SPRING 2026
ISSUE 06

₁ Robert F. Williams, “While God Lay Sleeping,” in The Memoirs of Robert and Mabel Williams: African American Freedom, Armed Resistance, and International Solidarity, ed. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Gloria Aneb House, and John H. Bracey Jr. (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 285–86.

₂ LTX underwent several mergers and acquisitions in the first two decades of this century, becoming part of Credence Systems Corporation during the financial crash of 2008. In 2018, it was acquired by Cohu, Inc., which supplies test equipment and services to semiconductor manufacturers. Recently incorporating AI into its testing methodology, Cohu has begun offering its services to self-driving vehicle systems and data centers.

₃ Martin and Jessie Glaberman papers, Box 39, folder 31, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. This is also where Dylan Davis, a member of the Long-Haul editorial collective, discovered “Present Depths.”

₄ Noel Ignatiev, Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2021), 109–110.

₅ For more on this tradition, see Sojourner Truth Organization, Workplace Papers (self-published, 1980). http://www.sojournertruth.net/workplacepapers.html. See Noel Ignatiev, “Black Worker, White Worker” for special attention to this theme.

₆ Staughton Lynd, “Stan Weir,” in Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers, ed. Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd (Beacon Press, 1973), 177. See also Stan Weir’s contribution to that collection, “The Informal Work Group,” 179–200.

₇ Elsewhere, Ignatiev goes further. In a passage from a 1991 draft entitled “Nothing Less Than a Total Change is Worth Fighting For,” he states: “Because the unions could no longer discipline the workers in the mass production industries, the employers withdrew their support for the collective bargaining system and began a new round of union-busting, computerization, and relocation; the amount of functioning plant and equipment they were willing to scuttle in the search for a more malleable labor force is the exact index of their fear of the working class.” Martin and Jessie Glaberman papers, Box 39, folder 32, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

In the fall of 1984, when he was a new doctoral student at Harvard, Noel Ignatiev submitted an essay for an independent study. Entitled “Present Depths,” the paper surveyed the rapid and cataclysmic changes then taking place across US society. The general restructuring of capitalist industry – particularly in the long-established sectors of auto, mining, steel, and rubber – was accompanied by the geographic relocation of production. Strongholds of worker control, “where the working class had been able to develop confidence in itself and its ability to resist the domination of capital,” were isolated, disaggregated, and broken apart.

Ignatiev’s own trajectory reflects this basic shift. For over twenty years, he had worked as a steelworker, primarily in and around Chicago, toiling among groups of Black, Mexican, and white workers in various plants from International Harvester (IH) to U.S. Steel Gary Works. It was here where his interest in US history developed alongside a first-hand reckoning with the class that made it. When he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to pursue a PhD, he simultaneously started temp work as a night watchman for the Norwood-based tech firm LTX.² Working nights at a facility that manufactured semiconductor test equipment, he hoped that, on the university’s dime, he might eventually embark upon a comparative study of the labor process there in light of his previous experience as a Chicago steelworker. Writing to Martin Glaberman that July, Ignatiev reported that 

The work here is cleaner, and it’s not noisy, and it seems fairly laid back about having radios in the assembly areas, and a recreation room where the people go and shoot pool, and a nicer cafeteria – but when you see a roomful of people with soldering guns and half assembled computers in front of them, with racks of circuit boards and housings and god-knows-what-all parts stacked in bins around the side – well, that tells me it’s a proletariat.

The work here is cleaner, and it’s not noisy, and it seems fairly laid back about having radios in the assembly areas, and a recreation room where the people go and shoot pool, and a nicer cafeteria – but when you see a roomful of people with soldering guns and half assembled computers in front of them, with racks of circuit boards and housings and god-knows-what-all parts stacked in bins around the side – well, that tells me it’s a proletariat.³

On his transition out of heavy industry, he reflected further:

So it came to pass that some years after riding in the 1940s-era bus through a gate under a massive arch with the name of U.S. Steel’s founder etched on it onto the grounds of the largest works of the largest steel company in the U.S., I find myself sitting in a leather armchair looking out through two-story windows onto the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are Oriental rugs on the floor and bound volumes of Punch on the shelves. As I am listening to gifted undergraduates play a Schubert quintet, I think that if the rest of the fellas back in Gary found out how good I had it, they would all leave and there would be nobody left to make steel.⁴

These class relations operative in the early 1980s were diagnosed in “Present Depths” as the culmination of a series of struggles between oppressor and oppressed in the heart of production: “A fight that each time ended,” as Marx had declared in one of the first lines of the Communist Manifesto, “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Ignatiev’s accounts of working in Chicago, in the Sojourner Truth Organization, and beyond, showed how real cultures of worker insubordination had been locked into an uneasy stalemate with managerial initiatives intended to neutralize them.⁵ In the 1960s and 1970s, urban spaces were shaped by the monopoly of capital and the socialization of labor. Immense swaths of fixed capital, sunken technical capacities, and established infrastructures of production formed the basis both for large capitalist enterprises and for urban concentrations of working-class communities. But by the early 1980s, these configurations had been burst asunder in a process commonly referred to as “deindustrialization.”

In Ignatiev’s assessment, deindustrialization was not an abstract process, wrought by no one from nowhere. Rather, it was a case of “the common ruin of the contending classes” hitting the ground in US manufacturing. The major machine manufacturer, IH, for example, faced up to its crisis of profitability with self-annihilation, liquidating its pension funds and eventually subjecting its fixed assets and machinery to planned demolitions. But for Ignatiev, contrary to received wisdom, it was the workers who hurled the company onto this ruinous path. In the crisis years culminating in the five-month strike of 1979–80, IH workers had stood firm, particularly over proposed compromises on standards of living and their informal yet customary work rules, even as it ultimately meant the destruction of their own jobs. IH was an emblem, however. According to Ignatiev, “From that point the strategy of capital became that of shutting down the basic industries, strongholds of proletarian strength.” With multinationalization of industry abroad and in the US South, capital sought refuge from traditions of militancy that had enlivened wider concentrations and plant-level networks of workers in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.

Ignatiev’s work experience shows the process of deindustrialization with American characteristics in miniature, viewed not from the formal structures of unions or reform movements, but the more capacious and dynamic structures of what Stan Weir called “informal work groups.” These are groups of workers who labor “together daily in face-to-face communication with one another,” and who develop an internal culture of continuity in workplace standards based on a collective and largely unstated determination of working conditions.⁶ Much more than the union as such, these groups were the locus and source of class struggle, stubbornly standing in the way of management advances. It is therefore these groups, and the cultures that connected them, that had to be overcome with such drastic measures. When Ignatiev’s group of three workers stage an informal “little strike,” they effectively destroy the machine at which they are stationed. But so, too, is their group dissolved. When the mass of IH workers tank the company through a monumental strike that insists on their rights of control over their time on the job, many more work groups are dissolved.

This struggle that reconstitutes the oppressors and oppressed must be seen, Ignatiev stresses, as part of a much longer process: The introduction of machines in the 19th century was met with sabotage and led to stepped-up police power; piece wages were fought through craft and guild control, which were undermined by “scientific” management and then countered in turn by industrial unionism; the subsequent incorporation of unions into management partnerships provoked an intense series of wildcat strikes; “and so forth,” he writes.⁷ Those working in the movement today – increasingly in newly unionized, or more militantly organized, workplaces outside of manufacturing – are forced to confront the organizational openness of the situation relative to the recent past, even as new technologies are engineered that seek to substitute domination for control.

Like Ignatiev’s work more broadly, “Present Depths” is a call to attend to possibilities of organizing beyond official union channels. Ignatiev’s evident cynicism towards the role of unions and his polemics against the union reform projects of his time clearly favor a strategic approach of independent self-organization on the job. In the depths of our own present, under a different paradigm of labor management, the role of unions may well be shifting in light of novel episodes of self-organization that are responding to a renewed managerial offensive. After decades of defeat, Ignatiev’s writing calls for us to learn from and adapt self-conscious initiatives from earlier waves of struggle, without privileging one model or another over genuine creative attentiveness to the present balance of forces and those patterns of organization and motion that are already existent or emergent. Appreciating the heroic strike experiences of IH, or the communists in the Trade Union Educational League, the practices of workers’ papers in the tradition of the International Socialists, or even the recent reform movements catching fire among K–12 workers, does not mean striving to reproduce them. These earlier episodes may provide hypotheses to test out in the course of organizing, but they do not furnish ready-made plans.

* * *

In the absence of older bedrocks of organization and association from within heavy industry, the increasingly multinational working-class struggle in the United States is taking new forms. Since Ignatiev drafted “Present Depths,” institutions like Harvard have become some of the largest employers in their respective regions. And rather than seeking refuge in the Ivies, workers are exiting universities having undergone experiences of militant struggle themselves. Teachers, nurses, hospitality and sanitation workers, and above all the networks formed by immigrant workers across these sectors, shape our present landscape of political possibility. These relatively new formations of intransigent workers, comprising innumerable informal work groups, contain traces of sociality and cooperation immanent to the labor process but are also extensive with the broader terrain of social reproduction. They are therefore connected to many different layers of the 21st-century working class and continue to attack the class enemies of the present in the older spirit of militancy that Ignatiev recorded and reflected in this essay.

The recent rise of ICE terror is the wager that hyper-militarized border policing can be put into the service of prying apart vestigial and novel inroads of international solidarity within the working class from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. In those cities, ordinary workers confront police power in their workplaces and at every stage of their commute. Everyday opposition to ICE, when not taken by members of community patrols, are anchored by indignant workers at work, on their way to work, or in the neighborhoods where they live. In each confrontation, working people assert their desire for better conditions of life, while the border police assist in the ruling-class imperative to erode them.

Ignatiev writes of “the historical and moral element” that contributed to the determination of the value of labor power, as well as the habits and expectations of what acceptable standards of living would be. These are shaped by the struggles “between different classes in society and within the working class itself.” “Once established,” he wrote, this element “is very difficult to dislodge,” leading workers into a posture of refusal of anything that falls below it, “even if the refusal entails . . . some hardship.” The fight to determine a moral economy not only of wages and working conditions, but the frequency and volume of exposure to state violence, is precisely what is unfolding through the now daily mobilization against ICE terror as two opposed camps look to consolidate and naturalize certain relationships of solidarity, courage, and force. “Present Depths” discloses something essential about our moment. It instructs us where, in this reconfigured landscape of class forces, in the ruins of the industrial heyday, to look for politics: not in the ruling class or Trump himself, but in the “thousands, millions of such daily encounters” between people, their bosses, and the state, which shape “the historical and moral element” of what they will accept and what they must refuse.