Review of: Andrew Kolin (2016) Political Economy of Labour Repression in the United States

This book is an ambitious attempt to tell the whole story of the conflict between labour and capital from the earliest days of the United States to the present.Its central argument is that the labour/capital conflict is often expressed through the formation and transformation of social institutions.As economic realities change, and as workers find new ways to unite and spread their voice, the forces of capitalism make use of or modify social institutions -government, the press, workplaces themselves -to make it possible to repress labour more successfully.Ambitious as the book is, it is unsuccessful in achieving its goals.The central argument of Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States is certainly a persuasive one but it is hardly original.It is no surprise that efforts by the have-nots to organise against the haves are opposed by the haves; 'twas ever thus.This is not a work of original research, so its presumed purpose is to serve as either a textbook or an overview of the subject for general readers.Several critical flaws, however, render it unsuitable for these purposes.First, for what is primarily a work of history, the book's historical grounding is thin, dated and incomplete.To take just one example, the author spends a great deal of time in Chapters 7 and 8 discussing the role of Communists in labour unions in the 1930s and 1940s, but relies almost entirely on secondary works published before the end of the Cold War in 1991 opened up Soviet archives to American researchers.As such, the author misses so much of the great insights that historians like Randi Storch have brought to the subject.This is just one of the many ways in which this book is not aware of, and therefore does not speak to, the myriad works on labour history from the last three decades.This reviewer does not wish to be unduly harsh, but it is inexcusable to write about the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the Pacific Northwest without referencing the work of Erik Loomis (2016), about Communist organising without the work of Robin D.G. Kelley (1990), about twentieth-century women's labour without Dorothy Sue Cobble ( 2004), or the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) without Joseph McCartin (2011).The author's main source of quotations for labour history are the magisterial volumes of Phillip Foner, the first of which was published in the late 1940s.Too much good work has been done in the years since they were published, though, for those works to be the author's go-to for historical narrative.The result is an historical analysis that frequently does not pass muster.The author seems determined, for example, to make financial speculators the driving force behind the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the US Constitution, when the wealthiest people in the country were plantation owners whose wealth was derived from slavery (Chapter 2).Kolin seems utterly perplexed about the motives and intentions of the Gompers-led American Federation of Labour (AFL), contradicting himself from one chapter to the next.At one point he states, "AFL

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