Introduction to the new edition

This book is a product of the political and ideological debate that engaged my New Left generation when, in the early 1970s, so many campus-based radicals inaugurated a remarkable probe into the character, meaning, and history of the working class and its institutions. Two events in particular seemed to crystallize my decision to write a history of unionism and the state during the 1940s. The first came on the evening of September 14, 1970, when a few dozen Berkeley students drove down to Fremont’s sprawling General Motors assembly complex to support rank and file workers when the United Automobile Workers struck the company at midnight. Hundreds jumped the gun and rushed out of the factory a couple of hours early. The youthful, boisterous crowd happily waved our hand-painted signs – “GM – Mark of Exploitation,” took over the union hall, and cheered militant speeches, both anti-company and anti-union. It was the beginning of the first coordinated, nationwide stoppage at GM since the winter of 1945–46. We didn’t know it at the time, but the 1970 GM strike, which would continue for ten weeks, came right in the midst of the last great wave of twentieth-century industrial conflict in the United States.1 While all this was going on, the Berkeley branch of the International Socialists, a Trotskyist formation of New Left sensibility and “third camp” (i.e. anti-Stalinist and anti-capitalist) politics, was in the midst of furious debate. Along with others radicalized on the campuses and in the anti–Vietnam War movement, a “turn toward the working class” had begun to propel thousands of student radicals into the nation’s factories, warehouses, hospitals, and offices. From Berkeley, friends and comrades took off for Detroit auto plants, Chicago steel mills, Cleveland trucking companies, and all sorts of industrial jobs throughout the Bay Area.2 But what were they to do when they got there? If these “industrializers” began to work their way up through the trade union apparatus, they would be helping to build an institution that seemed positively