Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half-Century of American Class Struggle
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein reflects on his long life and career, including Berkeley in the 1960s, Walter Reuther and the early UAW, Walmart, Bill Clinton, and much more.
Striking workers at General Motors in 1970. (Dick Darrell / Getty Images)
Nelson Lichtenstein is among the greatest living American labor historians. In a long conversation with Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht covering his life and career, Lichtenstein discusses his life and education at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, in the midst of that campus’s many eruptions in the 1960s; the intellectual and activist influence of his membership in the International Socialists (IS), a Trotskyist organization; his years studying the early United Auto Workers (UAW) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); his later turn to studying Walmart and international supply chains; his continued appreciation for radical politics and radical activists organizing, despite leaving Trotskyism behind; his thoughts about the state of labor history; and much more.
Lichtenstein spoke with Uetricht for the Jacobin podcast The Dig in March 2023; you can listen to the episode here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Beginnings
Micah Uetricht
You write in your essay collection, A Contest of Ideas, about being the son of a German Jew who fled the Nazis during World War II and an American mother who fled Mississippi around the same time. You came of age during the civil rights movement era. Is that how you were first politicized?
Nelson Lichtenstein
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