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chapter 1 Writing and Rewriting Labor’s Narrative In the years after 1970 my New Left generation inaugurated a remarkable probe into the character, meaning, and history of the working class and its institutions. Two events in particular seemed to crystallize my decision to write a history of unionism and the state during the 1940s. The first came on the evening of September 14, 1970, when a few dozen Berkeley students drove down to Fremont ’s sprawling General Motors assembly complex to support rank-and-file workers when the United Automobile Workers (UAW) struck the company at midnight. Hundreds jumped the gun and rushed out of the factory a couple of hours early. These youthful, boisterous, night-shift workers happily waved our hand-painted signs—“GM: Mark of Exploitation”—took over the union hall, and cheered militant speeches, both anti-company and critical of top UAW leaders. It was the beginning of the first coordinated, nationwide stoppage at GM since the winter of 1945–1946. We didn’t know it at the time, but the 1970 GM strike, which would continue for ten weeks, came right in the midst of the last great wave of twentieth-century industrial conflict in the United States.1 While all of this was going on, the Berkeley branch of the International Socialists , a Trotskyist formation of New Left sensibility and “third camp” (i.e., antiStalinist and anticapitalist) politics, was in the midst of furious debate. Along with others radicalized on the campuses and in the anti–Vietnam War movement , a “turn toward the working class” had begun to propel thousands of student radicals into the nation’s factories, warehouses, hospitals, and offices. From Berkeley, friends and comrades took off for Detroit auto plants, Chicago steel mills, Cleveland trucking companies, and all sorts of industrial jobs throughout the Bay Area.2 But what were they to do when they got there? If these “industrializers” began to work their way up through the trade union apparatus, they would be helping to build an institution that seemed positively anathema to many of us. The AFL-CIO remained a firm backer of the war in Vietnam; moreover, even the more progressive unions, like the UAW and the Packinghouse Workers, appeared so strapped Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 15 5/24/13 8:04 AM 16 shaping myself, shaping history by bureaucracy, law, contracts, and political allegiances that they hardly seemed an appropriate vehicle to advance the class struggle. C. Wright Mills, Stanley Aronowitz, Harvey Swados, C.L.R. James, and other radicals had taught us that the growth of the union bureaucracy and the government’s intrusive labor relations apparatus had robbed labor of its radical heritage. By incorporating the trade unions into the structures of the American state, or at least the twoparty system, these institutions were thought to resemble those of Stalinist or fascist regimes, where statist unions and labor fronts had been foisted upon the working class.3 Thus, in the debates that animated my generation of Berkeley students, older activists, like Hal Draper and Stan Weir, made much of labor’s experience during the World War II mobilization era. Then the unions had offered the state and enforced upon their members a “no-strike pledge,” even as wildcat strikes (i.e., those unauthorized by higher officials), union factionalism, and labor party agitation energized many of the rank-and-filers who had built the industrial unions during the great strikes that electrified the nation between 1934 and 1941. A new generation of working-class radicals, it was therefore believed, must keep a wary eye on the union leadership and build their own independent caucuses within the labor movement.4 Indeed, I was beginning my research as a wave of spirited strikes, many of them wildcat, shattered the industrial relations routine in Detroit auto factories, Midwest trucking barns, big-city post offices, and throughout California agriculture. Between 1967 and 1973 the size and number of strikes reached levels not seen since the immediate post–World War II years. This was the perspective put forth in my 1974 University of California dissertation , published in 1982 as Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II. The book was skeptical about the staying power of New Deal liberalism; saw the warfare state as a repressive institution; criticized Congress of Industrial Organization leaders, both “conservative” (i.e., social democratic) and Communist; and celebrated the World War II wildcat strike movement in the auto, rubber, and shipbuilding industries. It saw that...

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