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Part I Shaping Myself, Shaping History The essays in this section are biographical in orientation, exploring how I have written about the relationship between labor, capital, and politics and why my ideas have often changed over the years. “Writing and Rewriting Labor’s Narrative ” explains how, along with so many others in my New Left generation, I have reframed my understanding of those structures and social impulses that create the consciousness of the working-class as well its antagonists. At Berkeley in the early 1970s I was convinced that neither the law, religion, ethnicity, nor even race were as important as the work experience itself in shaping the consciousness of industrial unionists, whose sit-down strikes and wildcat strikes seemed to emerge directly out of a revolt against hierarchy and authority on the shop floor itself. The works of mid-twentieth-century sociologists like Alvin Gouldner, Donald Roy, and Reinhard Bendix were therefore important influences. Likewise I was inspired by Harry Braverman’s deconstruction of the labor process under conditions of Taylorite management, and I found the work of David Brody, who truly understood work and authority among steelworkers and butchers, something of an academic model, even though he was far more of an “institutionalist” than the other new labor history pioneers. But to put it rather crudely, I’ve come to the conclusion that the relationship of an individual to his or her work life is of less immediate importance than that person’s capacity to identify with and then expound a set of ideas and aspirations that may or may not run parallel to what an outside observer—say, a historian of left-wing inclinations—might seem to think met the person’s objective interests. This is the point Tom Frank made in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, although I hasten to add that consciousness and behavior are not merely the product of a preexisting set of cultural tropes. Instead they are heavily influenced by what Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 13 5/24/13 8:04 AM 14 shaping myself, shaping history workers and citizens see as part of a struggle whose success is probable and useful. So in this section’s inaugural essay, on writing and revising labor’s Depression-era narrative, one can find a younger Lichtenstein and an older Lichtenstein arguing with each other. The former focuses relentlessly on working-class self-activity at the point of production; the latter offers equal weight to the larger ideological, cultural, and racial context within which the unions and their antagonists competed for power and prestige. A second essay, which yanks the reader from mid-twentieth-century Detroit to early twenty-first-century Guangdong Province, recounts my discovery that the labor question can have many different configurations, especially when some of the most important and characteristic enterprises of our day are the big-box retailers, whose employee rolls and annual revenues now far outrank those of the largest manufacturing companies. To my sometime consternation, it now seems apparent that the essence of the twenty-first-century labor question no longer resides at the point of production in a struggle between workers and the owners of the factories in which they labor. Instead, the site of value production is found at every link along a set of global supply chains, in which the manufacturer and the warehouse operator, the ports and the shipping companies, as well as the retailers and their branded vendors jockey for power and profit. In this disaggregated system, legal ownership of the forces of production has been divorced from operational control, making accountability for labor conditions diffuse and knowledge of the actual producers far from transparent. I have always been interested in putting ideas into practice, which is why I’ve included an essay here that ruminates on the meaning of the public intellectual. At Berkeley my comrades and I saw ourselves as standing in a revolutionary tradition that reached back almost to the first years of the twentieth century. The task was to put that ideology to work, here, now, tomorrow morning. At the time we crammed as much history and analysis onto a series of mimeographed leaflets—single spaced, double sided, and normally finished at 2:00 a.m.—which we distributed bright and early at Sather Gate. New and more effective forms of distribution would soon become available, but the impulse to reach a larger, animated public by deploying ideas generated in either the seminar room or the political caucus retains its potency...

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