These are difficult days for the labour movement in the United States, and the situation is even worse for the radical labour movement. Trade-union membership in the non-farm labour force has declined from over 30 per cent in the early 1950s to about 17 per cent today. The real standard of living for workers has been falling since the mid 1970s. Concessionary contracts and schemes of labour–management cooperation, unthinkable even a few years ago, have become commonplace. As for the radical tradition: when in 1906 a famous essay by Werner Sombart asked ‘Why is There No Socialism in the United States?’, the us labour movement may have been closer to socialism than at any time thereafter. In 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) was founded, declaring that the working and employing classes had nothing in common. In 1912 Eugene Debs, running as Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, received nearly 900,000 votes (6 per cent of the electorate). Very little has been heard since from the labour movement in the United States about the socialist transformation of the relations of production.

Kim Moody’s An Injury to All and David Montgomery’s Fall of the House of Labor together help us to assess how all this came about and to explore what can be done about it.footnote^＊ In part i of this article, I will examine Kim Moody’s distinction between ‘business unionism’ and ‘social unionism’, and how it leads him to oversimplify the history of the American Federation of Labor (afl). In part ii, I will suggest that by characterizing the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) at the close of World War II as illustrative of ‘social unionism’, Moody appears to propose a social-democratic future for American workers. In part iii, I will argue that a better way forward is exemplified by certain of Moody’s own case-studies and by David Montgomery’s description of the work of radical labour activists in the early years of the twentieth century.

An Injury to All sets out in its opening pages certain conceptual distinctions that characterize the argument of the remainder of the book. Moody believes that the labour movement must choose between two kinds of unionism: ‘social unionism’ and ‘business unionism.’ Social unionism is said to be based on the value of ‘community’, defined as ‘the sense that liberty is nurtured in an informal environment where the voluntary and collective enterprise of people with common interests contributes to the solution of problems.’ Business unionism, on the other hand, is thought to derive from ‘individualism’, understood as a belief in hard work, ingenuity and ‘the capacity of people to rise by their own wills.’

In Moody’s view, the practice of the labour movement is communal, but the movement’s ideology has time and again been skewed toward individualism. The notion that honest toil assures economic success is an ‘utter falsehood.’ For this reason, ‘workers have always turned toward collective forms of action to increase the rewards of labour.’ However, individualism has ‘dominated [the] official ideology’ of trade-union leaders who, from the founding in 1886 of the American Federation of Labor, have imposed this false consciousness from above on the spontaneous collectivism of the rank and file.

The labour history told in An Injury to All, accordingly, is a tale in which the ‘social unionism’ toward which the objective condition of workers naturally tends does eternal battle with the ‘business unionism’ espoused by leaders infected by the individualistic ethos of American capitalism. However, the result is an oversimplified history, which obstructs, rather than opens, the way to a more accurate assessment of labour’s present dilemmas. Because the whole tangled skein of events is reduced to a Hegelian drama in which two values (community and individualism) are thought to have been expressed in two kinds of unionism (‘social’ and ‘business’ unionism), organizations tend to be viewed as exemplars of one or the other of the two underlying paradigms; and our task for the future is understood simply as the resurrection of the good, or ‘social’, kind of labour movement. Thus the ‘individualism’ said to characterize the afl reflected the ‘consciousness of the skilled craft workers who composed the unions of the early afl’. Further: ‘[B]eyond the advancement of the individual members that composed the union, labor, in this view, had no broader responsibilities to the working class as a whole. They called themselves “pure and simple unionists” and, in effect, invented business unionism—a unionism that sees members primarily as consumers and limits itself to negotiating the price of labor. This individualist approach to raising the price of labor expressed itself through attempts to limit the labor market to the skilled members of the various craft unions—resulting in exclusion rather than comprehensive organization in the new industries.’ This is the picture of the afl common to labour histories written thirty to fifty years ago in the flush of early cio victories. The picture is not untrue, but it is only a partial truth.

Surprisingly, Moody’s volume—published in 1988—shows no awareness of David Montgomery’s Workers’ Control in America, a collection of essays published in 1979 that revolutionized historians’ understanding of skilled craftsmen and their struggles in the era of the fouding of the afl. Where Moody, reiterating the older view, finds in the afl only individualism and business unionism, Montgomery sees a constellation of practices among skilled workers that he terms—choosing just the opposite characterization—‘mutualism.’ According to Montgomery, ‘[t]he three levels of development which appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century were those characterized by (1) the functional autonomy of the craftsman; (2) the union work rule; and (3) mutual support of diverse trades in rule enforcement and sympathetic strikes.’ By ‘work rules’ Montgomery means ‘the moral code, in which the craftsmen’s autonomy was protectively enmeshed.’ This had three aspects. First, on most jobs there was an output quota fixed by the workers themselves. Second, the craftsmen’s ethical code demanded a ‘manly’ bearing toward the boss. Third, and most at variance with Moody’s stereotyped view of craft individualism, skilled craftsmen in the late nineteenth century enforced their work rules by courageous solidarity actions in which the individual set aside short-run self-interest for the sake of preserving the welfare of the group. ‘The autonomy of craftsmen, which was codified in union rules,’ declares Montgomery, ‘was clearly not individualistic. Craftsmen were unmistakably and consciously group-made men, who sought to pull themselves upward by their collective boot straps.’

Mutual support of skilled craftsmen of diverse trades in rule enforcement and sympathetic strikes is statistically demonstrable, according to Montgomery. Strikes aimed merely at increasing wages or preventing wage reductions decreased after the formation of the afl in 1886. ‘Strikes to enforce union rules, enforce recognition of the union, and protect its members grew from 10 per cent of the total or less before 1885 to the level of 19 to 20 per cent between 1891 and 1893.’ The percentage of strikes that were wage strikes was over 70 per cent from 1881 to 1885, but under 60 per cent from 1899 through 1905. It is simply not true, moreover, that the afl discouraged sympathetic strikes in support of workers in other trades. According to Montgomery,