In Search of Syndicalism

I could not agree more with Peter Meiksins's initial observation that the field of labor studies, as represented by the two books under review in this symposium, is housed under a "very large tent"—in this particular case stretching to include the last 75 years of historical time and covering two settings as different as the inter-war United States and contemporary China. Still, this sweeping intellectual canvas only covers a small portion of what constitutes labor studies today. For all of our differences in topic, method, and theoretical positioning, these two contrasting works of sociology represent but a small part of what comprises the growing scholarly world of labor studies, an expanding universe that draws on academics and activists from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and institutional affiliations.

Meiksins expresses a certain ambivalence, which I share, about the resulting "diversity of labor studies." On the positive side, the recurring clash of disciplinary assumptions and perspectives creates—particularly in the presence of practical knowledge gleaned from the trenches of labor activism—a volatile intellectual mix that sustains the field's dynamism. Lacking a canonical set of assumptions at its core, labor studies scholars are free, in Meiksin's words, to "co-exist and learn from one another." The resulting atmosphere of intellectual openness and engagement found in this journal and others is refreshing and worth defending. The flip side of this openness, however, is that the field can be said to lack a basic consensus about its "central focus of inquiry," such that, in Meiksins's words, it "runs the risk of fragmenting into separate or even warring camps" that fail to engage in constructive dialogue with one another. Is this intellectual fragmentation of the field a realistic scenario and if so, does it pose a threat or an opportunity for labor studies scholars? Frankly, I am not in a position to say, though I think it may be useful to inject a note of sobriety into all such celebrations of "openness" for its own sake. Perhaps it is sufficient to bear in mind that—in scholarship as in camping—the larger the tent, the more firmly it must be anchored to the ground.

Let me now turn to that one piece of turf under the "big tent" of labor studies that I know best: historical sociological research on the 20^th century American labor movement as represented in my book, Battling for American Labor (hereafter Battling). Both Meiksins and Larry Isaac have done a superb job of summarizing the main tenets of my argument. In his more detailed comments, Isaac has gone even further, offering an extended discussion that highlights the study's main implications, while drawing out its larger theoretical and methodological lessons for students of American labor. As renderings of my work, I could not have done it any better myself. So, I can happily resist my authorial impulse to "set the record straight," and focus instead on the intriguing questions and challenges posed by Meiksins and Isaac

Battling advances a controversial claim that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), despite their contrasting ideological visions and utopian commitments, sustained a syndicalist orientation in their respective practices of unionism. This "syndicalism, pure and simple" was defined by its rejection of the political arena as the preferred terrain of struggle in favor of worker self-activity at the point of production. It was not, as I argued, a syndicalism of ideas but of practice. This "practical syndicalism" defined the broad contours of American trade unionism for at least the first half of the 20^th century and, to a diminished extent, down to the present.

My argument can be fairly criticized for claiming both too little and too much. It claims too little, one might reasonably conclude, to the extent that this conceptualization of syndicalism is so expansive as to cover most expressions of unionism in the U.S. and elsewhere. After all, if syndicalism is equated...