In the entire course of North American labor history, Labor Notes, now celebrating forty years of existence, is by far the most durable, and one of the most successful, interventions by activists who have come out of an explicitly socialist tradition.

Socialists of various sorts played important roles in the creation of the Knights of Labor and the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in the late nineteenth century, the Industrial Workers of the World a few years later, the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s, and the emergence of public sector unionism in the 1950s and 1960s. But one of three things happened.

They were purged by a repressive state or a hostile union officialdom. Or the socialists merged themselves into or accommodated the politics, legal structures, and leadership of the trade unions they had sought to influence. Or they just got tired and retreated from active political engagement, not unlike the old radical Harvey Swados evoked in his fictional portrait of those who labored in an auto factory in On the Line, published in 1957.