Mid-century America was indeed a time and place of stronger macro- and micro-social cohesion. Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, authors of The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, discuss the “I-we-I curve,” in which the individualism and mistrust of the Gilded Age gave way in the early decades of the twentieth century to a growing civic-mindedness, a wave that crested from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s. The upswing in social consciousness yielded the New Deal and the Great Society reforms and set in motion the century’s profound social revolutions, before the big “we” dissolved into many competing “I”s once more.

Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone, a landmark work of political science that traces the rise and fall of civic society — churches, clubs, unions, lodges, sports leagues, volunteer associations, neighborhood organizations, youth groups — to demonstrate and explain the unraveling of mid-century American mutualism. Regardless of ideological or political affiliation, Putnam’s argument goes, the mass participation in groups and vastly more social nature of American life evidenced a far stronger sense of social solidarity than exists today. Even the most ardent anti-communists espousing unabashed individualism lived in a society where people routinely moved in unison toward common goals — so unlike today’s lonely satellites criss-crossing through empty space. This was the pro-social flip side of what liberals remember only as stifling conformity.

In The Upswing, Putnam and Garrett chart this trend alongside several others, deepening our understanding of how texturally different mid-century American life was from today. Crucially, the arc of economic inequality follows the same bell-curve pattern.

“For decades after World War II,” the authors write, “the gap between rich and poor continued to narrow. Poor and middle-income Americans’ share of the bounty of postwar prosperity grew, further reducing income inequality.” America’s collective wealth was growing, but unlike the Gilded Age or today, the share of that wealth was also more evenly distributed.

“A rising economic tide lifted all boats,” Putnam and Garrett write. “In fact, during this period the dinghies actually rose faster than the yachts.”

The policies responsible for this dramatic narrowing of income inequality and rise in working-class living standards emerged from the convergence of several historical forces: the massive labor organizing of the 1930s, the New Deal’s transformation of the relationship between government and the economy, and the extraordinary economic expansion that followed World War II. Consequently, the 1950s represented what historian Robert Brenner calls “the true golden age for the American worker,” with production workers in manufacturing enjoying unprecedented economic gains.

Per Brenner, the period from 1948 to 1959 saw unprecedented economic gains for workers, with manufacturing wages growing at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent — the highest sustained wage growth of the entire twentieth or twenty-first century outside of wartime. This prosperity extended beyond factory workers, with similar gains throughout the economy.

This remarkable transformation stemmed from two key factors. First, labor’s organizational strength reached historic levels, with unions winning a high percentage of recognition elections and union membership peaking at approximately 35 percent of the private sector workforce by the mid-1950s. Second, as Brenner argues, the post-war economic boom created conditions where employers prioritized maintaining steady production over wage containment. In this environment of high demand and tight labor markets, the threat of work stoppages gave workers substantial leverage in negotiations, allowing them to secure significant improvements in compensation and working conditions.

The mid-century combination of low inequality and high wages fostered less competition, stress, and crime, creating greater stability, trust, and social solidarity. Liberals often dismiss this abundance as a whites-only phenomenon, but the reality is more nuanced. Jim Crow segregation and discrimination severely limited black Americans’ opportunities, but they were not entirely excluded from the period’s prosperity. In fact, black Americans experienced significant economic gains during the post-war decades, driven by broader income equalization that particularly benefited them as they migrated from the South to access better jobs.

This period saw the lowest racial economic inequality in American history, with the black-white wage gap narrowing throughout the ’50s and beyond until 1968, when overall inequality began expanding. This accelerated economic inclusion into the big “we” exposed America’s racial contradictions at the same time as it brought resources to black Americans, both of which intensified the push for full civil rights.

But just as black Americans secured formal legal equality, the postwar economic consensus began to unravel. As wages stagnated and inequality accelerated from the 1970s onward, black Americans bore the heavier burden of these trends — just as they had disproportionately benefited from the earlier era of shared prosperity. The civil rights movement’s legal victories preceded an economic transformation that would undermine their full promise in subsequent decades.

For women, the picture was similarly complex. Though many women earned nothing from working outside the home during this period, family-sustaining wages meant they often enjoyed relatively high living standards through their husbands’ incomes. But this domestic arrangement was profoundly unstable.

As historian Stephanie Coontz observed, the 1950s were “built to self-destruct. The very things that made them the epitome of the male breadwinner family and made it look like they were the golden age of family life also worked to undermine that family.” The combination of women’s financial dependency alongside rigidly sexist gender norms that asserted male authority and denied female autonomy created conditions that would eventually prove intolerable as women’s expectations and aspirations evolved.

Central to Betty Friedan’s argument in her groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique, researched throughout the 1950s and published in 1963, was the contention that women, like men, should be able to devote their lives to “a human purpose” outside the walls of their own homes. The social movements of subsequent decades were extensions of the general communal ethos of the 1950s, even as they vociferously objected to specific social features of that era.

Women’s rejection of gender role orthodoxy need not have coincided with the dismantling of high wages, strong union power, and robust community bonds. A more equitable society might have emerged if economic security remained intact while gender relations were transformed — where incomes remained high enough that both women and men could work reduced hours outside the home while sharing domestic and childcare responsibilities more equitably. This progressive evolution never materialized because, at precisely the moment second-wave feminism was challenging traditional gender roles, the American political economy was undergoing its fateful regime change to neoliberalism.

Beginning in the 1970s, this new economic paradigm systematically dismantled the material foundations of mid-century American life, eroding the economic security and social trust that characterized the era. This transformation coincided with the full expression of social changes that had been brewing in the postwar decades, like the downfall of Jim Crow and women’s entry into the formal workforce.

The timing led to a misdiagnosis. Conservative narratives exploit this coincidence to argue that social change itself caused economic precarity. To the Right, the supposed flaws of the 1950s were actually the essential features responsible for the period’s social cohesion, and we’ve gone astray because we’ve sought to “socially engineer” equality; letting natural hierarchies play out would work far better.

What liberals consider “backward,” like traditional gender roles, actually provided the necessary framework of order and purpose that prevented social chaos, the Right argues. The conservative solution follows naturally: to make America great again, roll back the social changes that supposedly threw off the natural balance and led to social decline.

In reality, the connection is far more contingent. The Democratic Party — always a party whose coalition included conservative elements like segments of capital, but also the party that was the architect of the New Deal and Great Society reforms and champion of unions and blue-collar workers in the twentieth century — abandoned its economic program, leaving the US political scene without an organized opposition to neoliberalism. At the same time, to provide progressive cover for the pivot, the Democrats embraced social justice politics. Without a foundation in shared economic prospects (the big “we”), those politics because increasingly tribalistic, mirroring the polarization and fragmentation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century social life.

The story liberals told about this pivot was that the 1960s and 1970s were a wholesale repudiation of the backward 1950s. This narrative is a gift to conservatives, creating the appearance of a trade-off between economic prosperity and social egalitarianism. Because liberals have lost any inclination to frame politics in class terms, they have no compelling counterargument to the Right’s seductive account of lost American greatness. All they can really do is act scandalized by mid-century nostalgia and outright deny social decline. This feels like gaslighting to people who intuitively understand that something of value has disappeared from American life.

Tens of millions of Americans feel that life once boasted features strongly associated with human happiness and flourishing but has since lost them. It’s incumbent on any political group to take that sense of loss seriously and offer a convincing explanation — one that distinguishes between causes and effects, so that we can envision a future that integrates the best of the past without backpedaling on crucial social progress. Liberals’ refusal to openly acknowledge and explain why key aspects of life felt better seventy years ago delivers people into the embrace of social reactionaries who have an explanation at the ready.

The story we need to tell cuts against both liberal and conservative myths: America’s social fabric has indeed frayed, and neoliberalism is to blame, as it demolished the material foundation of social solidarity. This economic assault robbed average Americans of trust, community, security, and a sense of common endeavor. If we don’t popularize this narrative, people will continue to think that the solution to recovering what we’ve lost is resurrecting what ought to stay buried.

Citing international competition, in late 1985, the corporate giant 3M announced plans to shut down its audio and videotape plant in Freehold, New Jersey, rather than invest in maintenance and new equipment. The facility employed around 400 workers who would lose their jobs as a consequence. Their union, Local 8-760 of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), launched a vigorous effort — at first aimed at convincing 3M to keep the factory open.

Leading the charge was Stanley Fischer, a longtime worker at the Freehold plant and president of OCAW Local 8-760. He was supported by the Labor Institute, a pro-worker research and education nonprofit based in New York. “Stanley has more nerve than anybody I’ve ever met in the labor movement,” says author and Labor Institute director Les Leopold, who worked closely with Fischer on the campaign.

Fischer and Leopold enlisted the aid of rockstar Bruce Springsteen, whose popular song “My Hometown” lamented the closing of a “textile mill” in Freehold twenty years earlier — a reference to the abandoned Karagheusian rug mill, where Springsteen’s father had once worked. Together with Willie Nelson, Springsteen signed an open letter to 3M, published that December in Variety, urging the company to “come up with a humane program that will keep those jobs and those workers in Freehold.”

The campaign soon garnered national media attention, with other high-profile artists and entertainers adding their voices in support. To help raise funds for the Freehold workers, Springsteen and the E Street Band returned to their roots by performing “My Hometown” at the legendary Stone Pony music venue in Asbury Park.

But even “the Boss” could not stop deindustrialization. By January 1986, it was clear that 3M was going to close the Freehold plant no matter what, just as countless other factories were being shuttered across the country.

At the suggestion of visionary labor leader Tony Mazzocchi — an OCAW official who had cofounded the Labor Institute — Fischer and Local 8-760 now called for a nationwide “economic bill of rights” for all workers impacted by plant closings. They demanded that multibillion-dollar corporations like 3M cover health care, childcare, and higher education costs for laid-off employees as they transitioned into new careers. Calling the movement “Hometowns Against Shutdowns,” Fischer began traveling the country to meet with other unionists fighting plant closures in their own communities and to publicize the plight of the Freehold workers.

In late February, just as 3M began its first round of mass layoffs in Freehold, an unexpected jolt of energy came from workers eight thousand miles away in South Africa.

Situated in a Johannesburg suburb, 3M’s South African facility produced a range of products including masking tape and computer tape. Despite having signed onto the “Sullivan Principles” — a voluntary code of corporate social responsibility for US-based multinationals operating in apartheid South Africa despite the global boycott and divestment movement — 3M management systematically discriminated against the plant’s 200 black workers and refused to negotiate with their anti-apartheid union, the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU).

Such unions regularly faced severe repression at the hands of the apartheid regime simply for trying to organize. But after learning of the struggle of their fellow unionists in New Jersey, on February 28, the entire black workforce at the plant staged an afternoon walkout to protest the layoffs in Freehold, temporarily halting production. Marching and dancing out of the building, they sported T-shirts reading: “Don’t Abandon Freehold, My Hometown” — the same shirts regularly worn by OCAW Local 8-760 members in New Jersey.

“This time, our protest was Africa for the USA, not USA for Africa,” said chief shop steward Amon Msane, referring to the group of artists behind the previous year’s hit single “We Are the World” (which featured Springsteen and was recorded on tape produced at the 3M plant in Freehold).

Msane had organized the walkout after being informed about the Freehold plant closing by SACCAWU president Emma Mashinini, who herself had been told about it by Leopold during a visit to the United States. “3M is an international company. . . . To deal with companies such as 3M, we need to be international in the struggle,” Msane explained. “This exploitation, this uncaring attitude of the 3M company is practiced not only in South Africa but all over the world.”

That June, Msane came to the United States and spent the month touring multiple cities alongside Fischer, fusing the Free South Africa Movement with the Hometowns Against Shutdowns campaign. “We both gained a lot from spending that time together,” Fischer recalls. “We were talking about what apartheid was doing to South Africa and what the multinational corporations were doing in this country and that it was one and the same.”

Speaking to crowds of captivated US union members wherever they went — and showing them a video of the 3M solidarity walkout in South Africa — the two men urged international labor solidarity to combat exploitation and injustice around the globe. “Workers in the United States should take similar actions for workers in South Africa,” Msane said at the time. “We look forward to the day that these links will exist not only in times of trouble, but will be ongoing and be maintained for as long as we exist.”

“He was a real, true labor leader,” Leopold says of Msane. “He saw that this plant closing situation was unjust and he saw it as a way to build a bridge with American workers.”

Meanwhile in South Africa, the apartheid regime launched a full-scale crackdown on the freedom movement, jailing hundreds of black labor leaders without charge. While still in the United States, Msane got a phone call from his wife telling him that police raided their house in the middle of the night looking for him, but fortunately she and their three young children were unharmed.

Msane knew he would likely be arrested upon returning to South Africa, but decided to return anyway. Sure enough, authorities arrested him as soon as he arrived home in early July. But OCAW, the Labor Institute, and other US allies had been preparing for this. They immediately sprang into action by mobilizing a mass letter-writing campaign targeting 3M executives and South African authorities demanding his release.

“We did everything you could imagine to publicize his arrest and put pressure on the South African government,” says Leopold. After one month, the apartheid regime relented and let Msane go.

That fall, Msane tempted fate by taking another trip to the United States to speak at the Labor Notes conference in Detroit along with unionists from El Salvador, the Philippines, Mexico, and Brazil. A few months after returning to South Africa, in February 1987, he was again arrested and detained without charge, though it was clear the apartheid regime hoped to make an example of him due to his increasing international profile.

Once again, OCAW and the Labor Institute organized a public pressure campaign to demand his release. US union members, clergy, and community leaders wrote thousands of letters and staged pickets outside 3M offices and South African consulates. Amnesty International provided crucial support, as did organizer Joel Carr of the American Federation of Grain Millers in Minnesota — where 3M is headquartered.

After holding Msane for an entire year, the South African government finally let him go in February 1988.

Though the Freehold 3M plant was shuttered in May 1986 like so many other factories, OCAW Local 8-760’s energetic campaign successfully secured state funding for a Worker Resource Center (which Fischer ran for several years) to help the laid-off employees get training for new careers. Further, the campaign’s call for an economic bill of rights for workers impacted by plant closures helped lay the groundwork for contemporary demands around a just transition for workers in fossil fuel–related industries.

Reflecting on his fight against factory shutdowns four decades ago, Fischer says it’s “bullshit” for anyone to suggest that deindustrialization in the United States is going to be reversed. “Having worked in that [3M] plant for twenty years, I wouldn’t want it open again — especially as we dismantle [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] and [the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health], because you still have to work with those nasty chemicals,” he says. “We need to move forward. Let us as workers go along with the technology and education of this century, not drag us back to a technology that existed ages ago and keep us behind.”

In South Africa, after the freedom movement succeeded in abolishing apartheid and establishing a multiracial democracy in 1994, Msane was elected to the Gauteng Provincial Legislature and continued fighting for workers’ rights. When he died in 2020, he was remembered as a “skilled unifier.”

By leading the 3M walkout, touring the United States, and speaking out against apartheid, Leopold says that Msane demonstrated “profound labor solidarity” because he was taking a tremendous risk. Leopold also credits Fischer’s tenacious leadership of the Hometowns Against Shutdowns campaign with setting the stage for the South African workers’ solidarity. “The precondition for international solidarity is you’ve got to be willing to fight,” Leopold explains. “And you’ve got to be willing to support other people who are willing to fight.”

“Without fight and risk,” he continues, “international solidarity is just window dressing.”

Leipold’s account is approximately but not rigidly chronological. He begins with a chapter on Marx’s early republican journalism (1842–43). This draws out the extent to which Marx’s critique of the Prussian regime in these pieces is republican in the sense of republican political theory — that is, focused on how the regime creates domination and arbitrary power.

Chapter two, “True Democracy: Marx’s Critique of the Modern State, 1843” addresses Marx’s critique of G. W. F. Hegel on the state and Marx’s collaboration with left-republican Arnold Ruge. The preponderant theme is the arbitrary character of the state bureaucracy.

Chapter three deals with Marx’s transition to communism in 1843–45 and his political break with Ruge. Leipold sees Marx, and more sharply Engels, at this period temporarily moving into the kind of “critique of politics” typical of the socialists of the time. For them, the struggle for democracy/republicanism was to be altogether rejected in favor of a focus on economic alternatives to capitalism. But he argues that even in this period, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx’s objections to alienated labor remain republican: shaped by its character as subjecting the worker to domination.

Chapter four, “The Red Flag and the Tricolor: Republican Communism and the Bourgeois Republic, 1848–52,” is mainly about the idea that the bourgeois republic “was an insufficient but necessary step for the emancipation of the proletariat.” Leipold stresses the novelty of this idea. He also makes the point that Marx offered very specific criticisms of the constitutional order of the French Second Republic (1848–52), which have been “perhaps the most neglected aspect of Marx’s critique”: criticisms of the directly elected presidency; of the ideas of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances”; and of the “balancing” of rights by vague “public order” limitations, in practice a selective approach that specifically undermined the proletariat’s rights. Nonetheless, the bourgeois republic did provide openings for the proletariat, in particular freedom of the press and manhood suffrage: insufficient but necessary.

Chapter five, “People, Property, Proletariat: Marxian Communism and Radical Republicanism, 1848–52” focuses on polemics between Marx and Engels and the radical republicans Karl Heinzen and William James Linton. Heinzen and Linton sought a return to or protection of small-scale private production as the foundation of republicanism, and hence opposed both the idea of the socialization of large industry and the wager on the propertyless proletariat.

Chapter six, “Chains and Invisible Threads: Liberty and Domination in Marx’s Critique of Capitalism, 1867,” contextualizes Marx’s argument from the competing perspectives on offer in the First International (Proudhonist, left-Ricardian, Comtean positivist, and so on). The narrative is largely one very familiar to Marxists, of the way in which the capitalist market produces the radical subordination of the wage-worker. Leipold’s account, however, brings to the fore the prominence of standard republican arguments about freedom and domination in Marx’s arguments.

Chapter seven, “A Communal Constitution: The Social Republic and the Political Institutions of Socialism, 1871,” centers on the Paris Commune of 1871 and Marx’s response to it in his Civil War in France. This is again a text extensively read by Marxists. But Leipold again locates Marx’s discussion in relation to the conflicting views of the Commune held by republicans. Further, a good deal of what Marx wrote was traditional democratic-republican positions (the formation of a militia, sovereign elected body, and so on). Marx insisted on the Commune as a form of self-government. This involved a radical opposition to bureaucracy that went back to his 1843 critique of Hegel.

The brief “Postface” begins with the introductory part of the 1880 program of the Parti Ouvrier français as a summary of Marx’s argument. It shows the continued necessity to argue both against ideas of a property-owning democracy and against anti-political and antidemocratic socialisms. The point, Leipold argues, is still fundamental: “Social transformation requires a constitutional setup that provides ‘the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions.’”

As I have already indicated, I think this is a great book and one that should be very widely read. I have a couple of small issues with the argument, concerned with the absences of the English constitution before the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century (1832, 1867. . .). These, in turn, pose questions in relation to issues Leipold raises in chapter seven about how far Marx’s constitutional ideas are relevant to present politics.

The “English question” begins with Marx on Hegel on “corporations” and representation. Leipold here in passing presents the British Constitution as showing “a more modern, individual form of representation” by constituencies, in contrast to Hegel’s representation by “corporations.” But this retrojects onto the 1810s, when Hegel was writing the Philosophy of Right [Law], the post–Reform Acts constitutional order; before the Reform Acts, England’s urban population was precisely represented by “corporations”; the more modern form of geographical constituencies designed to equalize their sizes is a product of the French Revolution.

The other side of this coin is Leipold’s queries in chapter seven about how far the level of self-government and “de-professionalization” of the state proposed in The Civil War in France is actually feasible — or, at least, how far all the current levels of civil service and local government could practically be elected. He suggests that increased use of “sortition” (random choice of officials or representatives, as used in ancient Athens) might help.

Here, again, the English Constitution before the early-mid-nineteenth century could add something: the very extensive use of trial by jury, much more extensive than its modern practice; the conscript militia, and conscription of police constables and analogous local officers; the strong constitutional convention against interference with local government; the House of Lords, including the non-lawyer peers, as the ultimate court of appeal; the use of parliamentary enquiries to deal with scandals. These were all systems that involved the self-government of the property-owning classes. The Reform Acts, gradually letting hoi polloi into voting and into juries, required the reduction of the democratic/republican elements of the constitution, beginning in that same period.

The relevance of this material is that the “unreformed” English Constitution organized a country that was more economically “modern,” and a state that was more militarily effective, than the French absolutist regime celebrated as a necessary stage on the road to “modernity” by Weberians and similar writers. And aspects of this regime of local self-government have persisted in the United States down to recent times — again, in connection with a more modern economy and a more militarily effective state than is produced by the cult of bureaucratic professionalism.

The conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was Marx’s conception: Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal. But it is still possible to argue that Marx was wrong on this question. And it is also possible to argue that Marx’s and Engels’s conception of the road to socialism is superseded by twentieth-century developments.

I put on one side the argument for the “coalitions of the oppressed” approach. It has resulted in handing the issue of class to the right wing, producing “Vote Harris: Get Trump” and analogous results across the world, and as a result far worse outcomes for the oppressed than the old conception of prioritizing the working class.

It is nonetheless arguable that the more advanced stage of the spread of capitalism across the whole globe, and its decline at its core, means that we should focus more on socialization: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately owned concentrations of capital as the means of coordinating human productive activities. It is certainly true that capital has created giant oligopolistic firms, which are “private” and “competitive” only in name; that the de-nationalization of publicly owned infrastructure in the “Counter-Reformation” of the 1980s has merely produced decay; and that human-induced climate change requires global planned action to respond to it. In this sense, socialization is more immediately posed than it was in the later nineteenth century.

There are two problems with this line of argument. The first is the Soviet case. Although the restoration of capitalism in the USSR has proved disastrous, it is nonetheless the case that Soviet “planning” systematically failed, and this failure lay below the decision of its bureaucratic heads to collapse their own regime in 1989–91. It failed because the Soviet bureaucracy and managerial class proved to have all the vices that Marx identified in 1843 in the Prussian bureaucracy and in Hegel’s Prussian-imaged bureaucracy as expressing the “general interest.” On the contrary, bureaucrats and managers pursue their individual turf interests, and the result is “planning irrationalities.” Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism.

The second and more immediate is that at a low level, capital rules through the support of the managerialist labor bureaucracy — from its right wing in the “AFL-CIA” to its left wing in the full-timers of the Trotskyist left. We need to overcome this managerialist labor bureaucracy in order to actually challenge capital. There are other outworks of the capitalist state’s star-fort layers of fortifications, but this element is the furthest out. It is illusory to imagine that it is possible to fight for “workers’ democracy” against the bureaucracy, without simultaneously proposing a constitutional alternative to the capitalist state regime as such.

Marx’s republicanism, then, remains essential to any socialism that is to go beyond the endless gerbil-on-a-wheel repetitions of the far-left groups and the short-lived broad-left and people’s front attempts. Hence the extraordinary value of Leipold’s recovery of Marx’s ideas.