Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900

In Solidarity and Fragmentation , Oestreicher provides a new approach to the evolution of the American working class and demonstrates the need for a more general theoretical reinterpretation of class relations during American industrialization.Oestreicher argues that social change in Detroit can be understood neither in terms of the proletarianization and polarization predicted by classical Marxism nor as the struggle between tradition and modernity hypothesized by modernization theorists. Solidarity and fragmentation, he suggests, were intertwined parts of the same whole, both fundamental aspects of working-class experience, both products of industrialization and urbanization, both distinctly modern. Working from this central premise, he helps us better understand the relationship between change in the labor movement and in larger ethnic and political cultures, and the sources of and barriers to lass solidarity.