In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

A set of politics that uses rhetoric, imagery, music, and performance to promote interests that are distinctively and explicitly identified with the working class, Burgmann productively suggests, might revitalize the labor movement. Yet the effort to apply lessons from “identity politics” to “class politics” reproduces two problems in contemporary radicalism. First, by reducing the movements of ethno-racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians to “identity politics” Burgmann underestimates those movements' claims to civil rights, human rights, socioeconomic improvement, and their general democratic nature. Second, the use of “class” to explain the antiglobalization movement is anachronistic and inadequate to the task of understanding radical politics today.

Verity Burgmann's condemnation of identity politics is unhelpful, because it is moralistic and ahistorical. Its assumptions take us back to a time before the civil rights, New Left, women's, and gay movements reinvented the Left so as to articulate their aspirations and grievances.

Burgmann has produced an interesting analysis of the liberating potential of the Seattle Movement. However, “identity politics,” as the term is currently employed, does not provide a useful framework for understanding the recent past, and therefore it cannot help academics in their attempts to analyze the meaning of current trends. Instead of using the flawed framework of “identity politics,” scholars should look to the opportunities and limitations inherent in all modern social movements.

Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.

In this response I argue that class politics are always experienced culturally, and open to diverse expressions in specific historical moments. I attempt to show that class politics did not so much die in the 1960s as get rearticulated through linkages to conservative political positions. Finally, I argue that a revival of class politics on the left depends on the possibility of linking class to the other “identity” positions that Burgmann sees as competitors.

Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be learned about class and class-conscious movements from “identity politics” and from cultural theorists, and of what is needed to encourage future movements for social and economic justice. It calls for a class politics that recognizes the diversity of the working classes, embraces multiple class identities, reflects the fluid and multitiered class structures in which we live, and honors the aspirations of working people for inclusion, equity, and justice.

“From Syndicalism to Seattle” was first delivered to ILWCH late in 2000, conceived during the highpoint of post-Seattle euphoria and before the events of 9/11. In some obvious ways the anticorporate movement in North America and Australia has since fallen on harder times due to: the necessary diversion of radical energies into the antiwar movement and opposition to inept and authoritarian counterterrorism initiatives; a reluctance on the part of some NGOs to continue campaigning in the prevailing conservative political climate; increased surveillance and repression of all forms of dissent and protest; and greatly reduced media coverage due to obsession with the “war on terror.” However, in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa, gigantic mobilizations and/or spectacularly stubborn day-by-day forms of resistance have continued and grown. Obituaries to anticorporate activism, invariably focused on the United States, are generally ignorant of these important struggles. In any case, despite the harsher political environment in the United States since 9/11, there are also positive developments that reveal the extent to which the critique of corporate power has gained public attention and political traction. Consider, for instance, the recent emergence of anticorporate blockbuster movies, such as Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, and Outfoxed. This new cinematic genre bears the imprint of Seattle: it builds upon the radically democratic anticorporate analysis brought to prominence by the worldwide movement that burst upon the political scene late in 1999; and it provides a valuable and previously unavailable avenue for dissemination of anticorporate ideas. Rather than dying—as those who pen its obituaries fervently wish—the anticorporate movement in the heart of Empire is instead assuming new forms and finding new ways to promulgate its message.

This article focuses on the various examples of anarchist violence, from terrorist action in the 1890s to anonymous bombs of the first decade of the twentieth century; from the tyranny of the Star pistol in the 1920s to the uprisings and revolutionary terror of the Second Republic and the Civil War. What follows is a story that is contradictory, heroic, and menacing.

The picture has prevailed in Spanish social history of a revolutionary, insurrectional peasantry in the south of the country. Aided by literary or artistic analyses, this article shows the existence, in the Spanish north during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, of a counter-model consisting of small landowners. This model was based on real facts, such as the permanence of small and medium land properties, the preservation of the commons, and the stability of leaseholds, all of which contributed to its literary idealization.

However, a more profound and detailed analysis uncovers the existence of other types of conflicts which are different from the large unionized demonstrations of the Andalusian south. In fact, conflict arose in the north with respect to leaseholds and surpluses of milk, cider, or sugar beet. Old emblems of peaceful peasant life such as popular festivities were tainted with criminality, as well as with “urban” and “industrial” delinquency and the old systems of communal solidarity were redefined, which forced political bargaining in local and municipal life.

The historical circumstances which led to the end of the indentured labor trade suggest that its abolition was only partially the result of humanitarian concern for the welfare of workers. It was the development of nationalism, both in sending and receiving countries, that prompted a rethinking of the racialized labor organization of indenture. In Australia, the introduction of the White Australia policy in 1901, with its restrictions on non-white immigration and employment, is usually thought to coincide with the abolition of the indentured labor trade. But the Australian pearl-shelling industry continued to employ indentured Asian workers up until the 1970s. This case study extends the historical analysis of indenture well beyond its supposed international abolition. In doing so, it demonstrates a degree of continuity of colonial thought and practice which persisted in the face of global decolonization.

As part of the global circulation of capital and labor in the early twentieth century, labor and left activists traveled throughout the Pacific Rim. Highlighting the biographical and political journeys of two important left labor agitators of the period, Patrick Hickey and J. B. King, this essay considers the role of the agitator and the meaning of the left for the mobilization of working people during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Hickey and King both had early experiences with radical unions in North America, Hickey with the Western Federation of Miners in Utah and King with the Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia. Their paths intersected in the formation of the left Federation of Labour (the “Red Feds”) in New Zealand. Both went on to play significant roles in Australian left labor circles in the years before, during, and after the First World War. Diverging over strategy and tactics during this time, Hickey became involved with the Labor Party of Australia and King eventually joined the Communist Party of Australia. Their biographical and political journeys reveal significant insights into the splits within the left and the public role of left labor agitators in the Pacific Rim during this period.

From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement of, effective protective legislation across the relevant market, then there is little basically new in the organization of garment production and the unrelenting pressures on its workers. Essential characteristics of sweated labor in the industry result from structural characteristics which have remained and are only ameliorated by strong unions, public concern for the conditions of labor, and enforced social regulation. While it has often seemed to be an outlier in its exploitative norms, the idea that garment work is totally unique in the flexibility it demands, the excesses and abuses inherent in the contracting system with its pressures to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing fashion, its production of a labor-intensive product not easily mechanized, and its ability to seek out and control a vulnerable labor force is a misjudgment. It is rather an industry which represents an extreme but not a different form of the way labor markets operate. It is not a vanishing past but a worrisome globalized future of just-in-time production and multisourced internationalized commodity chain organization of production which should be worrying.

On 17–18 April 2004, the Midwest Labor and Working-Class History Colloquium (MLWCH) met at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Formed in 1994, MLWCH is a consortium of graduate students and faculty connected to the Midwest either through research interest or institutional affiliation. MLWCH exists to foster scholarly exchange amongst the field's future and current practitioners, provide an informal setting for students to present and receive feedback on their research, and nurture the collegial relationships that are essential to the study of history. This year's colloquium brought together eighteen graduate students and featured three events: an open forum on the question “Is it Labor or Working-Class History?” two roundtable discussions on participants' research, and a faculty-led roundtable on professional development.

Would the existing powerlessness of American unions be much different had organized labor not been the focus of cold-war repression in the late 1940s and 1950s? How did workers experience the anticommunist upsurge and reshape their political alliances in light of what some have called America's darkest political hour? American Labor and the Cold War is a collection of smart and challenging essays that examine the impact of cold war politics on organized labor and the labor-left. The authors explore the historical impact of the cold war and the constraints placed on working class political power in the United States immediately following the Second World War. They argue that the cold war on labor reflected a process that was driven by state-organized repressive measures that were sustained by regional political-cultural traditions and in some cases high levels of working-class conservatism. The essays highlight the efforts of conservative labor leaders to take control of left-led unions, purging Communist Party (CP) activists and their allies and the ways in which communists sought to resist the radical right-wing movement in their unions and surrounding communities.

Wendell Pritchett challenges popular and scholarly images of the modern ghetto by highlighting Brownsville's history as a working-class neighborhood. This area of East Brooklyn underwent significant racial change, beginning the twentieth century as a largely white, Jewish neighborhood. Brownsville's black and Latino populations grew rapidly in the postwar years. Between 1940 and 1970, the population switched from eighty-five percent white to ninety-five percent black and Latino. Throughout these decades, however, this remained a home for New York's changing working classes. Brownsville residents, generally from the lower tiers of the city's working class, shared a history of political and economic marginalization. The neighborhood's later residents faced greater obstacles, as a result of racism, public policy, and economic change. Pritchett's fine study chronicles these changes and continuities and emphasizes white and black residents' unending efforts to secure needed resources and power.

On page 183, Peter Linebaugh is incorrectly given La Roche College as an institutional affiliation; his affiliation should read University of Toledo.