What’s Class Got To Do With It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century edited by Michael Zweig, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004, 240 pages, ISBN 0-8014-8899-0.

A new interdisciplinary field of teaching and research has begun to emerge in the US university system: working-class studies. It is distinguished from the established field of industrial relations and the smaller, but still more institutionally-secure field of labour studies, by its ambitious scope – “to understand how class works to shape our lives and the larger society” (16), in the words of economist Michael Zweig – and by its theoretical framework of class analysis. Teaching and research with this scope and conceptual approach have had an often-embattled presence in a range of disciplines in US and Canadian universities since the radicalization of the 1960s. However, the creation of working-class studies centres and programs at a handful of US post-secondary institutions, following the example of women’s studies and other academic fields that have grown out of social movements, is a recent development. A Working-Class Studies Association was founded in 2003. Zweig’s introduction, “The Challenge of Working Class Studies,” outlines a theoretical framework for understanding class primarily in terms of economic and political power, not income or lifestyle. He defines the working class as “made up of people who, when they go to work or when they act as citizens, have comparatively little power or authority” (4), and calculates this as 62% of the US labour force in 2002. In Part I, Dorothy Sue Cobble’s “When Feminism Had Class” introduces a number of women active in US labour between the Great Depression and the rise of Women’s Liberation in the late 1960s. She believes they offer the contemporary women’s and labour movements an understanding that gender, race and class inequalities and identities are inherently interconnected. Two chapters on race and class by Bill Fletcher Jr and R. Jeffrey Lustig argue that racial oppression has been and continues to be central to US capitalist society. They explain how this has had profound implications for the consciousness and action of US workers, and that the best response is anti-racist multiracial unionism and class politics. Part II begins with William K. Tabb’s overview of class in the global economy, which looks at the era of globalization as one of globalized capitalism, and critically examines the neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus. Leo Panitch, the one Canadian contributor, provides what is perhaps the strongest chapter. His “political class analysis” situates 9/11 and its aftermath in the context of what he contends were the two key features of the late 20^th century: the rise of US power as the “first really global capitalist empire” and the “historic defeat of the Left” (80). Panitch incisively criticizes the AFL-CIO’s opposition to China’s admission to the WTO as well as the posturing of anti-labour Third World elites. Katie Quan’s article follows with an analysis of the restructuring of the global garment industry. She argues that class analysis is vital in countering the competitive pressures that pit workers in different countries against each other. The focus returns to the US in Part III. Here Frances Fox Piven analyses how “welfare reform” social policy increases the disciplining of workers by the labour market. This she usefully places within the broad contours of neoliberalism since the mid-1970s, with its efforts to weaken unions, intensify policing and incarceration and privatize pensions, noting that there is also a “wider cultural campaign to celebrate markets and reinforce labor [sic] market discipline” (120). Michael Yates’s chapter discusses the US economy since the late 1990s and the situation of workers and unions in the post-9/11 period. The subject of the final section of the book is class and youth. After Gregory DeFreitas and …