Reposted by Gabriel Winant
If you're lucky, someone will eventually review your book in a way that almost makes you jealous of their insights into the material. It's fair to say that the historian Gabe Winant has just published that review of my book. dissentmagazine.org/article/muti...
dissentmagazine.org
The Party of Baristas - Dissent Magazine
Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny shows that the labor organizing of the radicalized PMC is far more than a fit of whimsical proletarian roleplay.
![The question of whether or not these groups-auto workers and grad students, screenwriters and teamsters-belong together is not one that has a self-evident or objective answer. It is an eminently political question. [...] Certainly, classes cannot be made from just anything: there must be some material substrate that is shared or at least comparable. But no two workers, much less groups of workers, are identical. Rather, all workers must decide to affiliate with each other, see themselves in each other, and become something together. That is true at every scale, from two workmates to whole sectors of the economy. Classes are made politically. Indeed, the political work of deciding what to bring to the fore, of how to make experiences commensurable, is what organizing is. The necessity of the activity itself reveals the lack of the guarantee. When someone says that grad students have hijacked the UAW, or that gentrifiers are taking over the Democratic Party, they are not making a descriptive observation, but a normative one. Let them make their case.
It's easy to blow hot air about who doesn't belong with whom. But it's not a serious idea if it has no stakes: it's the reaction of a child who thinks peas and ketchup shouldn't touch on the plate. If the center and the right think the working class and professionals don't belong together, they should make an offer to one group or the other about a better affiliation. Their failure to do so in any serious way is the condition for today's growing socialist coalition. What Mutiny shows is how this alternative proposition has, over a decade and more, been painstakingly turned into something concrete. It has limits and contradictions of its own. But it is on the table now, people can see it, and some of them like it. If the incumbent political order is anything other than historically exhausted, it will have to produce an answer that is more than a temper tantrum.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zyqczbqcnv4ubznwjhnfgwhj/bafkreiab6mdsimej6rf7dcf4hn3vd2mpololi2mcwjyeatatnwfaowdfaq)
