Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics Economy in the History of the U. S. Working Class by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics Economy in the History of the U. S. Working Class Reviews

• 
  Kyle

  Deserves its reputation. Not necessarily dry writing (a lot of Perry Anderson-esque quirky and fun turns of phrase), but shockingly dense, so don't expect a ripping narrative read.
• 
  Neil Griffin

  A very engaging, provocative analysis on why America has never really had a mass labor party, unlike other Western democracies. It goes deep into labor history, economics, politics, industrial policy, military spending, the rise of a new-money rentier class in the sun belt, and so much more, to try to answer this question.
  
  He wrote this at the apex of Reaganism, but it could have been written last week in terms of the insights he comes up with about the failure of labor's plan:subordinate itself to the Democratic party and thereby impact policy post Watergate.
  
  I've often wondered why the Democratic party is so awful at politics and often has basically only offered a "Republican lite, but good on social issues" choice. The last few chapters ably show how this is terrible electoral calculus and has allowed Republicans to use debt financing to actually offer parts of the populace benefits, until the Democrats come in and "responsibly" balance the budget....just in time for the next Republican administration to come in and enact tax cuts.
  
  A trap I'm so confident Biden and Co. won't fall into ;)
  
  The book, lastly, lays out an analysis of how we could have gone down a different path instead of the uninspiring shite we've seen for decades. He sees potential in the old labor movement partnering with the most faithfully progressive bloc in the country, African Americans, to really start a full-employment politics that would lift so many out of misery. Will we ever get there? He doesn't seem confident (and judging from the 30 years after the book, you would have to say he's right not to be confident), but he also isn't hopeless.
  
  And sometimes not being hopeless is all we have.....
• 
  Yonis Gure

  A remarkable book on the labour/capital relation in America throughout the fraught history of large-scale industrial capitalism (c. 1843-1979). Mike Davis combs through the tangled web of American labour history: from the early agitations of labour abolitionism, the formation of the Knights of Labour (and their astonishing Knight's "Courts"), the AFL's emergence during the labour disaffection from the Knights, and the contradictory CIO that was founded during the peak of the depression crisis.
  
  He charts the triumphs, defeats, turning-points, and missed-opportunities of the American labour movement throughout this period. Time and time again, he consistently bemoans American Labour's fundamental failure to recognize that ultimately their power lay not in subordinating the unions to the Democratic apparatus and their anti-communist crusades in the hope for piecemeal reforms, but in continually mobilizing mass action with a more diverse coalition of woman, African Americans, and "new immigrants", at the point of production. He takes the story up to the election of Ronald Regan, and one senses the contempt in Davis' tone the further done the historical arc he goes. A book of immense importance and relevance.
  
  I do, however, think this book is best supplemented by two other books: David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness and Philip Foner's Organized Labour and the Black Worker, 1619-1981. Both of these works explicitly integrate the question of racism and white supremacy, as well as White workers' tie to "whiteness", into the picture of American labour history much more forcefully than Davis. It's hard not to get the impression that Davis largely scants this integration - adopting instead for a more structural analysis - so as not to problematize or poke-holes in his overall narrative.
  
  Still incredible ! Recommend it highly
• 
  GwenViolet

  *Makes a rather coherent case for why America didn't follow the template 19th century European Marxists thought it would, and also gives a very novel and well argued portrayal of the actual state of American politics in the mid 1980s.
  
  The stuff on black struggle as the key issue of American society is as relevant now as it was when the book was written.
• 
  Kinsey Favre

  Fascinating and important subject matter but full of inaccessible over-the-top academic language and obscure foreign loan-phrases to the extent that it almost seems as if you're expected to know French, Spanish and German as well as English (I found myself looking up another word every few minutes, and I have a pretty sizable vocabulary). I also wasn't particularly fond of a passage in which Davis says that AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education's "labor strategy" was "sex-changed" into a "corporate strategy", exploiting transphobia for unnecessary rhetorical flourish. Nevertheless, overall it's a good critical overview of American labor history and analysis of why America has repeatedly failed to form a strong leftist/socialist politics. Apart from its inaccessibility, this subject probably should be revisited in a new work as much of the "current" information in Prisoners of the American Dream is now dated, even if it does offer valuable insight into how American "left" politics got into the sorry shape it's in now.
• 
  Avery

  Still really good
• 
  Nick Martin

  fucking incredible 🤯🤯🤯
• 
  Josh

  Interesting analysis of the history of class struggle in the US, including why there’s no independent labor/socialist party, the fractured nature of the US working class, labor’s fruitless relationship with the Democratic Party, and the rise of fall of the Fordist model of accumulation in the years after ww2.
  
  Written in 1986, the second half provides a really thorough explanation for the rise of the New Right, the “Reagan revolution”, its model for “economic growth”, and the class forces that benefit from it (Wall Street, military industrial complex, and professional managerial class). The last chapter is an analysis of the 1984 democratic primary campaigns, and the freezing out of the Jesse Jackson campaign’s attempt to bring social democracy to America. Chillingly similar to 2020 and the crushing of the Sanders campaign, with Walter Mondale being just as feeble and accommodating to capital as Biden. The point is we’ve seen all this before.
  
  The only reason I wouldn’t recommend this is Davis oftentimes writes in insanely impenetrable language that a lot of times I would just skip over, and a lot of the economic stuff on reagonomics, wage trends, or global trade deficits went right over my head.
  
  Fuck the AFL-CIO forever
• 
  Ai Miller

  Chapter seven is required reading for anyone in the Us, thank you
• 
  Mesut Bostancı

  I will never look at American politics the same way again after reading this book. This is like the adult version of Zinn's people's history, with a Brumaire like grasp of how class blocs work. Also absolutely mortifying the political parallels between the Reagan-era and today. A little bit more emphasis on the 80s than I was expecting, but that's when the book was written after all.
• 
  Christopher Moltisanti's Windbreakers fan

  I will review it later. But this book is depressing as fuck
• 
  Andrew

  I'm embarrassed to never have heard of Mike Davis until he passed a few months ago. I'm glad though that I'm now getting to know his work.
  
  This was a very dense, difficult book to get through but the history and analysis are really impressive: comprehensive, prescient and nearly flawless. Especially noteworthy is Davis's analysis of and prediction for neoliberalism, afaik a pretty new term for the time he was writing in the mid-80s. He totally nails its trajectory both into the 90s and beyond, and his analysis of the 80s Democrats could be applied virtually unchanged to 21st century politics. It's amazing and depressing how applicable most of his analysis still is: 30 years later, Democrats are still treating leftists as they did Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition -- trying to appeal to the mythical "alienated conservative" voter while both neglecting and browbeating what should be their Black and Brown base.
  
  Also of great value is his summary of the entire U.S. labor history through the 80s. His realist corrective is sorely needed in an area that routinely suffers from unduly romanticizing past labor struggles. In reality, Big Labor was coopted by corporations as long as a century ago, and they've suffered almost continuous erosion of labor rights since, with the lone victories coming at the hands at more decentralized and radical efforts. The entire history can easily be read as a stinging critique of democratic centralism, which is quite remarkable coming from an avowed Marxist. Indeed, he strongly criticizes the Communist Party USA for capitulating to liberal electoralism in the 30s and 40s.
  
  Ultimately, while I think this book is extremely valuable, its dense academic style will make it difficult for most normies to get through. I wish it were more accessible so that I could more widely recommend it, but as it is I can only highly recommend it to academics, or those sufficiently passionate about labor history to be able to slog through the jargon-filled analysis.
  
  
  Not Bad Reviews
  
  
  @pointblaek
• 
  Kai

  magisterial history of the working class left in the US, probing the question of the absence of a US socialist party in the context of rapacious capitalist exploitation here and abroad, while brutally describing several of the other blunderous own-goals of various Lefts in the 20th century US. there were a few parts that got a little deep in the weeds / of the moment, for me, but just for a second consider how relevant these assessments of 1984 are to the politics of DSA in 2022 (pg 297, 298-99):
  
  "The ascendancy of electoralism on the left, far from being an expression of new popular energies or mobilizations, was, on the contrary, a symptom of the decline of social movements of the 60s, accompanied by organic crisis of the trade union and community-service bureaucracies. Rather than being a strategy for unifying mass struggles and grassroots organization on a higher programmatic level, electoralism was either imagined as a substitute for quotidian mass organizing, or it was inflated as an all-powerful catalyst for movement renewal"
  
  "With its explicit anti-imperialism, the Jackson campaign probably invited an impossible leap from DSA leaders like Harrington or Howe who have given life-long dedication to liberal zionist and anti-Communist causes. The absent of any debate about the election in DSA, except from a passionate group of Black members, leaves open the question of whether even the 'Debsian' grassroots of that organization are capable of challenging its traditional mortgage to Israel and the Cold War, or of realigning the organization toward mass political currents that do not have the endorsement of liberalism."
  
  if you don't have the wherewithal for it, check out this podcast from 2020
  https://thedigradio.com/podcast/mike-...
• 
  Sean Estelle

  Not many other books come to mind that are able to balance a broad, sweeping historical panoramic view of U.S. working class history with razor-sharp political analysis on the political moment it was written in.
  
  “As Lenin pointed out three quarters of a century ago, with a perspicacity that has yet to be fully assimilated, ‘political’ consciousness comes from outside the immediate field of the economic class struggle - which is not to say that it is superimposed on the working class by intellectuals, but rather that it grows out of the overdetermination of the economic class struggle by other contradictions and forms of oppression.”
• 
  Christopher

  The raw explanatory power of this book cannot be overstated. The sheer volume of economic and political points of data from throughout the last 100+ years of American history (up to the second Reagan administration) that gets synthesized so artfully in this book will leave you with some "I know kung fu..." moments straight out of The Matrix. Wish I had read this years ago. Recommended. RIP to a REAL one.
• 
  Lucien Ryan

  A history of the mid- and late-20th century American labor landscape, with lessons and insights that are extremely relevant for the left today. Davis takes a materialistic view of the changes in character and composition of both the labor movement and the democratic party, especially in the 80's. Davis's analysis helps us understand why there isn't a more politically active and united labor movement in the United States and still resonates today. The book itself straddles a line between a popular audience and an academic one, making it highly readable while extremely well-researched.
• 
  Corey

  As opposed to historical critiques, this book was written and published in the moment the ‘New Right’ and Reagan were rolling out power in the American political-economy. Prisoners of the American Dream, traces the failures of the American working-class to create and sustain a revolutionary class-consciousness.
  The book is divided into two parts: labor and American politics, and, the age of Reagan. Labour and American politics, explains the multi-ethnic and multi-racial peculiarities of the American working-class. This heterogeneity (supposedly) does not allow for the working-class to cohere. Antagonisms are articulated in racial, gendered, denominational, and political differences. These parochialisms indicate large swaths of the working-class have been barred from fair and equal participation in American democracy. Particularly precarious populations: African Americans, migrant workers, immigrants, and women to get their demands meet have been forced to work outside of the rank-and-file of organized labour. Organized labor has thus failed on two-fronts: the necessary and sustained linking of oppressions and meeting the radical demands of more oppressed groups, some of which are outside of its own orbit.
  The labor movement’s failures allowed the ‘New Right’ to emerge and prosper. Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential campaign formula paved the wave for the arrival of the potent neo-populism. The campaign was based on two schemas: the ‘Southern strategy’ and the ‘hidden Republican majority’. The ‘Southern strategy‘ amassed support in the growth of white resistance to the Civil Rights movement. Goldwater received just over 38% of the overall vote, five of his six electoral victories came in the Deep South: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Moreover, the ‘hidden Republican majority’, focused on winning over particular elements of the Democratic party. Focusing on individual, single-issue, local politics: ‘law and order interest groups‘ (National Rifle Association), ‘new Cold War‘ lobbies, political fundamentalism (Jerry Falwell’s moral majority), and the defense of white suburban family life (anti-busing movements, the ‘right to life’, and anti-gay rights campaigns). Despite popular imaginations of Reagan’s rise to power, support was garnered through social not economic issues. The ‘New Right‘ was born.
  Davis’s structural analysis of a failed working-class consciousness culminates in the 1980s Democratic party waving the white flag to the tenets of neo-liberalism and the military-industrial complex. Does ‘revolution’ and consciousness have to come from within the Democratic party? Tisk. Tisk.
• 
  Mike

  While the first section of this book is dense and a tad merciless about it, the information one can garner from it yet is still more than one would get out of a usual text that long. It's really that the rhythm and density of it makes it a bit unwelcoming and conceptually unclear. But when the second part, "The Age of Reagan," kicks in, the purpose of the prior chapters clicks into focus as the book progresses. But it's really the second section of this book that has the most incredible, clarifying analysis delivered with uncompromising boldness. The analysis of the Mondale campaign against Reagan, especially in relation to the Jackson campaign and the trade-unionist bureaucracies, rings all too true today as the Democratic party once again repeats its mistakes of abandoning itself to a near-identical "military Keynesianism" brand of economic regime that was a far cry from the economic ideas set forth in the New Deal or the Great Society. Davis's analysis remains intersectional and refreshing: Prisoners of the American Dream bolsters a lot of the arguments in Allen's The Invention of the White Race in that Davis convincingly argues that a 70s middle-class strata of white bourgeois moderates created and maintained a backlash to the civil rights aspirations of the 60s, and this backlash - along with the AFL-CIO's racist protectionism and lack of interest in organizing women's work (i.e., the upsurge of clerical workers that happened in those decades) - were part of a serious recipe that all in all constituted a death knell to the rise of a sustainable labor movement in solidarity with minorities and marginalized groups. The culture that brought the Democrats farther rightward was the one where the white middle strata - the buffer zone between oppressed minorities and prosperous white elites - was functioning, essentially as designed, when discussed in Allen's text. Much of Davis's analysis is spot on, and many of his predictions did come true. Portents of the Bernie campaign abound, and likewise with the right-wing nose-dive into fascism. The text is cathartic in its second act, dense with excoriating analysis, and masterfully prescient all in all. But it comes after a hell of a slog of a first act. I wonder if the second part would suffice on its own, but overall it did pay off handsomely as a whole.
• 
  Malcolm

  Simply excellent analysis of the reasons for working people's support of right wing politics during the 1980s. Sobering analysis of the power of ideology.
• 
  Dave Oakley

  very interesting seeing that the problems davis wrote about in the middle of the reagan years are still problems!
• 
  Ethan

  I love this book for the dense labor and economic history, his honest critiques of socialist movements right up through the Jesse Jackson campaign, his bold predictions, and his strategic assertions. Mostly focusing on the last item, here are a bunch of quotes I want to remember emphasizing the vanguard nature of socialist movements in Latin America. This seems prescient 36 years after publication, especially with the recent resurgence of Debsian ideas.
  
  “In a period when Eurocommunism has become practically defunct, the Arab left destroyed, and Asian capitalism seems eerily stabilized—the massive, deep and continuing process of popular radicalization in Latin America and the Caribbean has truly become /the/ specter haunting American imperialism.” (212)
  
  “The neocolonial logic of Sunbelt capitalism endures that no fundamental challenge can be mounted against the domestic low-wage economy without a simultaneous change in the borderland structures of hyper-unemployment and domination.” (228)
  
  “By 1990, there will be a large outer perimeter of US society composed of workers without citizen rights or access to the political system at all: an American West Bank of terrorized illegal laborers” (315-316).
  
  “Washington would probably be confronted with a revolutionary crisis in South America within the decade. Its dominant ideological colour, unlike in the Middle East or East Asia, is more likely to be an insurgent socialism than any other—perhaps on a new, Bolivarian scale.” (317)
  
  “The view expressed here is diametrically opposed to that of many recent left-liberal and social democratic writers, who profess to see vistas of new liberations and reformist possibilities in late imperial America. …Rather than taking hope from make-believe social democracy, it seems better to prepare for the colder climate ahead.” (318-319)
  
  “As I have argued at some length, the failure of the postwar labor movement to form an organic bloc with Black liberation, to organize the South or to defeat the power of Southern reaction in the Democratic Party, have determined, more than any other factors, the ultimate decline of American trade unionism and the rightward reconstruction of the political economy during the 1970s.” (322)
  
  “The single most important organizational problem confronting the North American left today is the huge disjuncture between the progressive political consciousness of Black America and the weakness of any national Black socialist cadre (the same dilemma applies to Chicanos/Mexicanos in the Southwest).” (323)
  
  “Leftists must reject the ‘majoritarian’ fallacy, nurtured by fellow-traveling in the Democratic Party, that all socialist politics must be cut to fit the pattern of whatever modish liberalism is in fashion or to conform with the requirements for securing ‘practical’ Democratic pluralities.” (324)
  
  “If one precondition for the future of a popular left in the United States is a revived struggle for equality based on independent socialist political action, the other and equally crucial condition will be increasing solidarity between the liberation movement in Southern Africa and Latin America and movements of the Black and Hispanic communities in the USA.” (326)
  
  “Ultimately, no doubt, the left in the United States will have to confront the fact that there is never likely to be an ‘American revolution’ as classically imagined by DeLeon, Debs or Cannon. If socialism is to arrive one day in North America, it is much more probable that it will be by virtue of a combined, hemispheric process or revolt that overlaps boundaries and interlaces movements. …It is necessary to begin to imagine more audacious projects of coordinated action and political cooperation among the popular lefts in all the countries of the Americas.” (327)
  
  
  
• 
  Cool_guy

  An incisive historical analysis of the failure of working class militancy in the U.S to coalesce in an independent labor party, let alone make the jump to socialism or even the social democracy which prevailed in Western Europe during the immediate postwar years. Basically, capital has used the unparalleled diversity (American exceptionalism, in this case, is a thing) of the American working class against it -- geographically, ethnically, racially, etc. The inability of those aspects of the New Deal order which benefited the working class to penetrate the South in any meaningful way, typified by the failure of the CIOs Operation Dixie, gave capital a redoubt from which to launch an offensive against that order as soon as the economic structure that it was based on began to falter.
  
  In the years since the book came out, those redoubts have multiplied across the world with the acceleration of neoliberal driven globalization. The planet is crisscrossed with jurisdictions that capital can easily cross but serve as formidable barriers to the movement of people (and international political and labor organizing).
  
  One half formed thought - obviously severe racial inequities still persist in the U.S The almost daily murder of black people by the police is only the most striking evidence of this. However, the culture has changed dramatically in the past 40 years. Meaningful ethnic and religious differences amongst whites have all but disappeared, and even racial divide are, in some bizzare ways, softening (look at the shift in black and latino men towards Trump in 2020), as neoliberal American culture grinds everyone into a homogenous pink chicken nugget slime. On one hand, this means increased alienation and inability to relate to neighbors, coworkers etc; but on the other, might this provide an opening to overcome the historical divisions which have dogged the working class? I don't know.
  
  A difficult read -- depressing and, as others have pointed out, Davis could use an editor. When he wants to be, he's very lucid. But oftentimes it's a slog. Still, I consider this book essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of the U.S through a Marxist perspective.
• 
  Left_coast_reads

  This is the first book by Mike Davis that I've read. The width and depth achieved here are amazing. The book has two parts. The first discusses why the US doesn't have a strong independent labor movement/party. The second analyzes Reaganism--how it emerged and where it's leading (the book was written in 1986).
  
  Davis argues that there are two typical paths to independent labor politics. One is through the struggle for democratic rights, usually within the context of a bourgeois revolution. Often in such transitions, the ascendant capitalist class is either unable or unwilling to completely dispose of feudal political structures, and so a proletarian current assumes a more important role in securing voting rights. The second path is through the radicalization of labor unions, which respond to state repression or political abandonment by creating their own party.
  
  In the US, neither of these happened. For one, the US did not have to overcome feudalism. In fact by 1750 most white men in the colonies could vote. There were many small property owners, as opposed to the large landed estates of Europe. There was no revolutionary need or ideological opportunity to the further radicalization of a workers movement.
  
  The labor movement in the US was weakened by racism. And various immigrant groups were often separated by linguistic and religious differences. Craft unionism was disproportionately powerful (vs industrial unionism) and maintained a close connection with the Democratic party for many years.
  
  Reaganism was, in some ways, a backlash to the movements of the 60s. The failure of organized labor to strongly align itself with them allowed a white middle income strata and specific industries in the Sunbelt to assert their will. Davis situates this within changes in technology, patterns of trade, election strategies, etc.
  
  The first part of the book is phenomenal. The second part is very good, but it demands a lot of the reader and tries to do too much IMO. I could read this three times and still learn new things.