A History of Capitalism Done the Right Way

In Fear City, Kim Phillips-Fein has created a blueprint for how to write an inclusive and accessible study within the ascendant "history of capitalism" field. The history of capitalism is often seen as a kind of amalgam of business history, which puts companies and markets at its center, and labor history, which centers workers, their communities, and their organizations. The history of capitalism is supposed to offer us a larger and more holistic view, one that looks at all the moving parts and crosses methodological boundaries. The way the field has developed, however, often neglects waged workers and labor as historical actors, perhaps, in part, because of the field's roots in the history of slavery, or perhaps because of the weakening of the labor movement in our own time.¹ Workers, however, are fundamental to capitalism and any complete history of it must take labor seriously as an analytical category.

In Fear City, workers' history is not an add-on, but rather is woven throughout, and labor unions are central to the narrative. We learn, for example, that unions and worker struggles were key forces behind the creation of the generous local welfare state that undergirded New York's "urban liberalism," and that working people then deeply contested neoliberalism's assault on those services in the 1970s. We meet Adam Veneski, a laid-off bottle factory worker who organized his Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighbors to occupy the local firehouse for over a year rather than see it closed. The group of mostly white ethnic workers blocked the firehouse entrance with a sofa, brought in the kids and the vodka, and proceeded to hold polka parties and host showings of the radical labor film Salt of the Earth. We meet Ramón Jiménez, a Harvard-trained lawyer of Puerto Rican descent who organized a coalition to save Hostos Community College, a school expressly designed to serve the bilingual population through classes in English and Spanish. The students and community occupied the campus, including setting up a childcare center in the president's office, and blocked traffic by dragging classroom chairs into the middle of a major nearby highway. We discover that the "Welcome to Fear City" leaflet that inspired the book's title was part of a campaign by local firefighter and police unions to scare tourists and so pressure the city into forgoing cuts.

Phillips-Fein could have written this book a different way. As the city's fiscal crisis unfolds, we might have only heard about the bankers, politicians, bean counters, and fiscal experts. In the pivotal chapter that takes us into the heat of the crisis in 1975, for example, we might have met only Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frères banker who, along with three other corporate leaders, created the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), which allowed the state to issue bonds on behalf of the city. Instead, Phillips-Fein artfully pairs Rohatyn with Victor Gotbaum, the head of District Council 37, the city's largest public sector union that staged a ten thousand—person rally aimed not at the city government but at what they saw as the source of the problem, First National Bank. They targeted the bank for stoking the New York fiscal crisis when it demanded that the local, state, and federal government support worker lay-offs and cuts. We learn equally about both men, their backgrounds, motivations, and machinations.

We also see unions struggle with their contradictory role of both trying to protest layoffs and wage cuts while also trying to prop up the economic structure that undergirds their members' employment. At one point, we find ourselves watching an impromptu late-night meeting in American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Al Shanker's apartment, after New York Governor Carey and a wealthy real-estate developer came knocking on his door to plead that he urge the trustees of the teachers' union to agree to a major bond purchase. Shanker reluctantly agreed and saved the city from default, at least temporarily. Likewise, after Ford finally decided to offer a series of short-term "seasonal" loans to the city...