Historiography
Historiography of Work
The history of labor and workers has been an incredibly productive field. From foundational works to the most recent scholarship, this list collects the best academic writings on workers and the history of labor. It also includes award-winning books, including winners of the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Click on Summary for an annotated description of the work, and use the review link to read an in-depth review.
Book links are to Amazon. A percentage of the purchase price will be donated to labor organizations.
✭ denotes award-winning works
FOUNDATIONAL WORKS
Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. 1884.
In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, nineteenth century economic theorist Friedrich Engels traces early human history from the emergency of the state to the rise of a class society based on private property. Engels concludes that the state will inevitably fall, leaving a classless society. Lenin described Engels’s book as “one of the fundamental works of modern socialism.”
Read an in-depth review of Engels’s work.
Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. 1867.
In Das Kapital, nineteenth-century economist and philosopher Karl Marx critiques the capitalist system. His historical and sociological approach argues that workers are exploited by capitalist modes of production, and concludes that the system is unstable and will fall in the future. Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism has been incredibly influential, particularly for supporters of communism and socialism.
Read an in-depth review of Marx’s work.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 1944.
Hungarian-American political economist Karl Polanyi explores the rise of the market economy in his book The Great Transformation. Polanyi argues that the “market society” intertwined economy and the state. This is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon for Polanyi, but a political and social construct. This distinguishes Polanyi from his contemporary theorists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, because for Polanyi the intertwined nature of the market economy and the nation-state meant that neither could provide a solution to modern economic problems.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776.
Eighteenth-century Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith laid out his theory behind national wealth in Wealth of Nations. Considered a fundamental work in classical economics, Smith critiques his rival mercantilists and physiocrats by promoting the idea that national wealth must be understood in terms of the productivity of labor and the proportion of laborers who are usefully employed. A nation’s wealth, for Smith, must be understood in per capita terms, a concept that has carried to the modern day. Today, Smith is known as the father of modern capitalism.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1963.
English historian E.P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class to capture the experience of English artisan and working class society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Thompson’s goal, declared in his preface, was “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘Utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Thompson’s social history has been enormously influential and popular.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905.
German economic sociologist Max Weber puts forth his theory of for the rise of capitalism in Northern Europe in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber concludes that the Protestant work ethic was a major force in the emergence of modern capitalism. Weber specifically points to the Calvinist belief in predestination, which drove believers to use worldly success as a proxy for salvation, thus interpreting economic success as a sign of Godly favor. Weber’s theory has been influential, particularly for understanding the link between religion and economics.
WOMEN AND GENDER
✭ Harris, LaShawn. Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy.University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Black women used the underground economy to rise in early twentieth century New York City, LaShawn Harris argues in Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners. Using a range of sources, from police records to newspaper accounts as well as literature, Harris reconstructs the daily life of poor, working-class women of color, who have often been ignored in traditional labor histories. Harris shows both the opportunities and dangers of the economic survival strategies used by urban black women.
Winner of the 2017 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Woloch, Nancy. A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s-1990s. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Protective legislation for American women workers had harsh consequences, according to Nancy Woloch’s book A Class by Herself. These law, promoted in the early twentieth century, provoked a constitutional debate and hampered gender equality, even while they also set precedents that led to current labor laws. Woloch’s meticulous book speaks to broad themes about gender and labor in the twentieth century.
Winner of the 2016 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Basso, Matthew L. Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe dominate discussions of World War II, but Matthew Basso introduces Joe Copper, the white, working-class laborer who fought on the homefront. Basso argues that the experience of these workers, driven by a masculine ideology formed in the decades before the war, shaped the white ethnic racial identity that would drive the postwar period. Meet Joe Copper brings together class and gender in an important examination of working-class values.
Winner of the 2014 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge University Press, 2008
The planter household was a workplace, according to Out of the House of Bondage, and as such it had complicated labor and class relations in addition to gender and race relations. Thavolia Glymph reconstructs the day-to-day struggles between black and white women to critique how their relationship, and the perception of the relationship, changed with emancipation. Glymph critiques patriarchy and domesticity in her analysis of gender and slavery in the South.
Winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Gendering Labor History. University of Illinois Press, 2007.
✭ MacLean, Nancy. Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Harvard University Press, 2006.
In Freedom is Not Enough, Nancy MacLean argues that jobs play a fundamental role in the struggle for equality. Full citizenship, MacLean concludes, was tied with job opportunities. Since the 1950s, women and people of color have fought against their exclusion from high-paying jobs, opening the workplace and making inclusion an American value. MacLean explores the achievements and limits of the movement to make U.S. workplaces more diverse.
Winner of the 2007 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Cobble, Dorothy Sue. The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004.
By looking at the forgotten feminism of working women from the 1930s to the 1980s, The Other Women’s Movement integrates women and gender into twentieth century labor history. From union halls and factory floors to telephone operators and airline hostesses, Dorothy Sue Cobble constructs the ideas that inspired women reformers and their successful negotiations with employers and the state. Rather than arguing for an identical standard for men and women, these labor reformers argued that gender differences should be accommodated. Drawing on original research in union, government, and policy makers’ records, The Other Women’s Movement blends the history of labor and politics with women’s history.
Winner of the 2005 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ideas about fairness shaped women’s experience in the workforce in the twentieth century, argues influential historian of labor and gender Alice Kessler-Harris. Her book explores changing ideals of fairness from the 1920s to the 1970s, showing how deeply embedded notions of gender shaped even seemingly neutral social legislation. In consequence, women’s freedom and equality remained limited until the 1960s and 1970s, when the “gendered imagination” began to slowly shift.
Winner of the 2002 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Chojnacka, Monica. Working Women of Early Modern Venice. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press, 1999.
✭ Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the U.S. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Eileen Boris challenges the divide between the home and the world of work. Tracing the evolution of homeworking from the 1870s to the 1990s, Home to Work restores the voices of homeworking women to the debate over their labor. Addressing New York cigarmakers trying to limit homework competition to New Deal prohibitions on homework, Boris makes the visibility of workers who happen to function in the home a central component in modern labor struggles.
Winner of the 1994 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II. University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
✭ Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. Vintage Books, 1986.
✭ Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. Oxford University Press, 1982.
✭ Katzman, David M. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Federici, Silvia. “Wages Against Housework.” Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975.
Silvia Federici’s 1975 “Wages Against Housework” examines the social consequences of unpaid domestic labor. For Federici, housework is a pervasive manipulation against women and the working class, by devaluing the contribution of women. She also contends that women are naturalized to believe that unpaid work, including childcare, is a feminine virtue.
Read an in-depth review of Federici’s work.
RACE AND LABOR
✭ Harris, LaShawn. Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy. University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Black women used the underground economy to rise in early twentieth century New York City, LaShawn Harris argues in Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners. Using a range of sources, from police records to newspaper accounts as well as literature, Harris reconstructs the daily life of poor, working-class women of color, who have often been ignored in traditional labor histories. Harris shows both the opportunities and dangers of the economic survival strategies used by urban black women.
Winner of the 2017 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Labor coercion persisted in the years after slavery, Talitha LeFlouria argues in Chained in Silence. LeFlouria looks at the convict leasing system that emerged in Georgia in 1868, which forced black women to labor in camps and factories. LeFlouria uses oral history sources and medical records to argue that these inmates were physically and sexually exploited, while their skilled labor was used to modernize the South.
Winner of the 2016 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Norrgard, Chantal. Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
✭ Phillips, Kimberley. War! What Is It Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq. University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Black Americans earned the “right to fight” in 1948, but the struggle for equal citizenship continued throughout the postwar period. Black soldiers found themselves torn between a civil rights movement that championed the integration of the military and an anti-war movement that claimed war held back economic and social justice. In War! What Is It Good For? Kimberley Phillips charts the relationship between federal desegregation of the military and continuing racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Her work uses a race and class perspective to understand the black experience in postwar America.
Winner of the 2013 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge University Press, 2008
The planter household was a workplace, according to Out of the House of Bondage, and as such it had complicated labor and class relations in addition to gender and race relations. Thavolia Glymph reconstructs the day-to-day struggles between black and white women to critique how their relationship, and the perception of the relationship, changed with emancipation. Glymph critiques patriarchy and domesticity in her analysis of gender and slavery in the South.
Winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Green, Laurie B. Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Battling the Plantation Mentality uses the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike to understand the black freedom movement. Green argues that the civil rights movement had to battle an ongoing “plantation mentality” based on race, gender, and power rooted in slavery. The movement, then, was never just about constitutional rights but also social and human rights. By examining the grassroots level and looking at organized labor in Memphis, Green makes important contributions to the labor historiography of race, gender, and class.
Winner of the 2008 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Harvard University Press, 2007.
✭ MacLean, Nancy. Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Harvard University Press, 2006.
In Freedom is Not Enough, Nancy MacLean argues that jobs play a fundamental role in the struggle for equality. Full citizenship, MacLean concludes, was tied with job opportunities. Since the 1950s, women and people of color have fought against their exclusion from high-paying jobs, opening the workplace and making inclusion an American value. MacLean explores the achievements and limits of the movement to make U.S. workplaces more diverse.
Winner of the 2007 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. Oxford University Press, 2006.
✭ Gregory, James N. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
✭ Korstad, Robert Rodgers. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
✭ Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
✭ Hunter, Tera. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Harvard University Press, 1997.
✭ Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press, 1996.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1991.
✭ Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. Vintage Books, 1986.
✭ Meier, August and Elliott Rudwick. Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW. University of Michigan Press, 1979.
WORKERS’ MOVEMENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS
✭ Murphy, Ryan Patrick. Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice. Temple, 2016.
✭ Garcia, Matt. From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement. University of California Press, 2012.
Matt Garcia follows the rise and fall of the Farm Worker Movement under the leadership of Cesar Chavez. From the Jaws of Victory shows how the UFW was a victim of its own success, as the grape boycott became the defining feature of the movement. Using oral history sources, Garcia charts the “hope, triumph, and disappointment” that have shaped modern social justice movements.
Winner of the 2013 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
✭ Lichtenstein, Nelson. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton University Press, 2002.
✭ McCartin, Joseph A. Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921. University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
✭ Zieger, Robert. The CIO, 1935-1955. University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Zieger, Robert. American Workers, American Unions. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (4th ed., 2014)
✭ Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. Cornell University Press, 1993.
✭ Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton University Press, 1984.
✭ Zieger, Robert. Rebuilding the Pulp and Paper Workers’ Union, 1933-1941. University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
✭ Licht, Walter. Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton University Press, 1983.
GOVERNMENT AND LABOR RELATIONS
✭ Lipman, Jana K. Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution. University of California Press, 2008.
✭ Lichtenstein, Nelson. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton University Press, 2002.
Sanders, Elizabeth. The Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
✭ Jacoby, Sanford M. Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal. Princeton University Press, 1997.
✭ Keyssar, Alexander. Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
✭ Harris, Howell John. The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s. University of Wisconsin Madison Press, 1982.
✭ Gross, James A. The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947. State University of New York Press, 1981.
TRADES AND INDUSTRIES
✭ Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Knopf, 2015.
Cotton and capitalism were intertwined from the start, Sven Beckert argues, and the mix ushered in the global world of capitalist wealth and inequality. Beckert weaves the history of slaves, mill workers, and sharecroppers into his assessment of cotton, one of the most lucrative capitalist commodities after the introduction of industrial manufacturing. Beckert places labor history at the center of the history of capitalism in this major work.
Winner of the 2016 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History; Pulitzer Prize finalist.
✭ Peter Way. Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
✭ Flamming, Douglass. Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
✭ Freeman, Joshua. In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966. Oxford University Press, 1989.
✭ Scranton, Philip. Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1855-1941. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
✭ Derickson, Alan. Workers’ Health, Workers’ Democracy: The Western Miners Struggle, 1891-1925. Cornell University Press, 1989.
✭ Dowd, Jacquelyn, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. Hill and Wang, 1978.
SLAVERY AND THE WORKING POOR
✭ Smith, Stacey L. Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. University of North Carolina Press, 2014
✭ Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press, 2009
The low-end labor market in nineteenth century Baltimore included enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers. Rockman reconstructs the perspectives of this diverse workforce to explore how race, sex, nativity, and legal status granted economic opportunities or left workers vulnerable. Scraping By argues that these unskilled laborers helped drive the market revolution and gave birth to the American working class.
Winner of the 2010 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. Oxford University Press, 2006.
✭ Higbie, Frank Tobias. Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930. University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Katz, Michael. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. Pantheon Books, 1989.
INDUSTRIALISM AND INDUSTRIAL WORKERS
✭ Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie. University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Callahan Jr., Richard J., Kathryn Lofton, and Chad E. Seales. “Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 78, no. 1 (Mar. 2010), pp. 1- 39.
✭ Schmidt, James D. Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
The Appalachian South put numerous children to work in the nineteenth century, and many of those child workers promoted an “industrial childhood.” In Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor, James Schmidt uses litigation to explain how child labor was first normalized and then forbidden around the turn of the twentieth century. According to Schmidt, young workers tried to negotiate safe workplaces, setting themselves at odds with the child labor reform movement. Yet through court battles, these child workers slowly changed their perception of their own labor.
Winner of the 2011 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Brody, David. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle. Oxford University Press, 1980
✭ Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge University Press, 1990
GLOBAL LABOR HISTORY
✭ Hahamovitch, Cindy. No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Guestworker programs have been used since the nineteenth century to manage migration. No Man’s Land looks at the ways guestworker programs have created a particularly vulnerable group of workers with few rights. Hahamovitch focuses on the history of Jamaican guestworkers under the American H2 program, which has brought hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans to the United States since World War II. State regulation of labor migration, according to Hahamovitch, produced working conditions that were harmful to all workers, particularly guestworkers who labored under the constant threat of deportation.
Winner of the 2012 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History.
Chomsky, Aviva. Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. Duke University Press, 2008.
Silver, Beverly J. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
✭ Cowie, Jefferson. Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. The New Press, 2001.
Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LABOR HISTORY
Cornell, Drucilla. “Can There Be a People’s Commons?: The Significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital,” in The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis, edited by Roger Berkowitz and Taun Toay. New York: Fordham U. Press, 2012.
In her analysis of apartheid in South Africa, philosopher Drucilla Cornell explores the long-lasting effects of imperialism and capitalism in order to look for spaces of resistance to those forces. Cornell suggests that fostering communal forms of resistance can counter the harmful effects of exploitative capitalism. This article provides an in-depth look at the ways exploitative systems shape and transform societies.
Read an in-depth review of “Can There Be a People’s Commons?“
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici tells the sweeping story of how the proletariat came to exist as an exploited and exploitable class. Federici begins with medieval workers’ revolts and masterfully connects the witch trials to the rise of capitalism. For Federici, “capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism.” (17) In other words, capitalism rose by dividing those at the bottom along lines of gender and race.
Read an in-depth review of Caliban and the Witch.
Illich, Ivan. The Right to Useful Unemployment. London: Marion Boyars, 1978.
Philosopher Ivan Illich defines poverty as the inability to act autonomously. Illich also targets consumerism for harming individual and communal self-sufficiency. By redefining labor as the ability to act effectively and poverty as a circumstance in which labor is no longer meaningful or useful, Illich positions himself outside of both capitalist and Marxist economic orthodoxy.
Read an in-depth review of The Right to Useful Unemployment.
Harvey, David. “The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis this Time,” The American Sociological Association Meeting, Atlanta, GA, August 16th, 2010.
Leon, Luis D. The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez. University of California Press, 2014.
O’Connor, James. “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism vol. 1, no. 1 (1988), pp. 11-38.
Spence, Martin. “Capital Against Nature,” Capital & Class, vol. 24, no. 3 (2000), pp. 81-110.
Tronti, Mario. “Workerism and Politics,” Historical Materialism vol. 18 (2010), pp. 186–189.
In this 2006 lecture, Italian philosopher Mario Tronti provides a brief explanation of the theory of workerism, which he helped develop in the 1960s. Tronti also links workerism to twenty-first century changes to the conditions of work, provocatively asking if the working class still exists.
Read an in-depth review of “Workerism and Politics.”
Tronti, Mario. “The Struggle Against Labor,” in Operai e Capitale “Workers and Capital”, Einaudi, Turin, 1966.
In his 1966 book Operai e Capitale, Italian philosopher Mario Tronti argues that revolution is only possible when the working class understands the true conditions of its existence. As is central in Tronti’s work, capitalism and workers cannot be understood outside of a political framework. Tronti argues that it is only by denying its productive force through violence that the working class can transform itself into a true political power.
Read an in-depth review of “The Struggle Against Labor.“
Tronti, Mario. “The Strategy of Refusal,” in Operai e Capitale “Workers and Capital”, Einaudi, Turin, 1966, pp. 234-252.
Italian philosopher Mario Tronti’s 1966 Operai e Capitale lays out Tronti’s theory on the power of the working class. In “The Strategy of Refusal,” Tronti pushes for a new organizing principle for workers’ movements, which will center not on collaboration, which denies workers their inherent power, but antagonism in the form of refusal. Workers, Tronti argues, are the true ruling class, and it is only by building political autonomy that they can achieve their aims.
Read an in-depth review of “The Strategy of Refusal.“
CHRONOLOGICAL
ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
Epstein, Steven A. Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe. University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Whyte, Ian D. Scotland Before the Industrial Revolution: An Economic and Social History, c. 1050-c. 1750. Longman, 1995.
EARLY MODERN
Allen, Aaron. “Conquering the Suburbs: Politics and Work in Early Modern Edinburgh,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 37, no. 3 (2011), pp. 423-443.
Chojnacka, Monica. Working Women of Early Modern Venice. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Cohn, Samuel. The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence. Academic Press, 1980.
Epstein, S.R. and Maartyn Prak, eds. Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Foyster, Elizabeth and Christopher Whatley, eds. A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600-1800. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Gibson, A.J.S., and T.C. Smout. Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550-1780. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Fraser, W. Hamish. Conflict and Class: Scottish Workers 1700-1838. John Donald, 1988.
Sanderson, Elizabeth C. Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh. Macmillan, 1996.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1963.
NINETEENTH CENTURY
✭ Peter Way. Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
✭ Licht, Walter. Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton University Press, 1983.
Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. Hill and Wang, 1978.
EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press, 1999.
✭ McCartin, Joseph A. Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921. University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
✭ Derickson, Alan. Workers’ Health, Workers’ Democracy: The Western Miners Struggle, 1891-1925. Cornell University Press, 1989.
✭ Freeman, Joshua. In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966. Oxford University Press, 1989.
✭ Zieger, Robert. Rebuilding the Pulp and Paper Workers’ Union, 1933-1941. University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
✭ Gross, James A. The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947. State University of New York Press, 1981.
LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
✭ Jacoby, Sanford M. Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal. Princeton University Press, 1997.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY