ABSTRACT
The modern character of the struggle between the interests of labor and capital took form between 1880 and 1930. It was a period in which ascendant industrial capital brutalized American labor. Capital became increasingly concentrated and engaged in anticompetitive practices, while labor was increasingly proletarianized—from self-employed to wageworkers. Workers lost control over the work process as orders increasingly came from above. Jobs were deskilled. Workers faced the competition of wave after wave of immigrants. And strikes were repressed with extreme prejudice. The chapter analyses the struggles of labor against capital during this formative period between 1880 and 1930. It focuses upon the manner and extent to which labor's increasing successes, and especially its increasing militancy, set in motion forces that enabled the interests of capital to delegitimate labor's cause ideologically and partially reverse its gains. Industrialization came in earnest to the United States only after 1865.
