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This essay, originally published by n+1, introduces a collective project of inquiry into the history of the US workers’ movement, taking the form of a Haymarket Originals podcast, Fragile Juggernaut, and an accompanying newsletter series. After decades of defeat, workers are on the move again. Many of those interested today in a revived labor movement know that unions once exercised real sway over the national economy and politics in the US. And the distant memory of how the labor movement was
These questions of labor and democracy are pertinent in 2024. They are questions about which there has been too-little serious investigation in over a generation, over which interval the stories of labor in the New Deal have tended to congeal into celebratory hagiographies. But in light of the challenges we confront in the present, we think it an appropriate opportunity to invite public participation in the ongoing process of rethinking and rediscovery that gives permanent life to the study of the past. “The depository of historical knowledge,” as the philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed, is “the struggling, oppressed class itself.”