Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950 (review)

Kalb’s book is an attempt to revive mainstream labor history by applying sophisticated neo-Marxist analysis to a case study. The introduction is an impressive discussion of recent neo-Marxist debates in labor history. Kalb says that “the Marxist teleological theory of history is a corpse that must be buried” (6) and that the current shift away from social history to cultural studies, including the “anthropologies” of both Joyce and Reddy (14), is “misleading” (2).¹ Instead, he believes labor scholars should “embrace complexity” by focusing on both class and culture and by describing their “dynamic intersections” (17–23).

For his case study, Kalb examines workers in the North Brabant region of the southern Netherlands, where Philips, the giant electronics multinational firm, is based. Workers at Philips failed to unionize because of the firm’s imaginative policy of “flexible familism,” in which daughters were hired, migrant families brought in, and housing provided in order to ensure that working-class families remained docile (137).

Kalb’s theoretical introduction, unfortunately, has little to do with the rest of the book, which is theoretically and methodologically undeveloped. Kalb studied North Brabant because its workers displayed “an absence of dissent” (34). The only evidence for this claim, however, is that they joined Catholic unions. Because Kalb provides no statistics on either strikes or union membership, we do not know if workers were less strike-prone or militant than workers elsewhere. Since Catholic areas all over the Netherlands and northwest Europe have Catholic unions, it would be surprising if Brabant workers did not join Catholic unions.

Kalb does not argue that Catholic unions were larger, or competing Socialist unions weaker, in North Brabant than in other Catholic areas. He mentions briefly a debate among scholars about whether the North Brabant Catholic unions were manipulated by elites or genuinely worker-led, but he does not point out variables in his narrative to answer this question (28–29). Although he abruptly brings up Detroit, Boston, and the Ruhr at the end of the book (276–279), he does not use scholarship about non-Socialist movements elsewhere that might provide some tools to investigate this topic.

According to Kalb, workers “never broadly supported large-scale social movements employing the language of class,” but he admits that in a 1910 lockout, Catholicism “turned out to be the workers’ only ally capable of supporting serious industrial conflict” (24, 120). He concludes that “social Catholicism had shown itself to be capable of waging an all-out class conflict” (126). Catholic workers were not unique in forging alliances with the middle and upper class. Socialists did so on the basis of anticlericalism: “Both were explicit cross-class coalitions” (138). The two unions also allied with each other (121, 150). Given the complexities of Brabant workers’ activism, Kalb’s contention that “flexible familism” undermined labor militancy remains unproven.

Why, then, does Kalb use Catholic unionism as a major indicator of the level of class consciousness? The answer might be that Kalb the neo-Marxist theoretician has not won over Kalb the Marxist practitioner. After the long discussion of cultural analysis in the introduction, he repeatedly says that his approach is “materialist” and “Marxist” (61, 62, 63, 77, 87, and 261). In short, although Kalb studies an interesting topic, as a contribution to a revitalized labor history, this book has a mixed message.