Modernity's Discontents: Esmonde Higgins and James Rawling as Labour Intellectuals
In the first half of the twentieth century, two young men from different backgrounds broke with the ruling culture in Australia and became labour intellectuals.2 Why did this happen? Was there some disruptive element in their early engaement with ruling ideas – perhaps in their family life – that made their defection possible? And how did the break occur? Was it due perhaps to a moment of intellectual enlightenment, in which powerful new ideas captured the mind, or did it also involve a coming together of history and biography, a moment of concentrated exposure to modernity’s discontents at the same time as disorienting personal crises? Further, in their commitment to communism, how did they understand their political practice as intellectuals? And how should we understand it? Did it draw on their previous training and experiences? As intellectuals they were ‘modern’ men, but what kind of modernists were they? This journal article is available in Illawarra Unity Journal of the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: http://ro.uow.edu.au/unity/vol11/iss1/2 5 Modernity’s Discontents: Esmonde Higgins and James Rawling as Labour Intellectuals1
Revolution and Personal Crisis: William Z. Foster, Personal Narrative, and the Subjective in the History of American Communism
He is composed, con dent, unemphatic and impenetrably unruf ed. Never for a moment does Foster hasten his tempo ... He seems completely without ego ... He lives completely outside the circle of self, absorbed ceaselessly in the ceaseless stream of detail which confronts him ... Once in a while he gets angry over the stupidity of man; then you see his quiet is the quiet of a high tension machine moving so swiftly it barely hums. He is swallowed up in the strike’s immensity. What happens to Foster does not concern him. I do not believe that he spends  ve minutes in the whole year thinking of Foster or Foster’s affairs.
Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers
"The strength of this book . . . encompasses a broad view of history from the bottom up and deals not only with biographical background of the nonelite in labor but with insights into black, immigrant, and grassroots working-class history as well."--"Choice" Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.