Read more
List of contents
Introduction
1. The Horizon of Possibility
2. The Expanding Horizon of Change
3. A War Against Want, Senator James Murray
4. The People’s Struggle
5. Out of Rebellion and into the Morass
6. The Day of Structural Economic Reform is Not Over
7. The Vitality of the Improbable: The Campaign for a Job Guarantee and the Radical Possibilities of Full Employment in the 1970s
8. An Idea in Search of a Movement
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Michael Dennis is Professor of American History at Acadia University, Canada. A Historian of US social and economic history, he has written widely on the impact of the New Economy on the American South in the late 20th Century.
Summary
Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival.
Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.
Foreword
A study of the campaign for economic democracy in the United States over the course of the 20th century.
