Some Thoughts on What Separates Working-Class History from the New History of Capitalism

In a recent review for Dissent of three new books in working-class history, Gabe Winant writes movingly and incisively about the political education of the labor historians who elbowed their way into the profession between the 1960s and the 1980s.

It was precisely because they came from historically marginalized backgrounds and defended embattled traditions that these scholars—not just labor historians, but also women’s historians and African-American historians, collectively the “new social historians”—were positioned to pierce the fog of postwar historical complacency… In direct consequence of the professional struggle and advance of this cohort, the idea took hold as never before that American history was a history of dissent and resistance. The historical consciousness of past injustices and struggles that is visibly ascendant on today’s left—manifest, for example, in the conversation about reparations for slavery—owes a tremendous amount to this scholarship.

Winant’s review is in part a meditation on how labor history’s intellectual successes collided with the political disaster of organized labor, and of the difficulties that the field encountered and continues to encounter in adjusting the object of its analysis to account for transformations in what work looks like and who might be (or ought to be) included in the category “working class.” “The grounding of the field had lain in the social democratic state,” he writes, “which rested in turn upon the industrial economy and labor movement—widely seen as coterminous with labor history’s area of inquiry. As factories closed and the New Deal political regime disintegrated, the field began to lose its sense of a coherent project.”

Winant sympathetically describes labor history’s frustrations with its own inability to reassemble a synthesis that would truly encompass the U.S. working class as a whole—a project made even more improbable after the entry of transnational history on the scene and the eagerness of many younger labor historians to question the value and viability of the nation-state as the self-evident analytical container for the working class. But even before this challenge to the new labor history’s identity emerged, its practitioners were beginning to suspect that their hope for a new synthesis—an overarching frame in which all the hundreds of dissertations and monographs on the Worcesters and the Cincinnatis and the Lynns and the Lower East Sides could find their proper location—was not in the offing. “In the 1980s, the idea dawned that it might be impossible for the new social history to build a complete historical picture of the working class, brick by brick.”

Winant quietly seems to think that this dream of “a coherent project” or a “complete historical picture” was the right one, or at least that it may be more possible in the near future than it has been ever since the collapse of Fordism. He speculates that “we ought to expect that the reemergence of social conflict in the twenty-first century would bring with it a reimagined narrative of the working-class past, freed of some of the limits that constrained historians who struggled to see beyond the horizon set by midcentury social democracy.” Historians will be able to start picking up their bricks again—for one reason or another.

Embedded within Winant’s narrative, though, is a brief aside on the origins of the new history of capitalism, and it is worth—as part of my larger series here exploring the origins of the field—examining more closely. The new history of capitalism’s intellectual origins obviously do have a lot to do with the way the field of labor or working-class history was changing, and Winant’s account is a good example of how working-class historians think about that relation. (It is also more gracious and less acidic than some of the others that have been published recently.)

Winant argues that the new history of capitalism needs to be contextualized against the backdrop of “the high-neoliberal, end-of-history moment”—a statement which probably no one would argue with. But contextualization is not interpretation, and his conclusions about how budding historians of capitalism responded to neoliberalism are, I think, questionable. He imagines the budding historians of capitalism thinking to themselves,

Why study the working-class gravediggers of capitalism, when they had died out themselves before getting the job done? It was capitalism that was the survivor, and thus deserved attention. Only at this higher scale of analysis could phenomena like the historical ascent of finance and global trade be understood—newly important questions in the 1990s and 2000s.

It is a peculiar feature of the reactions to the new history of capitalism that economic historians think that the field’s center of gravity is in the antebellum period and labor historians place it in the 1980s, in both cases because that’s where they find the NHOC to be least self-critical and most enamored of its own novelty.

That aside, it seems less than fair to the first wave of historians of capitalism to portray them as such cold calculators, eager to side with the victors at the end of history. This is true especially when we consider that some bona fide labor historians were also becoming newly interested in “the historical ascent of finance and global trade” in these years. As an example, both Nelson Lichtenstein—whose labor credentials are impeccable—and Bethany Moreton wrote books about Wal-Mart at approximately the same time. They are significantly different books, and their differences are instructive in terms of understanding where the history of capitalism’s potential and distinctiveness lie. But is it reasonable to suggest that, because Moreton’s work was immediately associated with the history of capitalism, it was undertaken in a spirit of rejection for working-class history, or that Wal-Mart drew Moreton’s attention because its victories seemed more self-evidently important than the dissent and resistance of working people?

Winant certainly does not get so specific, and I don’t mean to put words in his mouth. But the overall frame of historians of capitalism as a group of scholars wanting to tell the history of the winners because they were the winners is not an uncommon attitude, despite the awkward fit it has with so many practitioners of the field and their work. Moreover, many studies from the new history of capitalism have attempted quite intentionally to expand our historical understanding of who counts as a part of the working class and to make the case for why our understanding of that category should change as a result. I’ll pick two from the antebellum period—Seth Rockman and Michael Zakim—and two from the post-Fordist economy—Moreton and Shane Hamilton.

Instead, it is possible that it is not the NHOC’s attitude to the working class per se that stands between the two fields, but rather its indifference to that hope for a “coherent project” or “complete historical picture” that has meant so much to labor history. There is very little in the new history of capitalism—even in its (innumerable) programmatic statements—that would suggest that its practitioners are interested in building a complete historical picture of American capitalism, “brick by brick.”

A great deal follows from this difference. Working-class history’s unfulfilled desire to write a total history of its subject comes out of a long history of struggle to bear adequate witness to the ephemeral rapture of solidarity. (Winant ends his review on a note of wistful solidarity.) In labor histories, the “plot” is usually oriented toward a culminating mass action, a moment of fusion and mutual sacrifice.

That is not usually the case in most histories of capitalism, and there is, I think, both an ideological and an archival reason for this. Certainly it is the case, as Winant points out, that the new history of capitalism is broadly liberal in the sense that its practitioners affirm as their “animating question” the problem of “how to live together in a society in which there is never just one story to tell.” Few histories of capitalism yet written encompass within their horizons a genuine expectation that capitalists as a class will cease to live among us; it is assumed that, even as capitalism is a historically contingent economic formation, historians will confront the continuing presence of both capitalists’ and workers’ stories for the foreseeable future. Thus, books in the new history of capitalism are often structured as either a series of chronologically parallel chapters (sometimes they are cases, but other times they are more like thematically connected scenes) or through the structuring metaphor of some kind of network or circuit. Edward Baptist’s innovative organization of The Half Has Never Been Told as a circuit around the body is an example that springs to mind, but William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis—an inspiration to many historians of capitalism—is also full of circuits.

Circuits are acts of coordination and articulation rather than rituals of solidarity, and there seems to be a pretty severe difference in the political subtexts and undertones that emanate from these two plot structures. Yet just as important, I think, as the ideological underpinnings that distinguish working-class history from the new history of capitalism are the practical archival problems and purposes that face the researcher. There are probably dozens of fine differences between the two, but I want to focus on one.

Historians of capitalism tend to (rightly) be careful in assuming and arguing for more class consciousness among their subjects than they can firmly prove. It is the privilege—otherwise known as the hegemony—of the ruling class that it does not have to be overtly class consciousness, and thus the archive presumably provides fewer direct expressions of capitalist class consciousness than does, say, a box of union grievances or a clutch of oral histories from workers. Even more, there are good reasons for capital to officially deny class consciousness in many of its forms, particularly in terms of coordination among capitalists. Some kinds of coordination are potentially illegal, and many others, if performed openly, would be unpopular. “The market” is a wonderful all-purpose mantle to throw over a whole variety of combinations.

The case of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is a good example of what happens when a historian infers more coordination and deliberate intent than can be unshakably established by the evidence. While I believed at the time and continue to believe that her inferences were reasonable and convincing, her book was also open to objection that it lacked a “smocking gun.” It was perhaps her background in social/labor history—which I think tends to work from the assumption that class consciousness is always a factor in play—that got her into trouble here, rather than a lapse in standards. Libertarians are not, shall we say, so friendly to books that bake class consciousness into their arguments, and they were not likely to understand or to be charitable to a book that did.

The point, however, is that most new historians of capitalism tend to be more cautious than MacLean, or are working on projects where coordination can be explained at the institutional level—through a recognized lobbying group like NAM or through a specific firm—rather than in the fog of class consciousness. I think that this is a second major point of division between working-class history and the new history of capitalism, and perhaps of misunderstanding.

Whether that division can be bridged—or whether it should be—I don’t know. Perhaps the fields are complementary and needn’t be yanked and crushed into a single frame, a grand historical synthesis of economic life under capitalism. But then, again, as a scholar who identifies more with the historians of capitalism, of course I’d say that.