In Search of American Labor's Syndicalist Heritage

In Battling for American Labor (hereafter Battling), Howard Kimeldorf's central purpose is to critically illuminate master narratives that paint a picture of the American proletariat as exceptionally conservative. He attacks this theoretical straitjacket that has confined American labor history and labor studies by first engaging in critically rethinking the premises of these orthodox master narratives. Second, he pursues a close, highly nuanced, deeply historical examination of workers' experiences in the life-course of American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) affiliates, and the relations between the two at the point of production in the early 20^th century. The objectives of this essay are threefold. First, I present a brief overview of Battling's highlights. Second, I discuss several important implications of Kimeldorf's argument. Finally, I raise questions and offer critical comments about portions of the conceptual and historical analysis for purposes of encouraging others to investigate the important questions that Kimeldorf has put on the agenda.

An Overview of Battling for American Labor

The Proletarian Conservative Orthodoxy

Several major master narratives, with which Kimeldorf "battles for American labor," have cast the American worker as ideologically conservative. Whether by birth or through experience with the peculiar social-historical conditions of U.S. capitalism, the American proletariat has been particularly quiescent and conservative, as the story goes. The master thesis of failed worker consciousness, hence the conservative proletariat, (we might even say, "masochistic proletariat") rests, according to Kimeldorf, on a psychological premise that points toward an anti-class, pro-capitalist complex. This shows up in a variety of different schools of thought, all converging on worker conservatism. From Selig Perlman's (1928) famous A Theory of the Labor Movement to Kim Voss's (1993) more recent The Making of American Exceptionalism, this implicit psychologizing operates by inferring workers' consciousness from their actions. In particular, proletarian conservatism is revealed in the act of joining the AFL. In the early 20^th century, both the AFL and IWW battled with not only capitalists, but also each other over the future of the labor movement. The standard portrayal of this intra-class war turned on ideological distinctions between the conservative AFL on the one hand and the insurgent IWW on the other, thus offering workers what would appear to be a clear choice. Table 1 gives a brief abstract of these key ideological distinctions.

Therefore, the fact that the AFL was way ahead in the organizing game when the IWW was founded in 1905 and even further ahead two decades later is typically read as evidence of the overwhelming conservatism of the American working class. For most students of 20^th century American labor, then, the AFL still represents the coffin of working class radicalism, with its cautious business unionism entombing a conservative rank and file. As central to the AFL, craft unionists remain cast in their stereotypical role as gravediggers not of capitalism, but of worker insurgency (Kimeldorf, 1999: 11).

The Syndicalist Taproot of the American Working-Class

Kimeldorf rejects this underlying "revealed preference" by arguing that ideological conservatism of the rank and file cannot be known by virtue of the relative organizational successes of the AFL. Moreover, unlike Seymour Lipset's (1996) "individualism" or Michael Kazin's (1995) "populism," he also rejects the "national value-system" as the point of departure for understanding class-consciousness or class action in America. Acknowledging the ideological gulf between the AFL and the Wobblies, Kimeldorf unravels their commonality that, with the exception of David Montgomery (1979: 15), has eluded others: "syndicalism pure and simple." In short, the taproot of American labor was a practical syndicalism that led both organizations to reject the political arena in favor of struggle in the workplace and to generally prefer the immediacy of direct action at the point of production to the uncertainty of legislative action in the halls of Congress (Kimeldorf, 1999: 13). The AFL and IWW alike...