When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Historical Materialism)

When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 explores one of the most tumultuous times in United States history. Self-organized workers recomposed their power by devising new strategies and tactics to disrupt the capitalist economy and extract concessions. Mine, railroad, steel, and iron workers pursued a strategy of tension that sometimes erupted into militant class conflict and general strikes in which workers took over and ran a number of cities. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, When Workers Shot Back argues that the escalation of working-class conflict drives rather than reacts to the consolidation and reorganisation of capital and economic and political reform of the state. Studying the class composition of this period illustrates why workers escalated the intensity of their tactics, even using tactical violence, to extract concessions and reforms when all other efforts to do so were blocked, co-opted or repressed.

Robert Ovetz is a senior lecturer in political science and teaches labor relations in the Master of Public Administration program at San José State University. His work focuses on academic labor organizing and the global labor movement. Ovetz is the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 and We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few. He is the coeditor with Kevin Van Meter of Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism: The Collected Writings of Harry Cleaver, coeditor of Real World Labor, and editor of Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategy, Tactics, Objectives. He has been published in nine other books in six languages.