Department of Politics
Wake Forest University
POLITICS 292
COMPARATIVE LABOR MOVEMENTS:
ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENTS
Fall 2000 Dr David Coates
Tribble Hall C316 Office: Tribble A308
Monday 2.00-4.30 Office Hour: Wednesday 2.30-4.00
E mail:
Phone: 758 3544
Course Description and Objectives
In this senior seminar we will explore the responses made by major labor movements to the arrival and development of industrial capitalism from the middle of the nineteenth century. This will give us an opportunity to deepen our political science by the addition of systematic labor history, and to widen our conventional frameworks of analysis by focusing on the theory and practice of a complex social category – the industrial working class – whose experience, institutions and politics is characteristically either absent or marginal to the concerns of mainstream political science. In the process we will also strengthen your capacity for researching and writing at length, developing in you a set of skills that are capable of being transferred to any research topic, skills that should then stand you in good stead in your later academic/business/political careers.
During the course of 14 meetings we will examine the ‘take off’ of labor movements in a number of key economies in Europe and North America. We will explore the clash of political alternatives canvassed within those labor movements in their early years, and see how and why – in different labor movements at different moments – one or another of those alternatives established a position of dominance. Since many of those political alternatives saw themselves as socialist in some form, we will be particularly exercised by the nature of left-wing politics in these early proletariats, asking why reformist political formations prevailed in some labor movements, why revolutionary parties prevailed in others, and why non-socialist forms of politics eventually won out in the United States. We will then trace the trajectory of each dominant form of working class politics through the twentieth century – looking in turn at the communist, social democratic and liberal democratic parties that drew on working class support in Western Europe and North America – before concluding with an analysis of the present impasse of each of those traditions in turn. We will begin by asking ‘what form did working class politics initially take’ and we will end by asking if ‘the age of working class politics is now over’.
Course Format and Organization
The course will be delivered in a series of long afternoon seminars, each divided into two (with, of course, a break for air and refreshments). Five of those sessions will be student-led, the rest tutor-led. The student-led sessions will be used for the presentation and refinement of first plans and then initial drafts of the research paper each of you will write as the key element of your assessment for this course. The tutor-led sessions will be used to introduce to bodies of theoretical and historical material whose content should ultimately inform (and improve) the research papers that you write. Each of the tutor-led sessions will require a limited amount of prior reading; with the rest of the reading (and subsequent writing) that you do being – from the outset of the course – individually tailored to the requirements of your particular research paper. The choice of research topic is, therefore, one of the early and vital tasks each of you will have to complete, in liaison with me.
As background to the course as a whole, please read as early as you can the parts of the following texts that are most germane to your likely chosen research topic. Read as much as you can of each, subject to other pressures of work and time, to deepen your own knowledge of the broad sweep of working class history and politics in Europe and North America. The texts are
D. Geary (ed), Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe since 1914
S. Salter and J. Stevenson, The Working Class and Politics in Europe and America 1929-1945
S. Berger and D. Broughton The Force of Labour; the Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century
M. Davies Prisoners of the American Dream
D. Sassoon One Hundred Years of Socialism
The list of research topics for a course such as this is potentially endless. The only constraint, beyond that of viability (given the limited time, space and research data available) is one of linkage. In making your choice, you must demonstrate some connection between the topic chosen and themes raised in the course. As a result you might want to explore in more detail issues explicitly raised in the tutor-led sessions: how to theorise the working class, the impact of capitalist labor processes on proletarian politics, why socialist parties failed to establish themselves in the US, the nature of Eurocommunism, the character of ‘the third way’ and so on. Or you might want to go beyond the course: to explore other labor movements (Japan, Brazil, South Korea, South Africa or wherever), or look at gender issues within past or present labor politics, the politics of workers affected by racism, trade union politics (either in general, or in a particular labor movement), the relationship between rural and urban change and unrest in particular labor movements, or a particular period/set of events (the New Deal, Labor and the Vietnam War). There are many working classes to chose from, and much politics on which to draw. So the choice is yours. Our task in weeks 1 and 2 is to agree a broad research area that both meets your interests and stays within the parameters set. Your task by weeks 4 and 5 is then to hone that area down into a viable research topic, suitably planned; and by weeks 10-12 to draft at least part of your answer to the research question you have set yourself.
Course Requirements and Assessment
Class Participation: Everyone will be expected to attend all sessions, and to arrive at each session having already completed the appropriate set reading, ready to participate in discussions and work exercises. If this isn’t possible for any particular session, please e mail me to explain why.
Research Paper: Everyone will be expected (1) to select a research topic, and to clear that topic with me, within the first two weeks of the course. In individual sessions, we will then agree a preliminary book list and broad research agenda. (2) Everyone will then be expected to develop an extensive plan of their research topic, and to present that plan for discussion by the whole class during weeks 5 and 6 of the course. (3) Everyone will be expected subsequently to present a first draft of their research paper for discussion by the whole class during weeks 10-12 of the course. (4) In addition, each member of the class will be appointed as mentor to a colleague; and, as mentor, will be expected to lead the discussion of the research plan (in weeks 5 or 6) and of the first draft (in weeks 10,11 or 12).
The research plan should be between 2 and 4 pages in length, well laid out with an attached bibliography. The first draft can still be in plan form, or consist of a completed section plus planning on the rest, and should be at least 4000 words in length overall. The final research paper should be between 10,000 and 12,000 words in length; and its content should show some engagement with at least one of the bodies of material/sets of issues discussed during the tutor-led class sessions. The mentor should provide a five minute structured critique of the plan, and later of the first draft, to open a class discussion that will normally last 15 minutes per plan/draft.
Assessment: The plan of the research paper will be graded, as will the first draft, the final version, and your overall class participation and mentoring. 15% of the grade will accrue to the plan; 15% of the grade will accrue to the first draft; 60% of the grade will accrue to the final research paper; and 10% of the grade will be awarded for participation and mentoring.
David Coates
Course Timetable
Session Date Topic
1. 9. 4.2000 The ‘take off’ of labor movements
2. 9. 11.2000 The ‘proletarian experience’ then and now
3. 9. 18.2000 Theorising and studying the working class
4. 9. 25.2000 Early labor movements: UK and US
5. 10. 2.2000 Discussion of research paper plans
6. 10. 9.2000 Discussion of research paper plans
7. 10.16.2000 Early labor movements: Germany and Russia
8. 10.23.2000 Party-class dynamics in theory and practice
9. 10.30.2000 The rise and fall of communist parties
10. 11. 6.2000 Discussion of research paper drafts
11. 11.13.2000 Discussion of research paper drafts
12. 11.20.2000 Discussion of research paper drafts
13. 11.27.2000 Twentieth century labor: UK and US
14. 12. 4.2000 Labor at the Millennium
Research Area to be agreed by 5.00 pm on 9.15.2000
Research Paper to be submitted by 5.00 pm on 12.8.2000
Class Topics
Session 1: The ‘take-off’ of labor movements
This session has two rather large tasks to complete. One is to paint the broad picture, of the patterning of working class politics over time. The other is to begin to isolate strategies for explaining that patterning. We will survey working class political history in Western Europe and North America since about 1850. We will build our first list of explanatory variables; and we will also discuss how to design and deliver a research paper of 10-12,000 words.
Set reading: One of the following. Chapter 1 or Chapter 9 of I. Katznelson and A. Zolberg (eds), Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States; or J. Cronin, ‘Neither exceptional nor peculiar: towards the comparative study of labor in advanced society’, International Review of Social History, vol. 38 (1993).
Session 2: The ‘proletarian experience’ then and now
In this session we need to begin to probe behind the politics, to locate the material and social experiences that shape working class life and interests. We will do that by comparing proletarian experience in early capitalism with working class life in contemporary advanced capitalisms, and by exploring the degree to which those early proletarian experiences are now reappearing in the lives of workers in newly industrializing economies across the globe. At the heart of our discussion will be literatures concerned with the ‘labor process’ central to the accumulation of capital both now and then.
Set reading: H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The degradation of work in the twentieth century (chapters 1,9,17,20); and one of the following: T. Elger, ‘Braverman, capital accumulation and deskilling’, in S. Woods (ed), The Degradation of Work; R. Price, ‘Theories of labor process formation’, Journal of Social History (Fall, 1984); R. Price, ‘The labour process and labour history’, Social History vol. 8(1983); or T. Nichols, ‘The Capitalist Labour Process’, part 1 of his Capital and Labour.
Session 3: Theorizing and studying the working class
Thus far we will have used the term ‘working class’ without seeking precisely to define it. Now is our conceptual and theoretical moment. We will examine the theoretical disputes around two key issues: what/whom are the working class; and how are working classes best to be recognised and explored. The first dispute is largely one between Weberian and Marxist scholarship, the second one between generations of Marxist labor historians. We will look at both.
Set reading: E.P.Thompson, ‘The pecularities of the English’, in his The Poverty of Theory; P. Anderson, the chapter on ‘agency’ in his Arguments within English Marxism; and either chapter 2 of R. Crompton, Class and Stratification or J. Scott ‘The question of the working class’, chapter 8 of his Stratification and Power. If you have time, see also D. Coates, ‘Roger Scruton and the New Left’, in N. Kirk (ed), Social Class and Marxism
Session 4: Labor movements in ‘first wave’ capitalisms: the UK and US
We have two large tasks here. One is to fill in our own understanding of the pre-1920 history of the first two major labor movements, and to spot their similarities and differences. The second is to explore and explain the relative weakness of radical proletarian parties within each. This second task will (in this session) largely be organized around the question of ‘the failure of socialism in the United States’. The broader conservatism of UK labor will be handled later, in Session 8
Set reading: R.Looker and D. Coates, ‘The state and the working class in 19th century Europe’, in J. Anderson (ed), The Rise of the Modern State; E. Hobsbawm, ‘The Making of the Working Class 1870-1914’, chapter 11 of his Labouring Men; and one of M. Davies, Prisoners of the American Dream, pp. 3-51; K. Voss, The Making of US Exceptionalism: the Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 1-12, 231-249; I. Katznelson, ‘Working class formation and US exceptionalism, yet again’, pp. 36-55 of R. Halpern and J. Morris, American Exceptionalism? US working class formation in international context; or pp. 197-277 of I. Katznelson and A. Zolberg (eds), Working Class Formation.
Session 7: Labor movements in ‘second wave’ capitalisms: Germany and Russia
This is our chance to explore the big issues of the Second International, issues which threw a huge shadow down the twentieth century. We will look at the character of German Social Democracy, the divisions within it, and its failure successfully to confront fascism. And we will look at the sources of revolutionary upheaval in Russia, and examine the theory and practice of Bolshevism.