Labor’s Failure?

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Much of the archaeology and history of labor is based on organized labor, unions, and strikes, and the common rhetoric emphasizes the success or failure of union strike activities. This frames labor activism as analogous to sporting events with clear winners and losers and inadvertently adopts the vantage point of capital. As we all know, labor has seldom “won” these contests. Given the modern world where union membership is plummeting and many viable unions are more like professional organizations than agents of revolutionary transformation, ‘success’ seems even more unlikely. In this paper, I use the case of the Coalwood lumber camp to argue that labor’s ‘success’ was much more complicated than simply winning strikes. Recognizing the difference between concrete and abstract labor provides a way to think about worker’s decisions to structure their lives based more on concrete than alienated labor that gave them more autonomy over their lives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 203