Editor's Introduction

Writing from inside the Covid-19 lockdown, I figured our readers as much as the editor would relish the summertime reverie afforded by Peter Blair's witty "Caddy Master." Would that we all could take a mulligan on this entire season of distress.

Back-to-business and in keeping with the themes of contemporary relevance, we are delighted to showcase Liz Faue and Josiah Rector's probing and prescient take on women health care workers during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. As the authors document, a spike of needlestick injuries, accentuated by a breakdown of OSHA and CDC regulatory vigilance, set the stage for concerted pushback by SEIU activists alongside women's, gay rights, and public health organizations. Their efforts were crowned by the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act of 2000, which established new, federal standards on blood-borne pathogens. The danger to health care providers identified in HIV care, the authors conclude, is all the more apparent during the novel coronavirus pandemic. In both cases, a shortage of equipment and swollen patient-to-nurse workloads risk the lives and health of both workers and the general public.

Based on his own observations and many conversations with both academics and trade union officials, historian Michael Honey presents the fruits of a 2019 sojourn at the University of Bergen, Norway. The Nordic way—or "social-democratic state capitalism"—he suggests, has much to teach us about the possibilities of a hybrid system of market-based entrepreneurialism combined with high taxes, strong unions, and elaborate, government-sponsored services. Rooted in the nineteenth-century social compromises extracted by Norwegian farmers and peasants from landowners and kings, the country's characteristic system of class conciliation was secured by the Basic Agreement of 1935 (following a decade of violent labor conflicts) that guaranteed the right to organize, recognized shop steward power, and established mechanisms of dispute settlement. After World War II, parliamentary majorities secured by the ruling Labour Party and backed by the powerful central labor federation known as the LO constructed one of Europe's strongest welfare states. Discovered in 1969, production of North Sea oil under state control offered a further social welfare windfall unknown in most societies (albeit also prompting criticism of its "gray" rather than "green" growth strategy). Recent decades, Honey learned, have seen some fraying of the Nordic model, challenged both by global neoliberalism and xenophobia aimed at migrants. Yet, even as the governing coalition has shifted rightward, the Labour Party represents the strongest electoral base in the country and continues to defend a social project with which Martin Luther King Jr. also identified when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964.

The journal is proud to take the measure of several new spirits in the field with a combination of intellectual and autobiographical reflections by Emma Amador, Max Fraser, Naomi R Williams, and Stacey L. Smith. As Eileen Boris notes in her introduction to the forum, "these interventions belong to a larger project that continues to examine the relationship between class, race, gender, citizenship, and other factors. We have learned that there is no simple fit between the concept of intersectionality and historical experience; rather, there are multiple relations that allow for probing how class identify develops with and against race and gender."

This volume's Bookmark features an exchange between Steve Striffler, author of Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights, and critics Bryan McCann, Eric Arnesen, and Nancy Raquel Mirabal. The readers are all appreciative, albeit in varying degree, of Striffler's grasp of the long arc of a progressive counterpunch to official US intervention in the region that stretches from the Haitian revolution to the creation of NAFTA. McCann offers a full-throated assent to an account he calls "sometimes inspiring, sometimes sobering, always enlightening." Mirabal worries that in focusing on solidarity campaigns "with Latin America and Latin Americans" inevitably is likely "to minimize, and at times, exclude the activism of communities of color, women, and immigrants in the United States who were very active and in many instances, critical to the success of these...