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Intellectual Crisis or Paradigm Shift?

Ira's paper begins with an apparent paradox: He agrees with William Sewell's statement that labor history is not in crisis, and yet, the remarkable historical occurrences and the powerful methodological and epistemological challenges of the past decade have produced nothing less than “labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose.” These developments are so serious that labor historians are encouraged to undertake a dramatic departure from the well-trod methodological and thematic pathways of labor history.Marxism, which in varying guises was hegemonic in our discipline for at least two decades, has all but collapsed under the double pressure of events and theoretical challenges. Its political project is undermined by a disappearing working class, a declining welfare state, and the end of European communism, its theoretical preeminence shaken by new deconstructive and Foucauldian approaches. These approaches have questioned the timelessness and solidity of Marxist categories, arguing that the “historical subject” of the theory—the working class—is not a sociological given or an ontologically secure phenomenon; it is a category that is not merely undifferentiated, but constituted in such a way as to obliterate its constitutive “other,” most preeminently “woman.” Poststructuralist historiography undercuts the teleological and triumphalist assumptions of Marxist philosophy of history, just as the aforementioned events have shown them to be counterfactual, if not “sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed.”