Activity

The national revolt began at the Pressed Steel (railroad) Car Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel in McKees Rocks, outside of Pittsburgh, where 5,000 workers from sixteen different national groups endured working conditions that would have appalled Czarist officials. According to the former coroner…

A large plant was often a fractious congeries that recapitulated the ethnic and geographical rivalries of the larger society.

But solidarity, as noted earlier, is not directly endowed by factory relations of production; equally, class consciousness, as David Montgromery reminds us, “is always a project.” Workers in new industries or plants are initially atomized: a competitive situation that capitalists attempt to prolong…

Certainly, Marx acknowledged a “historical and moral element” in the constitution of wages, as well as victories for the “political economy of the working class such as the ten-hour day.” Likewise, the level of “necessary needs,” as Michael Lebowitz rightly insists, is “the product of class struggl…

Meanwhile the mass craft occupations and the out-work economy continued to flourish alongside the factory system for most of the nineteenth century and into the next. The Great Exhibition of 1851, Raphael Samuel once pointed out, may have glorified the age of steam-powered machinery, but the sixtee…