Michael Goldfield’s The Southern Key: Class, Race, & Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s is an extensively researched, forcefully argued and insightful account of interracial organizing in a variety of industries and cities across the South at this decisive juncture and most importantly, of its missed opportunities. When I set out to write a review, it quickly became clear that Goldfield’s most recent major work is this, and even more. The first chapter’s plea for ‘Rigor in Historical Analysis’ heightens the stakes: it revisits and reasserts the primacy of causality as an explicative device that is inexorably imbedded in the capitalist economy and its class relations. Presented as a rampart to ‘culturalism’ – religion, paternalism, racism – when it is claimed to be a primary mode of determining the course of historical events, the author’s materialist and structural credo is nothing less than an epistemological call to arms.
Goldfield’s’ oeuvre is provocative in its own right and begs for rebuttal. It consists, as Charles Post writes here, in having ‘recast the discussion of race and class in the United States’, notably by ‘highlighting the historic conflicts within the US labour movement between those who accommodated white racism and those who championed anti-racist politics.’ This salient trait of the emerging labour officialdom, linked to their political alliance with the Democratic Party, would result in their bearing particular responsibilities in the missed opportunities for working-class solidarity. The Southern Key teaches us to what extent these processes were geographically and chronologically situated and would have longstanding effects. The failure to nationalise the rising tide of labour organising dynamics in their heyday left the door open for capitalism to rebound, to seek its revenge against workers’ historical welfare state gains and, in its most reactionary form, that of class and racial brutality rooted in humanity enslaved. Such is the ‘golden key’ to understanding politics and much of contemporary society in the United States today, notably the political conservatism of certain segments of the US working class. In sum, Goldfield concludes, in his signature, at once dense and dialectical style: ‘The South is a distinctive, atypical part of the United States; it is also, however, America writ large’.
Mike’s scholarship makes other essential contributions to labour studies as well. These include placing white supremacy and issues of race at the centre of every ‘critical turning point in American political history’ (The Color of Politics) and throwing light on the role of political actors in the debate on receding union density in the late twentieth century: changes in government policy that restricted workers’ right to organise, the systemisation of corporate hostility towards worker organisation through the deployment of anti-union consulting agencies and the key role of labour leaders in lieu of merely relegating the phenomenon to demographic and industrial shifts (The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States).
The February 2023 symposium entitled ‘Class, Race and Place in the US South: American Politics through the Lens of Michael Goldfield’s Work’ was held to revisit these concerns and methodologies. Organised by two research centres in Ile-de-France, IMAGER at Université Paris-Est Créteil and CREW at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle,1 it brought together 73 scholars (including 34 active participants) from six countries and three continents, to debate the kind of explanatory paradigms that are most apt at grasping how social phenomena intertwine and their particular inscriptions in the US polity.
Originally proposed to take place in 2020, immediately following The Southern Key’s publication, the symposium became a hostage – and now a reminder – of the world health crisis which summoned workers to pay the toll: first, by placing their lives on the line, then through increased work flexibility and public service cutbacks, in the name of reducing the sacrosanct public deficit accumulated through pandemic spending. This spending – which ultimately fuelled stock market speculation – that the powers-that-be, as Naomi Klein’s luminous lessons in disaster capitalism’s ‘shock therapy’ have taught us, are attempting to turn to their advantage. On a more positive note, future historians might very well look back at the period, if current trends are to flourish, as one that helped sow the seeds of labour renewal.
When the event finally came to pass, it was as if we’d staged the ideal venue to welcome our at once distinguished and rebellious array of labour scholars. France was riddled with a wave of protests against the public retirement system counter-reform that brought millions of workers to the streets of Paris and other cities, large and small. How can one explain why this massive and, in recent times unprecedented movement went down in defeat, one that had garnered 80 % of French popular support? It was so popular that it compelled labour leaders of the several national French confederations to join forces in a united front and became increasingly politicised to the point where demonstrators brandishing ‘Macron Out’ banners and make-shift guillotines ultimately raised the question of seizing political power. Would the outcome have differed had even one labour or left-wing political leader read the writing on the wall, calling to march with these demands upon the Elysée presidential palace or seriously attempted to deepen and generalise the movement, instead of diffusing it into 14 separate days of mobilisation over several weeks?
Thus, Michael Goldfield’s career-long concerns about the nature of social movements and the key role played by labour leaders in their denouement, as well as conjectures as to how events might have turned out differently – the ‘What ifs …’ of counter-factual interpretations that are at the heart of The Southern Key – resounded from the symposium hall to the real-time stamping of feet on the pavement outside.
The articles edited by Cody R. Melcher, Olivier Maheo, and Esther Cyna and published in this volume relate these international, interdisciplinary, intergenerational no-holds barred conversions. I would like to present some of those that embody the overarching theoretical frames and privileged themes that exemplify Goldfield’s work, commitment to conceptual clarity and rigorous methodology based on facts.
Goldfield himself sets the tone in the opening chapter when addressing the notion of ‘white skin privilege’, in typical no-minced words fashion. The author rebukes the exhortation to repudiate white skin privileges as being ‘largely meaningless’ and tending to blur class distinctions. What’s more, the rejection of unions as a potentially powerful anti-white supremacist resource is a ‘great misreading [of the] the important lessons of U.S. labour history’.
By setting out Goldfield’s militant trajectory and wide-ranging scholarship in his chapter ‘Goldfield’s Oeuvre: A Critical Engagement’, Bryan D. Palmer proposes an incisive overview of evolutions in US labour, radical social movements and their articulations with capitalist class formation and race relations from the 1960s on. In his concluding chapter ‘Class, Race and Capitalism: Contemporary Perspectives’, Goldfield gives his own take on his generation’s legacy and the current prospects of social revolution on US soil. Palmer then proceeds in typical Goldfield style, by engaging the author in polemical joust over the nature of the Communist Party’s Third Period and the Popular Front in the United States.
Alex Callinicos espouses Goldfield’s theoretical problematic of class and race through its complex manifestations, a subject explored extensively in this author’s work on settler colonialism in southern Africa. He raises swords with the widely accepted concept today of ‘racial capitalism’, and in particular its essentialist assumptions that, for the author, fail the Marxist litmus test of rooting social phenomena in class exploitation. While intertwined, the two phenomena must be conceived as distinct structures that undergo variations over time due to specific and changing mechanisms of interconnection that are contextually and historically situated. The extensive literature review of the materialist versus culturalist debate regarding race relations, with reference to gender and migration, is in itself a valuable contribution.
Cody R. Melcher’s chapter intitled ‘White Supremacy as a Decommodification Strategy: The Sociology of Race, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Scholars Denied’ is a case-in-point of a materialist interpretation of US racial hierarchies and racism that is firmly rooted in class-based causality. The chapter ‘resurrects’ a theory of the perpetuation of white supremacy that was promoted by little known early twentieth-century black scholars and also by the most eminent among them. Melcher’s conception of a ‘Decommodification strategy’ reveals how African-American and other minority worker exclusion from competitive markets in terms of jobs, education, housing, political influence, etc., subsequently provides white Americans preferential access. It is the operational lever that perpetuates conflicting economic interests, racial oppression and rivalry.
Charles Post’s account of the World War II no-strike pledge charts unexplored territory regarding the register of missed opportunities for interracial labour unity. The detailed study of wartime shop floors in the Akron, Ohio, rubber industry, convincingly illustrates a correlation between workplaces where the no-strike pledge was effectively implemented by CIO leadership – both the ‘centre’ and the CP-led ‘left’ – and the occurrence of racial ‘hate strikes’. The suppression of grievances around wages and working conditions undermined the capacity of workers to join in collective struggle and therefore interracial solidarity against capitalism, while concomitantly fuelling racial divisions that periodically exploded into violent confrontations. Inversely, racist strikes were ‘decidedly less significant’ when union leaders organised opposition to both employers and union officialdom’s war-time no-strike pledge. Bureaucratisation, then, went hand-in-hand with leaders’ inability, and especially unwillingness, to fight racism.
Brian Kelly marshals another device in Goldfield’s toolbox of rigour in the study of social movements and their relationship to institutions: that of engaging in academic battles to set the chronology of events straight. It is a wedge for undermining many assumptions that have become engrained in traditional historiography. Goldfield’s unrelenting gripe has been to debunk the ‘myth’ of Section 7(a) of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act: it was the massive, deep-going wave of industrial unionisation staged by the workers themselves that preceded and propelled New Deal legislation and induced its pro-labour stance, and not the opposite. Likewise, in his narrative of Civil War time South Carolina, Brian Kelly demonstrates how it was ‘the emergence of a powerful wave of Black political mobilization that preceded both the ascent of Congressional Radicals in Washington and Republican attempts to organize freed people’s vote through the Union Leagues’. In his scholarly illumination of the historical record, Kelly portrays the Republican Party’s betrayal of its long-held values and progressive initiatives that ultimately undermined this project of building a bi-racial democracy.
Dan La Botz’s chapter – ‘Using Michael Goldfield’s Approach to Examine the American Southwest: 1850–1950’ – perceives the pivotal role of labour and social movement activists in this region though Goldfield’s analytical lens. In its distinctive racialised economic system and demographic composition, the local political economy developed particular forms of labourforce oppression. This included de facto segregation and a divided labour movement where the role of leadership was decisive: the AFL bureaucracy was an obstacle to building an interracial, politically independent workers’ movement and the Communist Party, while carrying out important civil rights fights, ultimately subordinated itself to the Democratic Party.
The symposium was also a tribune for pioneering Southern labour studies research by young scholars from the US and France: ‘blue-grey reunions’ between former Civil War veterans as vehicles of anti-workerism (Mathew Stanley), untold stories of teachers’ strikes in Florida (Jody Baxter) and Oklahoma (Marie Ménard), disc jockey unionism (Tristan Le Bras), music consumption as a cogent vector in the formation of regional segregation (Manuel Bocquier), the reverse migration to the South and the regionalisation of Black identity (Nicolaus Raulin), and, setting the dialectical stage, the enlightening introduction by the editors.
Many thanks to the editors for bringing back to life these fecund and memorable shared moments. My appreciation and admiration to Mike for your unwavering confidence in the struggles of working people along the pathway towards socialist prospects, and for foregrounding the primacy of race and other decisive dynamics of the history and actuality of class politics that invigorate the conversation with myself and so many, across many waters.
Donna Kesselman
IMAGER: L’institut des mondes anglophone, germanique et roman (UR 3958). CREW: The Center for Research on the English-speaking World (UR 4399). The conference Organising Committee was made up by: Kalilou Barry, Lyais Ben Youssef, James Cohen, Esther Cyna, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Mathieu Hocquelet, Donna Kesselman, Olivier Maheo, Guillaume Marche, Cody R. Melcher, Marie Ménard.