and power has always been at the core of American conservatism, today as well as a century ago.The Right and Labor in America explores the multifaceted history and range of conservative hostility toward unionism, opening the door to a fascinating set of individuals, movements, and institutions that help explain why, in much of the popular imagination, union leaders are always "bosses" and trade union organizers are nothing short of "thugs." The contributors to this volume explore conservative thought about unions, in particular the ideological impulses, rhetorical strategies, and political efforts that conservatives have deployed to challenge unions as a force in U.S. economic and political life over the century. Among the many contemporary books on American parties, personalities, and elections that try to explain why political disputes are so divisive, this collection of original and innovative essays is essential reading.

The Port Huron Statement was the most important manifesto of the New Left student movement of the 1960s. Initially drafted by Tom Hayden and debated over the course of three days in 1962 at a meeting of student leaders, the statement was issued by Students for a Democratic Society as their founding document. Its key idea, "participatory democracy," proved a watchword for Sixties radicalism that has also reemerged in popular protests from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.Featuring essays by some of the original contributors as well as prominent scholars who were influenced by the manifesto, The Port Huron Statement probes the origins, content, and contemporary influence of the document that heralded the emergence of a vibrant New Left in American culture and politics. Opening with an essay by Tom Hayden that provides a sweeping reflection on the document's enduring significance, the volume explores the diverse intellectual and cultural roots of the Statement, the uneasy dynamics between liberals and radicals that led to and followed this convergence, the ways participatory democracy was defined and deployed in the 1960s, and the continuing resonances this idea has for political movements today. An appendix includes the complete text of the original document.The Port Huron Statement offers a vivid portrait of a unique moment in the history of radicalism, showing that the ideas that inspired a generation of young radicals more than half a century ago are just as important and provocative today.Contributors: Robert Cohen, Richard Flacks, Jennifer Frost, Daniel Geary, Barbara Haber, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Tom Hayden, Michael Kazin, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jane Mansbridge, Lisa McGirr, James Miller, Robert J. S. Ross, Michael Vester, Erik Olin Wright.

Ever since introducing the concept in the late 1980s, historians have been debating the origins, nature, scope, and limitations of the New Deal order-the combination of ideas, electoral and governing strategies, redistributive social policies, and full employment economics that became the standard-bearer for political liberalism in the wake of the Great Depression and commanded Democratic majorities for decades. In the decline and break-up of the New Deal coalition historians found keys to understanding the transformations that, by the late twentieth century, were shifting American politics to the right.In Beyond the New Deal Order, contributors bring fresh perspective to the historic meaning and significance of New Deal liberalism while identifying the elements of a distinctively "neoliberal" politics that emerged in its wake. Part I offers contemporary interpretations of the New Deal with essays that focus on its approach to economic security and inequality, its view of participatory governance, and its impact on the Republican party as well as Congressional politics. Part II features essays that examine how intersectional inequities of class, race, and gender were embedded in New Deal labor law, labor standards, and economic policy and brought demands for employment, economic justice, and collective bargaining protections to the forefront of civil rights and social movement agendas throughout the postwar decades. Part III considers the precepts and defining narratives of a "post" New Deal political structure, while the closing essay contemplates the extent to which we may now be witnessing the end of a neoliberal system anchored in free-market ideology, neo-Victorian moral aspirations, and post-Communist global politics.Contributors: Eileen Boris, Angus Burgin, Gary Gerstle, Romain Huret, Meg Jacobs, Michael Kazin, Sophia Lee, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joe McCartin, Alice O'Connor, Paul Sabin, Reuel Schiller, Kit Smemo, David Stein, Jean-Christian Vinel, Julian Zelizer.

In the historical narrative that prevails today, the New Deal years are positioned between two equally despised Gilded Ages-the first in the late nineteenth century and the second characterized by the world of Walmart, globalization, and right-wing populism in which we currently live. What defines these two ages is an increasing level of inequality legitimized by powerful ideologies, namely, Social Darwinism at the end of the nineteenth century and neoliberalism today. In stark contrast, the era of the New Deal was first and foremost an attempt to put an end to inequality in American society. In the historical longue durÉe, it appears today as a kind of golden age when policymakers and citizens sought to devise solutions to the two major "questions"-labor on one side, social on the other-that were at the heart of the American political economy during the twentieth century.Capitalism Contested argues that the New Deal order remains an effective framework to make sense of the transformation of American political economy over the last hundred years. Contributors offer an historicized analysis of the degree to which that political, economic, and ideological order persists and the ways in which it has been transcended or even overthrown. The essays pay attention not only to those ideas and social forces hostile to the New Deal, but to the contradictions and debilities that were present at the inauguration or became inherent within this liberal impulse during the last half of the twentieth century. The unifying thematic among the essays consists not in their subject matter-politics, political economy, social thought, and legal scholarship are represented-but in a historical quest to assess the transformation and fate of an economic and policy order nearly a century after its creation.Contributors: Kate Andrias, Romain Huret, William P. Jones, Nelson Lichtenstein, Nancy MacLean, Isaac William Martin, Margaret O'Mara, K. Sabeel Rahman, Timothy Shenk, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Jason Scott Smith, Samir Sonti, Karen M. Tani, Jean-Christian Vinel.

This volume of original essays considers how the International Labour Organization has helped generate a set of ideas and practices, past and present, transnational and within a single nation, aimed at advancing social and economic reform in the Pacific Rim.

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production.Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains—such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads—generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production.Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains—such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads—generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement-especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations-and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration. He argues that tensions within the labor movement and within the ranks of American business profoundly affected government policy during the war and the nature of organized labor's political relations with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. Moreover, the political arrangements worked out during the war established the foundations of social stability and labor politics that came to characterize the postwar world.