From mass mobilization to neoliberal war-making: Labor strikes and military-industrial transformation in the United States

Abstract

How did workers affect—and how were they affected by—the dramatic transformations of U.S. war-making that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century? Where do such transformations leave workers and war in the twenty-first century? Using newly compiled data on workers’ strikes in the U.S. armaments industries from World War II through the present, this paper examines the relationship between labor and military-industrial restructuring. The paper introduces the concept of regimes of war-making and makes three main arguments. First, workers’ power was a significant force shaping the shift from a regime of mass mobilization war-making to a regime of neoliberal war-making, as armaments firms aimed to overcome the constraints imposed by workers in the mid-twentieth century. Wartime mobilizations—for Korea and Vietnam—temporarily stymied these efforts by enhancing the disruptive power of workers, who leveraged that power into pauses or reversals of firms’ initial attempts at restructuring. Second, U.S. defeat in Vietnam was a watershed moment. Mass mobilization was abandoned, and the changing nature of war meant that subsequent military buildups offered workers little leverage with which to resist restructuring. Third, in the twenty-first century, the combination of greatly expanded wars and decades of restructuring has resulted in a bifurcation among armaments workers, between those producing supplies needed for pressing counterinsurgency operations and those producing other innovative, but unused, systems. Thus, while the regime of neoliberal war-making has reduced the size and strength of armaments workers in general, some still have significant disruptive potential at the present juncture.

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