"The movement is still very young, and it’s very hard to gauge support for it. But one labor official shares with me a very interesting data point: Working America, the affiliate of the AFL-CIO that organizes workers from non-union workplaces, has signed up approximately 25,000 new recruits in the last week alone, thanks largely to the high visibility of the protests.

"Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America, tells me that this actually dwarfs their most successful recruiting during the Wisconsin protests. “In so many ways, Wisconsin was a preview of what we’re now seeing,” Nussbaum says. “We thought it was big when we got 20,000 members in a month during the Wisconsin protests. This shows how much bigger this is.”"

There were fifty pro-union rallies in fifty state capitols today, outnumbering their right-wing Tea Party opponents when the latter bothered to show up. This is what one would expect. The Right can bring out numbers, but it can't usually match the Left in this terrain - its real power is in the support it gets from the state and the ruling class. But more surprising perhaps is the way in which two crucial aspects of the state in Wisconsin have swung behind the protesters. First of all, the local Democratic Party has actually demonstrated more spine than I've seen in the Labour Party of late. Second of all, the police - yes, the poh-leece - refused to evacuate protesters from the capitol building on orders from the governor today, and instead joined them.

This is raising questions which I don't fully know how to answer at the moment. It's surely unprecedented for major components of local power structures to swing behind labour in such a major way. And this is all happening in the much maligned mid-West: the strikes have been breaking not only in Wisconsin, but in Iowa and Ohio where similar measures are threatened. The scale of the protests and strikes, with 70,000 marching in Madison last weekend, the degree of organisation and rank-and-file militancy that has been unleashed, and the speedy way in which the campaign has taken the elements of popular discontent, articulated them and polarised them to the Left, may have shocked the political establishment. It may also be that this has raised doubts among sectors of the ruling class who previously accepted the direction of the Koch Brothers/Tea Party wing of the Republicans purely for the material benefit of tax breaks and weaker unions, without having invested in the wider strategy of outright conflict. After all, if strikes spread, these employers could stand to lose tens of millions for every day of action, perhaps more than they gain in any tax breaks. And the risk of energising and rebuilding a national left-wing movement after the Obama administration had successfully coopted the elements of leftist, working class dissent, rearticulated and neutralised them, is one that they may be wary of. But the Wisconsin campaign shouldn't just be looked at in terms of the crisis of capitalism, the divisions among the ruling class and the crisis of the state apparatus, as important as these are. The initiative is very much on the side of the workers at the moment, and the way it has energised the Left across the US suggests that it might in the near future demand study as an example of a successful left-wing, labour-based political intervention.

Michael Moore's new film is an attack on capitalist ideology. Is this different from an attack on capitalism as such? In a sense it is, as the film is neither a comprehensive indictment of capitalism's ills, nor is it a theoretical survey of how capitalism works. It is not ideologically consistent, nor does it avoid some illusions of its own, as FDR's haggard corpse is reanimated so that we can hear once more about how his vision of American society would, given the chance of fulfillment, have left American workers with a security and autonomy they now lack. Still, the film works best as a critique of American capitalism's soft-sell mythologies, as well as a celebration of working class resistance.

The time-frame in which the narrative unfolds is familiar: from the lustrous post-war fantasies of the American Dream - anyone can be rich one day, workers can have middle class lifestyles, property equals freedom and opportunity - to the cynical 2005 Citibank memo celebrating a new "plutonomy" in which the richest 1% of households owns more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. The financial technocrats who wrote that memo were not whistling dixie. They intended their analysis to enable their bosses to properly assess how wealth was owned, who the important consumers were, and thus how money was to be made. These are the people whom Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur characterised as "enemies" of the American people. And when did the American dream turn nasty? By Moore's account, it begins with the Reagan counter-revolution, and a coup of big capital led by bankers, in which unions were destroyed and workers subject to harder labour while wages flatlined. A more critical attitude to the Democrats would be useful here. It was Carter who began the task of switching to neoliberalism. The big fall in union membership and density began in 1978, when Carter imposed job cuts in return for bailing out Chrysler - the union leaders were too dependent on the Democratic leadership to resist. Moore knows all about the Democrats and the complacency of US business unionism, so the ommission is curious. He certainly doesn't give Bill Clinton the same free pass.

Other ommissions also weaken the force of the narrative. For example, it is quite appropriate that the narrative begins with the post-war era. This is the period in which the situation of American workers, with respect to militancy and ideological radicalism, began to diverge sharply from that of their European counterparts. And Moore is quite clear that the dominance that enabled the American ruling class to begin the process of intimidating workers resulted from the destruction of its major capitalist opponents in WWII, leaving it the world's productive centre. But the reference to America's subsequent empire-building is fleeting, as if it was incidental to the cultural power of the ruling class, and its ideological domination in that period. And while there is a focus on the carrot of capitalist strategy - that alluring Dream - there is no glimpse of the stick. It might have been useful to look at the way US radicalism was destroyed by the state's anticommunist purges in workplaces and the unions, if one wished to understand how capitalist ideology acquired such dominance.

The religious critique of capitalism as an "evil" that cannot be "regulated" but must be "eliminated" is the moral centre of the film. It is obviously intended as a counterpoint to the appropriation of religious ideology by the rich, and this amounts to an important cultural intervention, especially as the teabaggers advise us that God put capitalism in the US constitution. Moore can't find a reference to capitalism and free markets in the blessed founding document, but he can find a priest or two to cite scriptural hostility to the rich. And there's even a bishop on hand at Republican Windows and Doors to offer the Catholic church's support for the sit-in strike. A churl might point out that the church has a rather patchy record on the rich vs poor issue, and the theological virtuosity of their rationalisations for supporting bosses, bigots and right-wing dictators can hardly be in doubt. This churl might add that one can either base an attack on capitalism on God's say so, which is intellectually dubious, or one can say that such a critique can stand with or without God's approval, which makes the appeal to religion superfluous. Nah. But this churl would be missing the point that Americans are an unusually religious - not to say spiritual - bunch, and religion is a field of ideological contest. It doesn't necessarily do any harm to remind people who claim to be religious of the social gospel. And speaking as an atheist (some call me an auto-theist, but one forgives them), I've always preferred - say - Terry Eagleton's heterodox take on religion to the literal-minded and unimaginative pannings of the 'new atheists'. And I don't mind the language of good and evil: capitalism is an evil regime, arguably the most evil system ever invented by man, including the church.

At other points, Moore's attempt to give socialism an American face is less convincing. Egalitarian coperatives can certainly be very humane and fulfilling enterprises for the workers involved, but the same profit-motive that Moore castigates elsewhere motivates these institutions. They're still subject to the pressures of competition, and the same basic labour discipline, with its hierarchy of managers and line workers, obtains. There is still the drive to externalise costs, which poses a risk to consumers. It still acts as a competitive unit of production in a capitalist society, and the competitive pressures on a cooperative enterprise trying to work effectively in capitalism can be lethal. It can be bought up, or put out of business, or it can respond to those pressures by producing a more rigid hierarchy, introducing wage differentials to boost productivity, etc. Still, the basic idea that Moore is trying to communicate - democratising industry, bringing about workers' control of industry - is vital. Any case against capitalism, and for socialism, would be threadbare without it.

The strongest part of the film, in my opinion, is the treatment of the bailout, the "financial coup d'etat" in which the secretary for Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, organised the expropriation of the public treasury to the tune of $750bn (just for starters) so that favoured banks could build up their capital stock. Where, you may still be wondering, did all that money go? Answer: no one knows. Congressional overseers don't know, and the banks aren't telling because no clause in the bailout compelled them to. And it isn't just the money. There was the attempt to change the law so that the treasury could more or less do as it wished to siphon money to finance-capital without court review or oversight. There was the stitch-up of Congress, the campaign to deflect public opposition, and the threats of martial law. However the handling of Obama's part in this jack, presumably based on the faint hope that he would do something differently, is exceptionally delicate. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur alludes to it, but beyond that there is no discussion of Obama's decision to use his popularity and bargaining clout with Congress to force the bailout through. In that respect, the film was dated before it was even distributed. Most Americans are furious about TARP and its successors, and this is one of the biggest factors in the rapid drop in support for Obama and the Democrats. And Moore is far too nice to Bernie Sanders who, even if he calls himself a socialist, isn't to the left of many liberal Democrats.

Capitalism: A Love Story does not involve the emotional crescendos of Moore's previous output. Think of the jarring juxtaposition, in Sicko, between the entranced exploration of European health systems and the bitterly cold treatment of America's poor by the healthcare giants. There are shocking, appalling moments in Capitalism, but these are interspersed with stories of resistance as Moore's cameras film people preventing the eviction of local families, and capture workers at Republic Windows and Doors as they force the Bank of America to back down and fund their severance packages. You're less likely to weep like a punctured ulcer, watching this, than jab your fist in the air, and start a war cry. And it's about fucking time. Forgive me, but as much as I admire Moore, I don't know if I could take him doing the "who are we, what have we become" schtick once more. There is no "we". Kaptur was more right than she knew: American capitalists aren't fellow patriots, citizens, equal before - y'know - God and whatever. They're enemies of the people. Do you hear me, Americans? They're your enemies! They're your enemies! Death to American capitalists! Death to capitalism!

A year after the ecstatic spectacle of Obama's nomination, and more than a year after the Republicans were overthrown in some surprising new places, the Democrats have lost the previously safe senatorial seat of Massachusetts, lately the fiefdom of the late Ted Kennedy. This spells the end of Obama's 'healthcare reform' in its current, pathetic, version. Nancy Pelosi has made this clear: "I just don't see the votes," she has said. Her Democratic confederates largely agree. It looks as if, predictably, the massive public consensus in favour of healthcare reform, has once more been squandered. This was the Republicans' hope when it became clear that candidate Scott Brown was leading the polls. He told his suburban voting base that if they wanted to scupper this socialistic abomination, he would be the vital 41st vote for Republican filibusters.

The 'debate', if I may speak loosely, over healthcare reform was one that acted as a lightning rod for right-wing hysteria about high government spending and taxes. Relatively rich GOP voters identified their class interests in terms of lower taxes, a smaller state, and less handouts for the lazy bums. (Didn't those irresponsible, impoverished, often black folks cause this crisis through their subprime borrowing? Isn't it time to reintroduce red-lining and free up the police to deal with the inevitable crime spree among this hapless bunch, rather than lining their pockets with other people's hard-earned cash?) Scott Brown knew this, and evidently recognised that the best way to package some dog-whistling over the issue would be to give it an impeccably liberal imprimatur. His campaign crafted the successful 'JFK ad', which segued JFK spelling out his Keynesian tax cuts programme from 1962 into Scott Brown explaining that lower taxes would equal more jobs - he even delivered a concise account of the 'multiplier effect', though I suspect this was a coded appeal to 'trickle down' economics. The great majority of polls taken after the ad was aired put Brown ahead. Notably, Brown won in some of the areas with highest unemployment. One thirty-second slot would by no means have been enough to do the job. What really mattered was the disillusionment of Democratic voters. The turnout, though reasonable for a 'special' election, was way down on 2008, and fell most dramatically in the most Democratic areas:

In President Obama’s strongest areas — towns where he received more than 60 percent of the vote — the number of voters was about 30 percent below 2008 levels. In the rest of the state, the number of voters was down just 25 percent. In Boston — one of the strongest areas for Democrats — the number voting fell 35 percent.

The Democratic base, in other words, was just not mobilised. Lance Selfa, author of a critical history of the Democrats, asks why this was. It is easy to blame the lousy performance of Croakley, or whatever her name was. Her campaign treated the race as a coronation, at a time when voters are angry. But if right-wing voters are exercised by 'socialism', liberal voters had little to be excited about. In November 2008, they voted for a healthcare programme with a public option, lower insurance premiums, and universal coverage. What they were offered was a system that provided government enforced subsidies to the insurance and healthcare companies, lacked a public option, compelled people who might not be able to afford it to buy insurance policies, and didn't offer universal coverage. The healthcare industry, which had co-drafted the legislation, saw its stocks soar on Wall Street as soon as the legislation was finalised.

The unpopularity of Obama's proposals cannot be reduced to right-wing hysteria, which is only persuasive for about a fifth of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans. Such shrill nonsense motivates a right-wing base and, for that reason, cannot be dismissed - but let's get some perspective here. For a start, Americans hate the current healthcare system. The majority in poll after poll favours something like a single-payer or national insurance health system. That isn't reflected in every poll, of course, but the overwhelming trend is for Americans to prefer a government-run health system to the private, heavily subsidised, system. Secondly, this is Massachusetts we're talking about here. This is a state where a powerful majority voted 'yes' on a ballot initiative favouring a single payer system in 2008. The vote against the Democrats in their heartland was not a vote against socialised medicine, because that is not what was on offer. And despite the slavishly positive spin put on the proposed legislation by Democratic congresspersons, even many of the pro-Obama progressives hated it, and were deeply disillusioned by it. Even Arianna Huffington, bless her Coca-Cola advertising slots, has declared the end of hope.

The current polling status of congressional Democrats is pitiful, hovering at about the same level of popularity as the Bush administration in its lowest ebb. Obama's popularity has also sank, if not to the same lows. This rapid dissipation, after only 12 months, reflects a class anger. As Selfa points out, the president who won on the basis of a claim to represent Main Street rather than Wall Street (ho ho!) is widely understood to represent his major backers:

A September 2009 Economic Policy Institute poll asked a national sample of registered voters to say who they thought had "been helped a lot or some" from the policies the administration enacted. The result: 13 percent said the "average working person," 64 percent identified "large banks," and 54 percent said "Wall Street investment companies."

Obama knows this perfectly well, which is why he was blustering some while back about not running for office to serve a bunch of fat cat Wall Street bankers, and may also explain some of his tentative moves to lightly tax and regulate the parasites. Indeed, in the wake of the loss of Massachusetts, Obama has talked up his reforms yesterday, promising a 'fight' with Wall Street firms who tried to sink his proposals. These are not radical reforms - if the multi-millionaire Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne approves of them, they aren't that radical. But the president's combative language at least suggests that he is aware of where his weakness lies. This electoral pressure is important, though it is nothing compared to a mass movement. And I would contrast the miserable healthcare reforms with the surprisingly good proposals for immigrant rights reform, which comes on the back of pressure from a well-organised campaign rooted in labour and the migrants themselves, despite the latter's difficulties with organising under the ICE jackboot. This tells us that the Democrats are susceptible, if only at some remove and with considerable reluctance, to pressure from the left. In that light, the best thing that could happen to the electoral coalition that swept Obama to power is that they stop hoping, and start fighting.

One of the most interesting meetings at the very well-attended Historical Materialism conference was that addressed by Kim Moody on the effects of crisis on labour. (I should mention that the meeting was also addressed by two Turkish comrades on the impact of recession on female labour but, alas, that is for another post). For, although organised labour threw its weight behind Obama's election, it has so far been unable to extract much advantage from it. The two key policies that labour was pressing for was healthcare, and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the union movement in America has been in crisis for upward of thirty years now, and it has yet to recover. All the major unions have experienced substantial declines in membership, all are experiencing a profound financial crisis in part because they had investments that have turned to ordure during the crisis, and all are trapped in an impossible model of 'business unionism' that has consistently crippled the American working class. American labour has thus lacked the ability to put enough pressure on Obama to see its key policies through. Obamacare is proving to be a corporate-driven shambles, and the EFCA will be seriously watered down.

Moody tracked the origins of this crisis to the late 1970s when, beginning in 1979, there was a sudden nosedive in membership, strike rate, NLRB negotiations and - as a consequence - wages. Part of the background for this sudden crisis of unionism in 1979-81 was that the union leadership had expended much of its energies combatting the rank and file insurgencies of the Sixties and Seventies that had challenged the norms of business unionism, thus evaporating activists energies on internal struggles. The dependence on the Democratic Party machinery was also fatal. The AFL-CIO helped Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, with the promise of a labour-friendly bill, but it was filibustered and contained. And when Chrysler was going under, labour depended on Carter to organise a bail-out and thus engaged in its first, fatal, pre-Reaganite round of concessionary bargaining. Job losses were conceded and the union movement subsequently lost members and leverage. It was already ripe for plucking apart by the time Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union.

This nosedive in unionism reached a plateau by 1982 and it facilitated a wave of restructuring and spatial re-organisation in American industry, including auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, mining, telecommunications and building. The US steel industry alone lost a quarter of a million jobs by the end of the 1980s, as larger firms downsized and smaller groups such as Birmingham Steel and Oregon Steel pioneered new successful models of accumulation. As in Europe, the manufacturing sector shed jobs in bulk and waged a bitter but often successful war against shop floor organisation. Through intensified labour regimes and technical innovation, capital was able to raise productivity while wages remained static rather than rising with productivity gains as had been the case in previous decades. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity in US industry rose by 46.5%, but the median wage fell by 8%. (Figures from Harman's Zombie Economics). Notwithstanding a brief period of growth at the end of the 1990s, real wages continued to fall in the Bush years, and are still falling while productivity has soared during this crisis. (Though, typically, a number of US economists writing in the New York Times have taken the opportunity to argue that US wages are actually far too high and should be reduced to the global "market-clearing rate"). The intensification of work included a crude increase in the rate of exploitation by way of increased working hours, so that the average labourer in the US worked almost as many hours in 2004 as a Mexican worker (1,824 and 1,848, respectively). This process, technically known as 'class struggle from above', did facilitate a substantial recovery in aggregate profit rates until about 1997 - not to the levels of the post-war boom, but certainly above the troughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For figures, see David McNally, 'From Finance Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation and the Global Slow Down', Historical Materialism, 17.2).

The model of business unionism that persisted and still persists involves the acceptance of capitalism not just de facto but in explicit ideological terms - the language of class politics is specifically eschewed. It involves reliance on the Democratic Party which is, both in terms of its outlook and leading personnel, a capitalist party, not even a reformist party akin to European social democracy. It involves bureaucratic top-down methods of organising and growth in which the latter is the preserve of 'professionals', long-term sweetheart deals, no-strike agreements, and the exclusion of would-be members if they do not belong to existing bargaining units.

The effect of this depoliticised, professionalised model of unionism is not only to forestall struggles but to substantially weaken them where they arise. Moody gave the example of auto-workers striking at a BMW plant who met with European trade union delegates. They explained that they were not against the company - they liked the company - but they just wanted a voice, a seat at the table. The delegates said 'they're going to get beaten', and of course they were beaten, because they didn't understand that it was a class conflict not a family quarrel. Another problem facing US workers is the one I mentioned in a previous post - older forms of community-based workers' organisation have suffered because labour is much more mobile than before. American workers can travel a hundred miles to get a job now, whereas once it was common to live within walking distance of work. Moreover, they are unlikely to work at the same plant, where common union representation would signify a common struggle. They are atomised, fragmented, and dispersed. The only workers' constituency that resembles those old communities is among immigrants.

The formation of 'Change to Win', which was supposed to break with the more bureaucratic methods of the AFL-CIO, did not augur a new period of growth. This was in part because the split didn't involve any substantial political or tactical disagreement. It was entirely driven by the unions' respective leaderships. The Change to Win federation essentially accepted the same model of recruitment as the AFL-CIO, based on professionalised campaigns and economies of scale. The SEIU, one major constituent of the Change to Win coalition, was supposed to have recruited tens of thousands of new members, but its net growth after factoring in losses amounted to approx. 10,000 - not really that large given that the SEIU represents 1.8m workers. Its leadership has publicly eschewed any idea of class politics, instead vaunting that old shibboleth, 'partnership'. And it has increasingly resorted to carrying out raids on other, smaller unions - a nasty and rightly scorned tactic in the labour movement. The UAW and USWA unions experienced losses. Only the smaller unions have made gains. There are positive developments, however. Unions are changing their attitude to immigration and increasingly looking to organise the 12 million Mexican workers in the US. The SEIU, despite its commitment to business unionism, did take some pioneering steps in this direction with its famous janitors campaigns in the 1990s. (The campaigns featured in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses). But it has not organised a great deal in the South, which is ripe for a recruitment drive, and where tentative efforts in, eg, the meatpacking industry have met with success.

Moody has long advocated a version of 'social movement unionism' to combat the conservatism and limitations of the 'business unionism' model. Rather than reserved for members of bargaining units, unions should be thrown open to all - not least those many workers who regularly volunteer their time and efforts to help union recruitment drives, but are not union members themselves. The unions should campaign on broader issues and be integrated into larger campaigns rather than restrict themselves to narrowly 'economic' issues. We had a glimpse of this with Seattle and after, and with the massive organisation of immigrant workers in 2006, subsequently crushed under a wave of ICE raids and horrendous repression. But as yet the model of business unionism has not been broken with on a large scale and, as a result, recruitment still doesn't make up for lost members, and union density continues to decline. It will require a painstaking accumulation of forces before the necessary shift can take place, but it would also require an ideological break with the Democratic Party to be sustainable - now a much more delicate and difficult matter with the Obama executive. To the extent that white workers break with Obama, it may just as well be to the right as to the left.

(Yet another whinging, pessimistic post. Where is the Hope? Where is the change-you-can-believe-in? Tsk.)

I'm afraid I was too late with my entry to the ReadySteadyBooks symposium, but I did want to draw attention to David S Roediger's How Race Survived US History. It is an extremely timely argument about the enduring significance of 'race' in American society, as well as a sophisticated polemic against the complacent assumption that the Obama phenomenon spells the end of American racism. As the title implies, Roediger is interested not only in the origins of racism, and the way that it has been perpetuated and resisted, but particularly in how it managed to weather challenges, from the revolution to the civil war and 'jubilee', to the civil rights movement and its long-term results, including the election of Obama. After all, as he points out, "black males born 27 years after the most important civil rights acts, are estimated to have a 29% chance of imprisonment, more than seven times that of whites born in the same year". 224 years after the Declaration of Independence with its "created equal" clause, blacks and Latinos suffered poverty almost triple that of the white population. Over half a century after Brown v the Board of Education, 'apartheid schools' still flourish in America. Obviously race does matter, despite the emotional eulogies that followed Obama's victory.

To understand this, Roediger investigates the origins of 'possessive whiteness' as a legal and political doctrine that helped circumvent class struggle in the Virginia colonies and elsewhere, the Lockean arguments for slavery and colonialism, and the use of 'race' to manage and stratify the labour market. He takes issue with the simplistic arguments of the free market right, that racism was somehow inappropriate for capitalist development, acting as fetters to successful accumulation. According to the neoconservative canon, capitalism undermines racism by promoting abstract labour (everyone's muscle is the same regardless of skin pigmentation), and preferring supposedly more efficient free labour, But capital, Roediger notes, has profited most not by reducing the workforce to 'abstract labour' as per a certain blinkered marxist orthodoxy, but through the production of differences within labour - differences organised by gender, nation, race, and religion. This is crucial for the development of 'white republicanism', in which the egalitarian aspirations of white, working class Americans were successfully redirected into support for a hierarchical and exploitative system based on white supremacy. As for preferring free labour, slaver capital generated immense profit from the commodities whom they worked and traded. Northern capital also benefited, as did some of the North's elite universities. Northern liberals were as a result unwilling to seriously challenge that structure - so much so that in the early years of the Civil War, Lincoln insisted that defecting slaves were in fact nothing more than "contraband" who should be restored to their owners. It was only the pressures of military necessity on Lincoln, and a mass strike by slaves themselves, with some 200,000 of them leaving their erstwhile masters and rallying to the Union cause, that effecrtively guaranteed abolition.

Capital, north and south, would come to bitterly regret the experiment in democracy in the Reconstruction period. Though it was not possible to re-impose slavery, the new nationalism of the turn of the century did unite liberals and reactionaries in support of depriving African Americans of the vote (and thus of means to ameliorate their situation), and introducing segregation. There is, of course, a great deal of bad news for liberals in this book. Drawing partially on the work of Ira Katznelson, Roediger details the impact that official liberalism's collusion with white supremacy meant that federal programmes advocated under the New Deal were also means by which forms of segregation and deepening racial inequality were advanced. The racist components of the New Deal and, later, the Fair Deal are given a robust airing here. Even the exigencies of the Cold War, and the need to respond to decolonization, did not lead to mainstream liberals being willing to fundamentally challenge the one-party, racist southern power bloc until LBJ took bold measures that both abolished legal segregation and introduced reforms to undermine the poverty that, as he knew, was partly a legacy of past Democratic administrations. Though inherently self-limiting because these programmes depended on prolonged growth, and were deprived of the billions that were wasted on committing genocide in Vietnam, these reforms mattered enough that the Republican party made itself their most aggressive opponents. It was at this point that older racist discourses were re-coded in the language of the market, with welfare and affirmative action treated as 'reverse racism', as if existing inequality was meritocratic. Moreover, racial inequality was reinterpreted in terms of the mythology of the bootstraps, in which all immigrant groups in America do eventually embrace the American way of doing business, gain status and become mainstream: those that do not must be dysfunctional. It became an article of faith among rightward-moving liberals and the right, especially after Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on inner city unrest, that black families lacked the virtues that made their white counterparts more efficient. Thus, a whole set of discriminatory practises in the economy and in criminal justice were naturalised as the efficient product of a free market and a just society, and by and large the Democrats capitulated to this discourse.

One odd weakness of the book is that the focus on domestic US history tends to leave the international, or rather imperial, component of American racism under-examined. Roediger is quite clear that racism was forged in a context of empire. However, the discussion of racism in US foreign policy, though by no means marginal to the topic, is rather slight in the book. A crucial aspect of liberal nationalism in the 'Progressive' era was the overcoming of American sectionalism by binding the Southern racial order to an imperial policy largely driven by Northern liberals. Roediger lucidly details the complex relationship between Cold War anti-communism and anti-racism, in a way that is much more sophisticated than Mary Dudziak's arguments. However, ne aspect of that anticommunism in power that Roediger overlooks was the way in which racist tropes permeated foreign policy thinking. One of the major headaches of post-war US governments was the achievement of what they frequently referred to as "premature independence". Eisenhower insisted that Arabs could not understand "our ideas of freedom or human dignity". This style of denigration returned in a 2003 State Department document which insisted that "the towel heads can’t hack" democracy. In this connection, it is surely telling that Obama has been more often vilified as an 'Arab' or a 'Muslim' than as an African American. Imperial culture must have a great deal to do with the survival of race in American history. Even with this caesura in mind, however, Roediger’s book provides a compelling and concise answer to the question of how race has persisted, and why it will survive the Obama phenomenon.