By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialisttradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators tookapocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeplydivided between the advocates of change (“New Times”required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politicscould be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By themid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present thiscontemporary transformation not as the “death ofclass,” but as the passing of one particular type ofclass society, one marked by the process of working-class formationbetween the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment,reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwarsettlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attackon Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, theunity of the working class ceased to be available in the old andwell-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While onedominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic maleproletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, withtheir associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration),another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place(predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types ofpublic employment). But the operative unity of this new working-classaggregation—its active agency as an organized politicalpresence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the politicalefficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collectivepolitical agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emergingconditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of thetwenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put backtogether again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old hasbeen dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decompositionis yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into anew and coherently shaped form.

Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspectiveà la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much strongeremphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson.Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing thedynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied localcontexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feedthese movements and alliances. Class is thus reduced to a microheuristic ofhidden injuries and subaltern identities. However, the concept of social classcan only help to articulate a position beyond formal institutionalism and theclass language of bipolarity when it is wedded to a nonreductionist,nonessentialist, and nonfinalist theory of capitalism. Seen from thisperspective, capitalism is a worldwide and world- embedded process of combinedand uneven development that constantly assembles and disassembles the materialsfrom which human communities are made. In short, if we want to rethink class inplace, we need to rethink capitalism in space.

Responding to the triumph of the right during the 1980s, Eley and Nieldconclude that traditional concepts of class are no longer workable and need amajor overhauling. Unfortunately, they mischaracterize the literature, offerlittle that could refine the debates, and ignore the important role ofcapitalism in the last two decades.

The experience of socialist countries, which Geoff Eley and Keith Nielddo not address, raises fundamental questions about their argument. Class-basedthinking and rhetoric under Soviet socialism served as a weapon in the hands ofthe authorities, not as a vehicle for critical analysis, let alone for humanemancipation. Before 1917, class-based ways of looking at the world presentedenormous, indeed insurmountable obstacles for a liberal-based politics. Eley andNield, while embracing liberalism, want to retain a role for class, but theirvague proposals are almost exclusively rooted in historiographical polemics ofoverblown significance.

In my comment I raise two main questions about the Eley/Nield essay.First, I express some doubts about whether the issues discussed in their essaycan be unproblematically transposed to historiographical debates in areas beyondWestern Europe and North America. Certain themes, such as the need toreemphasize the political, are hardly pressing given the continual emphasis onpolitics and the state in Latin American labor history. Closely related to this,I question whether the state of gender studies within labor history can be used,in the way these authors seem to be doing, as a barometer of the sophisticationand vitality of labor and working-class history. Despite recognizing thetremendous contribution of gendered approaches to labor history, I expressdoubts about its ability to help us rethink the category of class, and evenexpress some concern that it might occlude careful consideration of classidentities. Instead, pointing to two pathbreaking works in Latin American laborhistory, I argue that the types of questions we ask about class, and primarilyabout class, can provide the key to innovative scholarship about workers even ifquestions such as gender or ethnicity go unexamined. Finally, I point out thatclass will only be a vital category of analysis if it is recognized not simplyas “useful,” but as forming a basis for genuinely creative andinnovative historical studies.

The essay focuses on two points: First, Eley and Nield's emphasison micropolitics, discourse, and diverse forms of affinity is stimulating andessential but inadequate to the task of understanding when and how the categoryof working class is useful. Such a task also requires nuanced analysis ofinteractions on a large scale and at long distance, of control of materialresources, and of centralizing institutions. Second, their identity-centeredvision of politics is too constraining to make clear the multiple forms ofpolitical imagination, connection, and mobilization or to figure out the extentas well as the limits of power.

Geoff Eley's and Keith Nield's essay is marked by a tensionbetween a desire to update the old social history by detaching it from itsmaterialist assumptions on the one hand and a commitment to continue writingnarratives of working-class political agency on the other. By insisting thatclass is still the best way of analyzing inequality and mobilizing resistance toit, the authors foreclose other possibilities for thinking about contemporarypolitics and for writing critical history. They do not ask the questions thatneed to be asked, which are, What are the operative political categories capableof moving masses of people into agency? and, What terms might be used torepresent inequalities of distribution? These questions don't exclude classbut they don't require it either; they also allow for a more open andprobing approach than is offered by Eley and Nield.

Our principal anxiety about the responses to “Farewell to theWorking Class?” concerns their strangely private character. In themain—the response of Barbara Weinstein excepted—the respondents seemto use the opportunity our article has provided simply to restate some of theirown previous positions. Often they engage neither with the substance of ourarticle nor, equally importantly, with its conciliatory tone. As a result, thechance further to depolemicize these important debates has been lost orotherwise evaded in a variety of reiterations.

This review essay has three aims: First, it presents a critique of thework of those scholars whose “primacy of politics” approach hasposited the fall of class. Second, it reviews a selection of traditional andreworked defenses of class. Third, it indicates some of the fruitful ways inwhich class can be employed in the new millennium.

The eleventh annual conference of the Institute of Contemporary BritishHistory was held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London,July 12–16, 1999. The first day was largely concerned with British Marxistand socialist movements; the second concentrated on the trade unions andcomparative perspectives; the third and fourth days focused on the Labour party;and the conference concluded with a day on the future of the Left. Theconference was male-dominated to about the same proportion as most universitydepartments in Britain, but the age range of participants was broad and involveddoctoral students as well as professors. Only two papers were presented on womenin the labor movement, and although participants addressed issues concerned withidentity and ethnicity, there was nothing directly concerned with imperialism orimmigrants from Britain's former colonies and their British-bornoffspring.

Few nonspecialists know that Belgium was the first continental Europeancountry to benefit and suffer from the Industrial Revolution. Resulting in partfrom this heritage and also building on an even older tradition of textilemanufacturing dating back to the High Middle Ages, Belgium is home to a numberof high-quality museums and institutions showcasing and researching the age ofindustry and its corresponding social movements. Two such organizations are theArchive and Museum of the Socialist Workers Movement (AMSAB) and the Museum ofIndustrial Archaeology and Textiles (MIAT) in the city of Ghent. On April27–30, 1999, these two institutions joined forces to organize aninternational conference on “Gender and Class in the 20th Century.”For several days, participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, GreatBritain, and Belgium gathered to listen and respond to a variety ofpresentations covering the whole range of issues related to the conferencetheme, from sexuality at the point of production to the discursive constructionof poverty as female in the contemporary global age.

Roughly fifty years after the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)purged communist-led unions from its membership, the Southwest Labor StudiesAssociation met in San Francisco from April 29 to May 1, 1999, to reconsider thehistory and implications of this event and, more broadly, to attempt to untanglethe connections between and among McCarthyism, anticommunist liberalism, and thepolitical trajectory of organized labor during the postwar era. Bringingtogether labor activists, union members, and academics, panels considered thesethemes from a number of perspectives and methodological approaches. Papersfocused on such topics as the dynamics of political repression, theeffectiveness of liberal anticommunist politics for organized labor, and therole of the state in shaping the labor movement.

From April 22–25, 1999, the Organization of American Historiansheld its ninety-second annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. The theme was“State and Society in North America: Processes of Social Power and SocialChange.” More than seven hundred scholars were on the program, animpressive showing; and for Canadian historians, whose community iscomparatively small, a source of envy. The participants were, of course,overwhelmingly American and US specialists, but many Canadian colleaguespresented papers or attended, as did other international scholars, includingAmericanists based overseas. While most sessions were held at a downtown hotel,organizers made use of local cultural venues and historic sites. They scheduleda session on the Underground Railroad, for instance, at St. Lawrence Hall, siteof the first meeting of the Colored Free Men in Canada and an antislaverylecture by Frederick Douglas.

I cannot provide a definitive answer to those of us pondering what thebest alternative to capitalism is, but after attending the Pacific NorthwestLabor History Association (PNLHA) Conference in Westminster, British Columbia,over the weekend of May 28–30, 1999, I can tell you that this is certainlya preferable alternative to standard academic conferences. As usual, the PNLHAwas able to produce a cadre of historians (from the trades as well as academia),active unionists, and old-timers whose memories are as tapable as a keg of beer.Although the association designates labor history as its subject, newly electedPresident Ross Rieder likes to say, “History ends the moment beforenow.”

The field of debate over the value of postmodernism for the practice ofhistory by now has become littered with the remains of so many allegedauthorities that even General Douglas Haig might quail before such a prospect.Cynicism is perhaps the best defense against the assaults being launched fromboth sides of this new no man's land. However, every so often, onecontribution to such ritual bloodlettings acts as a flare to reveal theimportance of the issues at stake at the same time as it cogently analyzes thearguments and assumptions underlying the controversy. Of the books and articlesunder review here, perhaps none will be of greater importance to historians thanRichard Price's chapter on “Postmodernism as Theory andHistory” in John Belchem's and Neville Kirk's edited volume,Languages of Labour, which does just that.

Joseph P. Ward's study explores the extensive but largely untappedearly modern records of London's trade guilds (known as livery companies).In many respects, his work is intended as a corrective to previousinterpretations, which followed a time-honored Enlightenment tradition. Thesetended to portray the guilds as hidebound, even retrograde institutions,committed to perpetuating urban oligarchies through various arbitrary controlswhose ultimate effect was merely to dampen economic development. Ward seeks todeflate this commonplace view by revealing the inner workings of the liverycompanies and by examining their role in shaping the lives and identities ofworking Londoners during a period of immense economic and demographicupheaval.

These two books concern major chapters in the history of mass housing:Amsterdam in the first two decades of the century and “Red Vienna.”Both programs were models of state welfare reform, but the political contextsare totally at odds: Amsterdam, with its settlement initiatives achieved througha corporatist compromise among moderate parties, and Vienna, where the SocialDemocrats attempted literally to build socialism in the midst of “a highlycharged, often violent political conflict between left and right” (Blau,13).

The metamorphosis of French syndicalism is easy enough to discern. Atthe end of the nineteenth century, in the Bourses du Travail and theConfédération Générale du Travail (CGT), workerstalked openly about revolution. Employers and the government took themseriously, as they took themselves seriously. After all, French labor had a longand impressive revolutionary pedigree, and throughout the fin de sièclethe working class kept adding to its scars as it continued to engage in frequentand violent confrontations with the forces of order. Thus the proletariat primeditself for the decisive showdown: the general strike, the heroic and largelyspontaneous episode that would finish off bourgeois society and bring workers topower. This was the revolutionary “myth” that propelled the labormovement forward.

The industrial unrest of November–December 1947 constitutes amajor signpost in post-World War Two French society and politics, and, indeed,it has served to indicate the hardening of the then-emerging Cold War divide inand beyond France. Strongest in centers of Parti Communiste Français(PCF) and Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)power, this strike wave symbolized the definitive end of the postliberationtripartite governmental alliance among centrist Catholics, social democrats, andcommunists. The strikers' oftentimes militant activism led hostileobservers to detect insurrectionary aims on the part of blue-collar workers, theCGT, the PCF, and the Kremlin. Because of the obvious centrality of the“red strikes” in late 1947, the paucity of serious analyses is allthe more remarkable.

Transforming Peasants is a collection of papers that focusesprimarily on the Russian peasantry between 1861–1930, with brief foraysinto Poland, the Kirgiz steppe, and Turkestan. Judith Pallot's introductionto the volume is informative and concise. She provides the reader with anexcellent overview of each paper and highlights each author's contributionto the existing debates within the context of Russian and East European peasantstudies. Pallot is well versed in the comparative literature on the study of thepeasantry and notes the degree to which new work on the Russian, Central Asian,and East European peasantries has been influenced, informed, and expanded bythis comparative material. What unifies the various selections inTransforming Peasants is that each author is grappling with the way inwhich the state, intellectuals, or educated society conceived of or“imagined” peasants and how these conceptions, in turn, influenced,shaped, or determined policy aimed at transforming the peasantry.