Thread by @ErikLoomis

There's not much that's cooler than book release day. Amazingly, this book, which was much harder for me to write than anticipated, is actually released. And more amazing, people seem to like it.

amazon.com/History-Americ…

I am celebrating in the most glamorous way possible--spending the day preparing for tomorrow and Friday's classes. But let me take a quick break from that for a few words on what this book means to me and I hope can mean to you.

I initially started working on this in 2015, so well before the tragedy of 2016. What that election did, with the rise of fascism in this nation under Trump, is underscore how important it was for a hard look at workers' struggles when the media was distorting who workers are.

The most important strike in American history is what I focus on for Chapter 2 of the book--the slaves walking off the plantations and ending the Confederacy. Yet, not only do we not usually see slavery as part of labor history--the whole point of it was to control labor!--but...

...the media has routinely defined the "working class" as "white dudes from the Midwest." And that is really messed up. It materially contributes to racism. So that's wrong. This book attempts to take a hard-edged look at race and labor. It does not hide white workers' racism.

After all, the first major legislative success of the American labor movement was the Chinese Exclusion Act. I focus on other issues as well, such as the Detroit Hate Strike and the AFL-CIO's long history of opposing immigration, which mercifully is no more.

Moreover, we forget that the first industrial workers were women, in the apparel industry that continues to travel the world to exploit women and children today, now killing over 1,100 workers in Bangladesh making your clothes. Why don't we focus on women as workers??? Sexism.

So the first chapter of the book focuses on the Lowell Mill Girls strike. Huge parts of women's labor are often ignored by us--especially unpaid housework, but too often paid domestic labor, flight attendants, teachers, etc. Luckily, there are great historians fixing this.

This actually reminds me how much I owe all the great historians out there. Howard Zinn once told people that he was glad they liked his book, but now they needed to read the books in his footnotes. I hope people do that with my book too. Read more history!

It so happens that I enjoy synthesizing large bodies of scholarship into narratives for the popular public. But I couldn't do that without all the historians plugging away in the archives. Meanwhile, college administrations no longer hire historians, so the future, who knows?

Anyway, what we need to today is to understand that work is changing and that the future may not look like the past. But we also have to understand that the struggle of workers will never end and we have to seek to improve the lives of workers, by which we mean ourselves.

Moreover, we have 200 years of labor history we can learn from. We can have a pretty good idea of what works in the American political structure and what does not. This is why I do not support third parties. They never work. Ever. And they draw energy from other struggles.

We also must understand that workers almost never can win a strike if the government opposes it. That's why we have to take over the political system. It makes me feel good that so many people are getting it and it's why I respect what DSA is doing with Ocasio-Cortez, etc.

Do what the fascists do and take over the party. It's easier than starting a third party. We can do that. It's hard. It's a lifetime struggle, but so is everything else. Those who hate us will always fight us, so we have to fight them forever.

But what gets in the way of this? Racism! White workers often choose their white identity, their evangelical identity, their misogynist identity over their working-class identity. We this over and over again. It's why we have to fight racism head on without compromise.

When we look at lame Democrats, we think of Carter and Clinton. They were lame and bad for workers. But unions never organizing Georgia and Arkansas so these guys weren't reliant on unions for their power. So they didn't care. It's the reality, even if we don't want to hear it.

Basically, we must articulate and fight for a radical agenda for workers of all races and genders. If we do that, hopefully we can draw enough white workers that they prioritize their class identity over all their repressive and oppressive identities.

What we can't do is "appeal to the white working class" like a zillion op-eds and bad mainstream media stories demand. It is up to us to reject and fight for a radical agenda.

And since this is my day, indulge me a bit on some other writing I have done. In a rapidly changing workforce, we need to think about what the future looks like, not nostalgically long for the past.

So one thing we need to do is advocate for a federal job guarantee, where everyone who wants a job at $15 can have one. This would give workers so much power over their lives. I demanded it here in this @nytimes piece.

nytimes.com/2018/04/25/opi…

I have no objection to UBI and other direct cash transfers, except that I think, as I read through American history for decades, that there isn't space in American politics for such a program. We have so mythologized work. To fight that is like fighting gravity.

After all, Horatio Alger wasn't only a pedophile priest (which he very. much was), he also helped shape a whole mythology of work that dominates how the working class thinks about the world.

Another part of the radical worker agenda has to be holding our corporations and their supply chains legally accountable for all the crime and destruction they create around the world. I have articulated ideas around that too that I hope we can create.

bostonreview.net/class-inequali…

I also wrote a book about the horrors our corporations create globally. Let's stop this capitalist exploitation of the world's people. We can do it. It's easier than you think!

amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corp…

We also have to remember that the workers movement is also about the millions of us who are forced to work as prisoners for little to no money, which also undermines the wage market for the rest of us. It's wrong and it's racist. I wrote about that here.

nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opi…

Talking about solidarity and revolution and all that is good and all, but we also have to get serious about fighting for a different economy, one that we can articulate in real policy and one that takes power from the capitalists and returns it to us.

Unfortunately, I need to get back to lecture writing (oh boy!) but let me close by saying how much I appreciate @thenewpress working with me on this. They publish so many great books. You should buy some of them!

And I will be back with my labor history tweet threads as well, which I think is an interesting to way to take this garbage technology that helped elect Donald Trump and turn it into something useful for people as they figure out how to fight back.