Gary Cross's article is a valuable and welcome attempt to extend the scope of labor history. to give attention to issues of popular culture and consumption that have been brought to current prominence especially by work in the field of cultural studies. Clearly this move reflects wider changes in society, in which the hegemony of commodity production appears to be exercised as much through the attractions of advertising and the shopping mall as through the disciplines of the factory and office. But as Cross is able to show, these are not new issues. Working-class movements have long sought to resist the power of capitalism and class domination through the social linkages of alternative class cultures as well as through bargaining and political strategies, though in the consumerist age these forms of cultural resistance are easily forgotten. Cross is right to suggest that these issues and struggles - whatever their outcomes have been – are important to labor history. His central idea of exploring the antinomies of money (conferring power within a market system) and time (allowing partial withdrawal from it) as alternative kinds of class demands, is an interesting and potentially fruitful one.

Next to the extinction of communism, nothing has disconcerted labor historians as much as the proliferation of cultural studies about mass consumption. By contrast, the critique of economism begun two decades ago under the influence of E. P. Thompson was a snap, for workers and the making of the working class remained the main focus, even as emphasis shifted from workplace to community contests over pub life, public parks, and other arenas of popular culture. Cultural studies of mass consumption, however, challenge whether it is still valid, much less possible, to focus uniquely on workers, except perhaps to deal with their unmaking as a class. Some are influenced by the “linguistic turn” associated with poststructuralism and deconstruction, putting pressure on labor historians to relate complex processes of signification to the changes in strategies and structures that are the meat and potatoes of the labor-history field.

Recent studies of women's employment in the United States, recognizing that the past has shaped – and constrained – the present, have turned to historical evidence for answers to pressing questions about gender inequality in the economic arena. These carefully designed and methodologically sophisticated projects, often based on newly discovered primary sources, have greatly illuminated the processes, institutions, and social groups which have interacted to produce persistent inequality despite substantial change.

In the beginning was the Theory. Even before the collapse of Soviet communism, the glow of Marxism in American (and European) universities was beginning to dim. Now we look back on our own investment in Marxism, not always with satisfaction. At best, the theory did not so much fail historians, as historians, in their efforts to redress the lacunae in the theory, wrote around it to the extent that theory ultimately became marginal to their enterprise. This is hardly surprising since Marxism, having given up pretense to science by the mid-1960s, became largely a critical theory in the sense that its main sources were European thinkers – Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault, Althusser – who sought to repair the crumbling walls and beams remaining from the wreckage of Stalinism.