The essay argues that the idea of the United States as a classless society was never a faithful representation of the U.S. socioeconomic reality, but constituted a myth elaborated since the 1830s by the first generation of U.S. economists to oppose the insubordination of Northern white workers, their mobilization through strikes, their politicization of class, and their critique of wage labor. It was precisely to counter the workers’ discourse, the essay maintains, that the first U.S. economists, most importantly Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), developed an ideological representation of U.S. society as a classless structure devoid of fixed boundaries, in which industrious individuals could improve their condition through labor and in which social positions reflected a scale of talents and merits. By studying the early writings of Carey, but also of Theodore Sedgwick (1780–1839), Francis Wayland (1796–1865), Henry Vethake (1791–1866), Alonzo Potter (1800–1865), and Francis Lieber (1800–1872), the essay shows how economists used the myth of the classless society to scientifically legitimize the coming of capitalism to the United States, as well as to delegitimize class conflict. This anti-labor reaction, the essay argues, marked the very emergence of political economy in the United States as a science aimed at justifying the order of society through a mystified representation of its power relations, while the myth of the classless society would persist as a fundamental ideological pillar in the legitimation and naturalization of American capitalism.

The article analyzes a period when public officials withdrew children from the labor market and assigned them to the school system. While existing research delves into the reasons behind this process, focusing on sociopolitical reforms, economic factors and changing concepts of childhood, there is limited understanding of how working-class families responded. The article aims to fill the gap by examining the social impact on families when their children were barred from factory work by political-administrative authorities, shedding light on class formation and political subjectivation. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s book Proletarian Nights the article specifically investigates the Swiss canton of Aargau, where the clash between industrial child labor and liberal school reforms around 1830 provides a unique perspective. The conflict prompted the mobilization of proletarian families, compelling them to organize, unite politically and collectively advocate for their children to rejoin the labor market.

It is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impact across dimensions and at various levels of scale (i.e., at the point of production or firm level, local community, and wider society) by analyzing the outcomes of more than 4,500 strikes during the late-nineteenth-century rise of US industrial capitalism. We find that while strike solidarity at the point of production is necessary, it is not sufficient for success. Disruption costs that strikers seek to impose to gain leverage can be significantly reduced by the countertactic of hiring strikebreaking replacement workers recruited from the local community or imported from beyond. We also find that the urban regime of strike policing matters by moderating the impact of strikebreakers. The most powerful predictor of strike outcomes is employer use of replacement workers, signaling the key to undermining working-class strike solidarity directly pits the working class against itself. Intraclass solidarity is necessary for the success in interclass struggle but needs to extend beyond the struck firm implicating the importance of solidarity of the surrounding community and wider social factory. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the historic formation of the US labor movement and its present predicament.

The history of the oil industry’s labor movement during the 1940s has often focused on the Tudeh’s ability to act overtly and rally the masses of workers. Thus, more often than not, the importance of union underground activity and the role played by the masses of ordinary oil workers during times of political and military repression, is overlooked. This article examines how the particular setting of the oil town of Abadan influenced motivations of oil workers and the dynamics between them and the Tudeh. As the article aims to show, these elements were an essential part in the ability of the labor movement in Abadan to remain viable and reemerge in force in the early 1950s as part of the oil nationalization movement.

Did late Victorian strikers have a right to poor relief? Historians have suggested they did not. Scholars point out that nineteenth-century strikers rarely turned to the Poor Law for assistance, and when they did, during a colliers' strike in South Wales in 1898, Poor Law officials were taken to court by disgruntled coal companies. In the subsequent High Court ruling known as the Merthyr Tydfil judgment of 1900, the Master of the Rolls decided that the policy of relieving the strikers had indeed been unlawful. However, it is argued in this article that the judgment has not been properly understood by historians. Contemporaries did not think it obvious that the giving of poor relief to strikers was illegal. On the contrary, in 1898, there was widespread agreement that Poor Law officials had no choice but to support destitute strikers; the Poor Law demanded they relieve the men and their families, a point confirmed in an earlier High Court ruling in 1899. Thus, Poor Law scholars should view the Merthyr judgment as a notable innovation in Poor Law policy. Labor historians should see the ruling as part of the employers' counteroffensive against the labor movement of the 1890s and 1900s. Merthyr came out of the same febrile atmosphere that produced the Taff Vale judgment. That its true significance has been forgotten can largely be explained by the labor movement's unease at having a striker's right to poor relief confirmed in 1899. Respectable workers, union leaders averred, should not be supported out of the poor rates.

The years between 1968 and 1971 in Turkey were unprecedented in terms of rising social protests instigated by students, workers, peasants, teachers and white-collar workers. However, these social movements have received very limited scholarly attention, and the existing literature is marred by many flaws. The scarce literature has mainly provided an economic determinist framework for understanding the massive mobilizations of the period, by stressing the worsening economic conditions of the masses. However, these explanations cannot be verified by data. This article tries to provide an alternative, mainly political explanation for the protest cycle of 1968-71, relying on the “political process” model of social movement studies. It suggests that the change in the power balance of organized groups in politics, which was spearheaded by a prolonged elite conflict between the Kemalist bureaucracy and the political elite of the center-right, provided significant opportunities to under-represented groups to organize and raise their voices.