The minimum wage in the US state of Pennsylvania has not increased since 2009. The mandated hourly rate remains at the federal minimum of US$7.25, while neighboring states legislated graduated increases to US$15.00. Pennsylvania is a fount of cheap labor in a larger political-economic context that produced a cheapening of labor in the United States relative to the global stage. The strategies of racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia have been central to that outcome. Beyond declining real wages, living conditions for working people have been degraded by the neoliberal plundering of city, state, and federal budgets that slashed public spending and gutted the social safety net. In these circumstances, demands against capital and on the state for wages, immigrants’ rights, racial justice, and social supports manifest resistance to many, different moments of dispossession. Analyses that cleave off wage demands from social reproduction and justice struggles, therefore, do little to illuminate the politics of our day. Instead, we need to pay close attention to their multilayered interconnections and their diverse claims on surplus value (e.g., Harvey 2013; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Mullings 2009; Smith 2014; Susser 2012, 2018, 2021). This undertaking requires a framework that “heightens and encapsulates several otherwise familiar tensions—urban/rural; worker/poor; local/national/global; society/nature; gender; and so on—and can show, therefore, perhaps more clearly than in other contexts the essential relations among them” (Bond et al. 2013: 236).
We gain purchase on the generative notion of “the essential relations among them” by revisiting Marx's linked concepts of value and socially determined needs, albeit with a critical perspective that puts labor at the center of analysis. Labor, always broadly construed to extend beyond the productive realm, is more than just a source of capital's valorization, but also its negation via its own demands for social reproduction and social needs, “the needs of socially developed human beings” (Marx quoted in Lebowitz 2003: 40). “In capitalism as a whole, the two-sided totality, capital does not merely seek the realization of its own goal, valorization; it also must seek to suspend the realization of the goals of [labor]” (Lebowitz 2003: 122). Socially determined needs change over time, and they are articulated by people as an immediate politics of culturally inflected standards for wages, inclusion, livelihood, and rights. A broader politics that connects these various demands and that challenges structural contradictions of capitalism involves alliance and coalition, and it is harder won. It is important to analyze both the particularizing processes and the universalizing moments.
Essential relations pries open that two-fold inquiry. It names the ways that manifold labors—waged and unwaged, made visible and invisible, and recognized and unrecognized—are involved in the production and realization of surplus value. The formulation moves from concrete work and livelihood activities to abstract labor and the universal subsumption of daily life under capitalism, and back again from the general to the specific (see Harvey 2018; Kalb 2022; Narotzky 2018). It also registers political meaning. Essential relations surveys assorted protests for social inclusion and betterment as they confront valorization; it points to the making of alliance and puts solidarity squarely within the investigation of value. It asks us to consider how uneven capitalist processes underlie the production of difference and leads to critical questions in situations of social change: What hidden relations among diverse populations are being exposed? What can be seen, talked about, abstracted, and theorized at a particular conjuncture? What tactics, alliances, organizational forms, and theoretical interventions can be built and imagined in these changing circumstances?
Division of laboring people by race, gender, nationality, economic sector, skill, and so forth is an inner tendency of capitalism: The accumulation of labor is the accumulation of difference (Federici 2004). This fundamental insight can be better apprehended when we view labor as a political entity. That is, there are myriad ways of making a living beyond wages, and power-laden processes categorize, differentiate, or unify those labors. By this definition, social divisions of labor are never simply technical or economic, but always a historical outcome of struggles and impulses toward differentiation or unification, both from above and below (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014, 2015).
The result of these ongoing processes is not class as a fixed structure, but rather a historically situated arrangement of exploitation, dispossession, and extraction between capital and its combined workers, dependents, and payers. Feminist social reproduction theorists grapple with bringing capital's non-waged and marginalized “others” into class analysis; they remap class and reconsider class struggles to account for capital's many laborers, their manifold relations to value, and their varied political expressions (e.g., Bhattacharya 2017; Fraser 2018). Unevenness of capital and labor is continually reproduced and combined in new ways, and this matters for how working people relate to capital, the state, and each other. Accordingly, we need to closely observe how “culturally embedded forms of organization are [made and] disorganized; place-bound paths of dispossession are continuously generated; and wage and unwaged forms of making a living change repeatedly and pull people apart or together at different conjunctures through space and time. All contribute to the historical dynamics of remaking differences [and equivalences] that reconfigure labour/capital power geometries” (Narotzky 2018: 36).
This perspective stresses the politics of class, class made “in the medium of time—that is, action and reaction, change and conflict” (Thompson 1965: 357). The intellectual and political project is to renew “the concept of class immanently, by reworking it in and through the struggles of our age” (McNally 2013: 402; also Kalb 2015; Kalb and Mollona 2018), including fights for both particular issues and communities and broader conflicts that coalesce around more general, structural conditions of capitalism. The end game is to apprehend how class is formed by combining difference, in the medium of time and through struggle.
To advance this research program, it is important to consider articulations in particular locations. In what follows, I draw on my fieldwork (2018–2021 and ongoing) in the majority Latinx (the gender-neutral term for Latinos/as) rust-belt city of Reading, and the majority white, non-Latinx suburbs and rural towns of Berks County in Pennsylvania. My research took place during a distinct conjuncture for oppositional, left-oriented politics in the United States. The timeframe was bracketed by the 2016 election of the right-wing authoritarian Donald Trump and the unfolding crises of 2020–2021: including the COVID-19 pandemic, state-led and xenophobic assaults on immigrants, a racial justice uprising catalyzed by the police killings of African Americans, and the national election and subsequent white nationalist insurrection (Kasmir 2020, 2021). During this period, I carried out participant observation (in person, online, and again in person, as the pandemic dictated) among three social movement groups: Make the Road Reading advances immigrant and workers’ rights; Sunrise Movement Berks is a youth climate justice organization that advocates for the Green New Deal; and Berks Stands Up builds political and democratic engagement in the electoral arena. Each is a branch of a national- or state-level organization involved in wider coalitions that provide training and coordinate campaigns for their local affiliates. Their professional staff pursue issue-oriented agendas in state and national arenas. The three local groups are at the heart of a growing left/liberal ecosystem in Reading/Berks that also includes cultural and education associations, legal advocates, and community initiatives. I followed their protests, organizing strategies, and alliance as they responded to urgent national developments, built their power, and made claims on value.
The groups achieved modest but notable advances in a region where decades of deindustrialization deepened divisions between the city and surrounding county. Trump's right-wing populism fueled racism and encouraged anti-immigrant and anti-urban reflexes in the area, where white hate groups had gained ground decades earlier. However, opposition to Trump's presidency also fostered new left/liberal organizing. In solidly Republican Berks County, the three groups contributed to defeating Donald Trump in 2020 in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. For its importance to the national outcome, the editor of The Nation spent Election Day in Reading. Writing before the results were known, when it seemed the election might hinge on Pennsylvania, he wrote of the social movement trio, “Let the record show that if Joe Biden wins here, he was carried to victory on [their] backs” (Guttenplan 2020). In what follows, I introduce the Reading/Berks region and the groups Make the Road, Sunrise Berks, and Berks Stands Up. Then I discuss the hard work of organizing that broadened the progressive field, and I show how their alliance moved the groups toward more radical positions on race, capitalism, and class. I identify moments when their actions revealed hidden relations among diverse populations and changed what could be seen, talked about, and imagined.
Uneven development in Reading/Berks
Reading (population 95,844) is a city of row houses, brick factories, and railroad crossings left behind by the once-dominant Reading Railroad conglomerate. Many factory buildings are abandoned, yet some still house manufacturing. Nearly one-third of Reading's population lives in poverty, triple the rate for Berks County as a whole. Despite repeated attempts to revitalize the central business district, including the recent expansion of a local college into a downtown office building, large storefronts on the main business corridor are vacant. Meanwhile corner shops, restaurants, bodegas, and other small businesses testify to the fact that immigrants vitalize the city's commercial life. Uneven investment and disinvestment, divisions of labor, and state policy have intensified disparities between Reading and Berks over decades.
Reading is a majority Latinx city (officially 67 percent, 2020 census) with a substantial foreign-born population (18.6 percent). A minority of the population identifies as white alone, non-Latinx (20.4 percent). The African American/Black alone community, dating largely to the city's industrial expansion in the nineteenth century and the post–World War I Great Migration from the south, is comparatively small (13.3 percent). Puerto Ricans came to Reading for jobs in industry and agriculture after Operation Bootstrap (1947), and migrants from Dominican Republic, Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Central America began to arrive in the 1980s, as they were displaced by the growth of export processing zones, free trade agreements, and civil wars in their home countries. Some sought affordable housing in low-cost Reading after they were priced out of working-class neighborhoods in gentrifying New York City (130 miles away); others came directly to join relatives in an increasingly Spanish-speaking city (Reisinger 2004, 2005a, 2005b).
Reading is ringed by working-class and middle-income suburbs, and a few miles beyond those are farms and rural towns. Berks County (population 428,849) is majority white alone, non-Latinx (68.7 percent). Reading reliably votes Democrat, while surrounding areas are strongly Republican (typically more so with greater distance from the city) and helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. This political demarcation manifests the demographic, economic, and social divergence of urban, suburban, and rural Berks over the course of the twentieth century.
Reading had been a stronghold of the Socialist Party of America from the 1920s through the 1940s, and an organized working class commanded power across space. Today area activists remember little of its achievements. Reading Socialists won the mayoralty three times from 1927 to 1944, and they took city council seats to comprise a majority in city government. At the time, Socialist parties in the United States, Europe, and Australia had municipalist wings that fought for local-level power through home rule and charter reform. The strategy emerged from the experiences of late nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. Reading was home to the Reading Railroad, Berkshire hosiery mills, cigar-making shops, dozens of metal and textile factories, hotels, and stores, and it was home to German-descended and Pennsylvania Dutch migrants from nearby farms. New class configurations and life conditions in the city shaped a novel political response: “If onerous working conditions precipitated new forms of labor organization, the conditions of daily living also produced new forms of urban politics” (Stromquist 2011: 311, also 2009). The Socialist Party grew within these changing circumstances.
The Reading party was closely tied to the craft unions and to the city's majority German-descended population. Its electoral success rested upon thorough-going, ward-level organizing. Socialists nurtured a political and cultural network that linked city and county, and they held public office in boroughs throughout the county. Reading's Socialists disbanded in 1962, having weathered decades of declining membership after the national party split (1936), the New Deal won working-class voters to the Democratic Party (1930s–1940s), World War II further diminished support, and the Cold War forcefully repressed left organizations (Fones-Wolf 2000; Gavigan 2021, Hendrickson 1972, 1973; Kennedy 1979; Pratt 1970, 1975; Stetler 1974).
Importantly, however, while party records listed members among the Polish and Italian migrants to the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there is little indication that Reading Socialists organized African Americans. This failure mirrored capitalist divisions of labor in Berks. Black people were less likely to be employed in the industries and shops where craft unions and socialism took hold, most notably cigar making and other skilled trades. Socialists at the national level were likewise slow to organize Black workers and to fight for all laborers and “all work throughout the world” (Du Bois [1920] 1969: 102).
Racial inequality was the groundwork for the diverging trajectories of Reading and its surrounding environs over the twentieth century, and the legacy leaves its mark to the current day (as I discuss below). No other social movement emerged in the region that commanded the power that Socialists did, and Left opposition in Reading/Berks diminished in the wake of its decline. The city's population reached a peak of 110,000 in 1930, after which capital flight, first of heavy industry and then of textiles, eroded the industrial base. The see-saw of investment and disinvestment reshaped geographical space and disarticulated linkages among working people and between them and wider fields of power, while the construction of highways after World War II drew industry and population out of the urban center to newly built suburbs.
Disinvestment and the cheapening of labor beset Reading's neighborhoods and particularly the small African American community. In fact, across the United States, capital flight hit Black workers earlier and harder than it did whites (Robotham 2020). Sectors of the city's population that might otherwise have been politically active were consequently disempowered, and the disparate impact of deindustrialization, structural racism, and white supremacy had the effect of moderating Civil Rights organizing in the 1960s and 1970s (Penn State Berks, n.d. a, b).
Latinx migrants came to Reading during a period of economic decline. The population fell to a low of 78,000 in 1980, and those who remained in the city earned lower wages and were less likely to work in union shops than those who resided in the suburbs. The suspension of railroad passenger service in 1981 futher widened the gulf between city and county. Capital flight was acute after the passage of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in the 1990s, when a succession of large industrial employers shut their doors. Setbacks, plant closures, and punishing defeats beleaguered organized labor, and the United Steel Workers and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers were hard hit. Today, shop-based organizing is an uphill battle and major private employers are non-union. Workplaces are dispersed, immigrant workers are uniquely vulnerable, and unions are on the defensive.
While Berks County overall was transformed by capital abandonment, decline cut an irregular path. Rural land has been rezoned and sold to speculators who invest in million-square-foot warehouses for lease to massive e-commerce corporations. In turn, the city lost its tax base, and the federal government cut funding and devolved fiscal responsibility to cash-strapped municipalities. The political-economic result was a deindustrialized, financially distressed “disempowered city” (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018). Following the neoliberal playbook, revenue sharing and tax redistribution were political non-starters, and urban space was devalued relative to the suburbs (Tabb 2015). Reading declared financial exigency in 2009 and submitted to state oversight. Upon its exit from the program for fiscally distressed municipalities thirteen years later, the state-appointed manager reflected, “Distressed status had a major impact on every resident and business in the city … It constrained vital social, civic and safety services, and investments in infrastructure, parks and development … and inhibited the city's ability to combat poverty and provide affordable housing” (Lynch 2022).
The circumstances of “racialized disinvestment, the splintered political geography of suburban exclusion and regional inequality” (Kirkpatrick and Smith 2015: 3; also Peck 2013, 2014) widened demographic, economic, and political cleavages across Berks. Hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and National Socialist movement, leafleted and recruited in the county in the 1980s and 1990s (Penn State Berks n.d. b). After Barack Obama's election in 2008, the right-wing Tea Party gained a foothold in Berks. Membership in the Tea Party-affiliated Berks Patriots subsequently declined, nonetheless members and sympathizers rallied for Donald Trump and Mike Pence during 2020 campaign stops in the area, and some county residents went to Washington, DC, on 6 January to subvert the election of President Biden. Trump's right-wing populism fueled racism, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban reflexes in this setting. However, it also sparked left/liberal organizing.
A left/liberal alignment in Reading/Berks
After the election of Donald Trump, sectors of the US Left turned their energies to the electoral arena. The 2016 campaign of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders had become a channel for a radical reformist position that held that contesting power in the two-party system was both necessary and possible (Smucker 2020). Working in the context of historically low interest rates, these progressive actors promoted an intellectual and policy framework that aimed to make the federal government a more active agent of redistribution, and they mounted a case in favor of deficit spending and fiscal stimulus (Kelton 2020). National groups agitated from the “outside” by mobilizing their local affiliates, while allied elected officials worked the “inside” of legislative bodies. At the same time, Black Lives Matter (BLM) grew its network and joined with other racial justice organizations in the broad-based Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). The movement focused on state violence, mass incarceration, and police killings of Black people, tracing those forms of violence and oppression to the history of slavery and racialized capitalism (Kelley 2017, 2021). Their call to defund or abolish the police issued a mandate to shift public spending away from policing and jails and toward improving living conditions in Black, brown, and poor communities. Gender and LGBTQIA+ equality, raising the minimum wage, environmental justice, erasing student debt, granting immigrant rights, and supporting unions were likewise on the agenda (M4BL; Ransby 2018). The intersecting crises of 2020—including the deadly failure of the federal government to coordinate a response to the pandemic, mass joblessness, racial disparity laid bare, and widespread protests sparked by the police murder of an African American man George Floyd1—together with the low cost of borrowing, strengthened the position of progressives to pursue social justice through government redistribution and deficit spending.
The “inside-outside strategy” was acted on in 2021, after Democrats achieved a majority in Congress and Biden won the presidency. Social movement actors who helped deliver the victory then pressed for a “new New Deal.” Demands for public spending and investment also offered a fix to the seeming “twilight” of the neoliberal regime of accumulation (Maskovsky and Bork-James 2019) and to China's mounting economic force and its power of the state purse, as evidenced by the Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative. These facts augured the decline of US hegemony on the world stage, and government spending was one potential remedy.
While stimulus packages and an infrastructure plan were being formulated in Washington, advocates wrangled over how much could be wrested from capital and the state, and in what form (tax the rich, basic income, jobs programs, medical care, state-funded higher education, higher wages, etc.). On the ground in places like Reading/Berks, the pressing concerns were: Who will be counted in and who will be counted out of the fought-for spending programs? Whose labor will be valued and whose will go unrecognized?
These questions evoked a race and gender critique of the 1930s New Deal. During New Deal negotiations, broadly distributive policies were enclosed by a compromise with Southern legislators and agricultural interests. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act exempted tipped, domestic, and farm work from minimum wage regulations, overtime pay, social security, and other protections. This maneuver brought the economic and cultural legacies of slavery, share-cropping, and Black women's domestic service squarely into the New Deal. The expansion of the Keynesian state after World War II further accrued benefit to white male workers. The state thereby inscribed a structurally unequal and politically fragmented US working class (Baca 2004, 2017; Coates 2014; Katznelson 2013; Mullings 1986).
Struggles over categorization of labor, visibility, and inclusion were underway in 2020–2021. Left theorists and activists in the United States were increasingly mindful of the ways that the New Deal underwrote white male privilege. Backers of the Green New Deal made the case that federal investment in green jobs, infrastructure, and the care economy must undo those historic injustices as an urgent priority, beginning in frontline communities plagued by environmental racism. BLM and M4BL traced connections between New Deal and Keynesian policies and the widening racial wealth gap, for example, discriminatory financial incentives to home ownership. These national conversations seeded the on-the-ground organizing of Make the Road Reading, Berks Stands Up, and Sunrise Movement Berks. Each group addressed different constituencies, who were themselves diverse. Their work building their own members and their (sometimes faltering) alliance shaped the emergent progressive alignment in Reading/Berks.
Make the Road Reading was established in 2014 to serve immigrant and multiracial working people, both documented and undocumented. Its non-profit parent organization be-gan in 1996 in New York City, and there are currently chapters in five states and 12 cities that promote immigrant rights, a US$15.00 per hour minimum wage, and building power in Latinx and working-class communities. Make the Road's affiliation with the Center for Popular Democracy ties it to 50 progressive groups nationwide and to national-scale strategies. Make the Road employs paid organizers and has hundreds of members in Reading (not all are equally active) who participate via a committee structure. Discussions at weekly meetings of the comite de lucha, of which I was a member, often centered on Trump's punitive immigration policies and the material conditions of life in a distressed city. The Reading chapter has been an effective player in local political races, including the 2019 election of the city's first Latinx mayor. It attempted a workers’ committee in 2019 and had some initial success in area mushroom farms. Unfortunately, the undertaking faced formidable obstacles, as workplaces were dispersed, operations were subcontracted, and workers’ distinct immigration and citizenship statuses meant they faced different vulnerabilities. Make the Road Reading conceded the effort.
Indivisible Berks was founded in 2016, in the immediate aftermath of Trump's election. Democratic congressional staffers took a lesson from the right-wing, populist Tea Party that began grassroots organizing in reaction to Barack Obama's presidential win in 2008, and they assembled their own playbook for taking back power in Washington, DC. Following the “Indivisible Guide” for state and local action, groups swiftly formed across the country. These were decentralized volunteer chapters, loosely tied the national parent, and most were started by women (Gose and Skocpol n.d.; Greenberg and Levin 2019).
Two white women from Berks’ suburbs formed a chapter. Members were mostly (though not exclusively) white, suburban, and middle-income. While officially independent of party affiliation, in practice Indivisible Berks endorsed select Democrats in county and state races. They chose candidates who pledged to defend the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act (health insurance), and they determined to hold officials accountable on a growing list of issues. Looking ahead to the national election, the group left the Indivisible network and joined the statewide Pennsylvania Stands Up in 2020 to become Berks Stands Up. Over one thousand Facebook followers comprise their extended constituency, and several dozen dues-paying members form a more active core.
Sunrise Movement is a national non-profit founded in 2017 that promotes the Green New Deal resolution for renewable energy, green infrastructure, and union jobs. The youth-driven organization used confrontational tactics (i.e., sit-ins in offices of Democratic elected officials) and quickly gained influence in Washington, DC. The Berks hub (chapter) launched with a celebration at Make the Road's downtown headquarters, and a founder of Indivisible Berks made a speech to welcome the new group to the orbit of the Reading/Berks resistance. Sunrise is the smallest of the three groups; the hub has a fluctuating but dedicated nucleus of ten to twenty multiracial young people, some of whom identify as gender nonbinary. They foresee that Reading's poor residents on the frontlines of disinvestment and environmental degradation would be well served by substantial federal investment.
Creating and sustaining an alliance among these organizations is a difficult undertaking. In the following sections, I discuss the work of building their base and combining diverse people and struggles.
Make The Road: May Day 2021
Reading's International Workers’ Day 2021 was planned by Make the Road, with the collaboration of Berks Stands Up and Sunrise Berks. It began outside Make the Road's downtown office, and participants marched to City Park, where speakers from social movement groups, unions, and local government took the stage. The central themes echoed the inside-outside strategy of their state and national parent organizations: US$15 an hour minimum wage; congressional passage of the union-backed PRO Act to remove hurdles to union organizing; and citizenship for undocumented “essential workers.”
The march also turned on the question of whose labor would be legitimated by the state and whose would not. Undocumented workers and those without a social security number were ineligible for the cash payments and unemployment benefits provided in the Trump administration's pandemic stimulus bills. The subsequent Biden recovery act went part-way to extending unemployment allowances, but millions of immigrant workers were still cut out of state support. This omission resulted in terrible outcomes in Reading. Essential workers reported to work, even under dangerous conditions, in order to maintain their household income. COVID outbreaks and two COVID-related deaths in area poultry plants where several Make the Road members were employed confirmed the deadly risks of their precarity. Meanwhile, those who lost paid work during the pandemic shutdown were rapidly immiserated, unable to cover their rent or buy adequate food. Charitable and volunteer groups stepped in to deliver groceries and offer financial support, and Make the Road Reading, Sunrise Berks, and Berks Stands Up formed a new initiative Berks Mutual Aid for that purpose. In this situation, challenging the divisions of labor—that is, confronting the accumulation of difference between documented and undocumented, visible and invisible labors—was an urgent matter of life and death.
Make the Road and other activists appropriated the state-designated classification “essential workers” to affirm that far from “disposable” or “surplus,” terms often used to denigrate them, farm workers, meat processors, food preparers and deliverers, and caretakers were the core of the national economy; they were worthy and created value. Advocates turned the state-issued, Janus-faced category “essential,” which disproportionately exposed Black, brown, and immigrant workers to sickness and death, into a claim for wages, recognition, and citizenship rights.
Reinventing May Day in Reading
The very fact that International Workers’ Day was revived in Reading was itself a noteworthy accomplishment. The holiday was invigorated in the United States in 2006 when immigrant rights groups staged a national Day Without Immigrants. That action was the outcome of more than ten years of organizing (Fine 2006; Striffler 2014), and it took another decade to bring the protest to Reading.
Make the Road reinvented Reading's May Day in 2017 after the holiday had not been celebrated there since Socialists led the festivities in the early-mid twentieth century. May Day had long been edged out by the more domesticated Labor Day, a national commemoration of the accomplishments of US unions. The annual Labor Day parade was Berks County's major union ritual for decades, but it was suspended in 2015 because neither the financially distressed city nor the United Labor Council could shoulder the US$15,000 price tag. The parade was again cancelled in 2016 for lack of funds (VanAllen 2016). It was therefore symbolically redolent that May Day was initiated the following year by the recently launched immigrant-rights group. Underscoring the changing landscape of labor's institutions and rituals, the event put immigrant's rights at the center of working-class demands, and Make the Road announced itself to be a new social movement actor.
Reading's May Day was an effort to bring together different factions of the community, a tough fight anywhere, and especially so in a region where the history of uneven investment and capital abandonment created deep-seated divisions. Over 100 local businesses pledged to close for the day, and hundreds of people stayed out of work and marched to oppose the encroachment of federal immigration enforcement in Berks. Months into his presidency, Trump issued an executive order to expand federal funding for the 287(g) initiative that partnered state and local police with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Immigration raids had already resulted in arrests and deportations in Reading, when the county commissioners and sheriff considered applying for the 287(g) program. The protest helped stall the proposal, and Berks County never applied for the federal monies.
After hosting a smaller event in 2018, Make the Road Reading prepared for another May Day in 2019. For weeks, organizers visited immigrant and Latinx owners of bodegas, restaurants, and nail salons and asked them to shut from 10:00 a.m. to noon in solidarity. Some had participated in 2017 and readily agreed, while others were unfamiliar with the event, and more discussion was required to secure their commitment. I went to dozens of locations with a staff person to seek their collaboration. In one small grocery, the organizer asked the Dominican proprietor to support the huelga, using the Spanish word for strike to describe the day's purpose. The proprietor's mother joined the conversation, and the organizer, also from Dominican Republic, continued in Spanish, “Well, it is not a huelga like we know. It's more like a protest.” This would not be a work stoppage or general strike, the kind of actions the women would be familiar with from International Workers’ Day in Dominican Republic, but a more modest march. The mother and daughter were sympathetic. They agreed that Pennsylvania's US$7.25 wage, doggedly guarded by the Republican-dominated state legislator, was too low, and that Lantinx residents had little power in the city. They displayed the Make the Road poster in the shop's front window and promised to shut on 1 May. A total of 153 businesses did the same.
On the day, approximately 100 protestors gathered at the Make the Road locale. Members flanked a large Fight for US$15 banner and led the march. They were joined by shop owners, middle-class members of Indivisible Berks, and Sunrise activists who carried signs demanding the closure of Berks detention center, where ICE contracted with the county to hold immigrant families at US$200 per day per bed. Although organized labor was not the driving force of the proceedings, the president of the Berks United Labor Council and two representatives of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) spoke for unions. By contrast, the historic powerhouses United Steel Workers (USW) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) were not in attendance, a fact that evinced their loss of membership and the hollowing out of heavy industry in Berks.
Their absence also testified to meaningful social cleavages. USW and IBEW members are mostly white and male and reside outside of the city. The United Labor Council President told me that they would not think of joining the protest. They see Make the Road as “radicals,” and they avoid visiting Reading, except to attend sports events, use the county offices, or (in past years) participate in the Labor Day parade. The reinvented May Day therefore had the unintended effect of reinscribing difference between city and county, immigrant and native-born, social movement groups and labor unions.
Notwithstanding, the Labor Council President's attendance sent an important message. It signaled his readiness to embrace new local actors and to keep the door open for sectors of organized labor to join in the changing left/liberal alliance. There were other engrams of unions on 1 May, as well. Some Sunrise members come from homes where union membership was etched in family history and identification. The grandfather of one was an IBEW member; another's father lost his job when Ronald Reagan fired and permanently replaced striking air traffic controllers in 1981, an act that dealt a decisive blow to the union movement and issued a neoliberal salvo. Many Make the Road members from Dominican Republic lived through the wave of industrial actions and general strikes in their home country in the late 1980s, and they brought their experiences in clubs and unions to this new context in Pennsylvania. In addition, the Fight for US$15 community-labor campaign was formulated by a national coalition of unions and social movement groups, including SEIU and the Movement for Black Lives.2
If May Day exposed social divides between city and suburbs, unprotected and union workers, native-born and immigrant, it also evinced the possibility for coherence. A Make the Road director observed that owners of small shops who joined the march “don't do better than workers who sell their labor in a traditional way” (Richman 2017). If only fleetingly, 1 May actions enunciated a relationship between immigrant rights and the needs, anxieties, and grievances of a heterogeneous group of protestors, including middle-class suburbanites worried about health insurance and medical costs (Indivisible); immigrant shop owners and undocumented workers (Make the Road); and precariously employed, student-debt-encumbered young people (Sunrise).
To be sure, the form the protest took exposed the structural impediments to workplace organizing. The Make the Road staffer recognized this reality in the grocery, when she contrasted the Reading march with the instrument of the general strike that the mother and daughter proprietors would recall from Dominican Republic. The collection of non-profits, volunteer groups, and union representatives in Reading/Berks did not have the capacity to stage a mass walk out; such militant action would have required a greater degree of power and unity than had been achieved. Nonetheless, Make the Road revitalized an international working-class holiday, mobilized a diverse collective, and instituted an annual ritual for the growing alliance in Berks.
Indivisible Berks: Shared values
Immediately upon her return from the Women's March in Washington, DC, the first mass protest against the Trump administration, a founder of Indivisible Berks posted on Facebook, to call her friends and neighbors to action. She was promptly contacted by an acquaintace who was likewise shocked by Trump's sexism, racism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia, and afraid that his authoritarian nationalism threatened democracy in the United States. Both women had been active in Berks Democrats, but they now considered the Party an ineffective vehicle for the kind of grassroots organizing that would be needed to confront the right-wing agenda in majority-Republican Berks County. Attesting to the fact that their skepticism of the Democrats was widely shared, Indivisible chapters appeared across the country in short order.
Indivisible Berks's first effort was a “listening canvass.” Volunteers, who were mostly white, suburban, and middle-income, spent weekend days in 2018 and 2019 knocking on doors in select boroughs that they deemed swayable for their slim margins for either Democrats or Republicans in recent elections. At their neighbors’ homes, they asked: “How can government make your life better?” The question was meant to initiate non-partisan conversations about representative democracy and the role of government in securing their well-being. If this opening was measured and cautious, it also registered a challenge to the reigning neoliberal common sense in favor of small government and against public spending, a message the Berks Patriots had doubled down on in the preceding decade. In addition, the invitation to envision government social support went against Trump policies that handed tax cuts to the rich and threatened to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Canvassers hoped to engage voters whose own vulnerability was exacerbated by these dis-possessive policies. Indivisible learned that affordable health care, the price of prescription drugs, and defense of public services were big-tent issues that appealed to many segments of their suburban and rural turf. It was therefore both tactical and heartfelt when the organization drove a months-long campaign to defeat a plan to privatize the county-owned and unionized nursing home. Indivisible's reputation as a formidable local actor was cemented when the county commissioners backed down and signed contracts that kept the nursing home in public hands and preserved union jobs.
Indivisible's two founders supported redistributive policies akin to New Deal and post–World War II Keynesian protections. Clearly recognizable in their worldview is the “double movement” involving processes of marketization and the countervailing struggle for social cover (Polanyi 1944). In their own words, the women saw themselves as working to “defeat the Trump agenda, elect leaders who share our values, and realize bold policies.” It is worthwhile to examine the rhetorical work being done by the dense, polysemic phrase “share our values.” They used this expression to voice critique and redraw the familiar political map. They avoided the terms “left” and “right” to characterize policy or to chart the political field and were wary of the descriptor “progressive” for their organization. They maintained that a new political vocabulary was necessary to reach a broad constituency in their highly partisan county. Instead of those well-worn political identifiers, they believed that “those who share our values” summoned a more expansive ethical community. This hoped-for assembly would be sufficiently large to swing elections and to assert power over public officials; it might shift the moral compass toward re-embedding the market and cementing a new social contract.
Importantly, however, “shared values” envisaged a consensus that sidestepped histories of uneven capitalist processes and dispossessions in different corners of Berks. It wished away racial and citizen-based inequality more than it confronted the contradictions that a large-tent would inevitably bring to the fore. Susana Narotzky made a similar observation regarding the 2011 anti-austerity mobilizations in Spain. Under the banners of “dignity” and “justice,” demonstrators issued moral claims about people's worth—that they deserved food, work, and social welfare to provide a dignified life. Yet they did not contest the class inequality or capitalist property relations that undergirded the widespread production of precarity and indignity in Spain (Narotzky 2016b). In Reading/Berks, values talk likewise evaded questions of capitalism, race, and class. However, the ensuing conjunctural crises of 2020–2021 changed what could be seen, talked about, and imagined. Some members of Indivisible's leadership team strained against those developments in the lead up to the national election and after the police murder of George Floyd, while others steered a more radical course.
Berks Stands Up: Defund the police
Gearing up for the 2020 election, Indivisible Berks’ leadership made the tactical decision to leave the nation's moderate and decentralized orbit and to join forces with the more left-leaning and strategically honed Pennsylvania Stands Up. In so doing, they hoped to benefit from the institutional strength, expertise, and resources of the statewide coalition. The coalition was associated with the Bernie Sanders camp and was committed to a social democratic agenda. It brought together groups from nine Pennsylvania counties to defeat Donald Trump and to support progressive local and state candidates, some of whom were members of Democratic Socialists of America.
Involvement with the statewide organization challenged and transformed the local group. The decision to become Berks Stands Up was not unanimous, and some on the executive board resigned their posts in disagreement. Those who remained drew on their relationship with Sunrise Berks to recruit young and non-white activists to leadership positions in the organization. Several months later when Berks Stands Up endorsed Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary, there was a further exit of moderate members, but again their numbers were boosted with new recruits. Berks Stands Up arrived at another crossroad only weeks later during the wave of racial justice protests.
The police killing of George Floyd in Spring 2020 catalyzed an uprising in the United States. Two months into the pandemic, as COVID-19 deaths mounted, especially in poor, immigrant, and minority communities, and as unemployment soared, people across the country took to the streets. The protests mobilized a new cohort of Black leaders in Reading, broadened and radicalized the existing left/liberal alignment, and opened frontlines of struggle.
When I began fieldwork, there were few Black-led political organizations in Reading/Berks. Reading had a long-standing chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that sponsored candidate forums, hosted an annual Juneteenth celebration, and sponsored community events. There was no local BLM chapter to moblize young, radical activists. Organizing was partly limited by the Black community's small size (never more than 13 percent of the city's population) and because working- and middle-class African Americans left for the suburbs when housing markets opened to them after the 1960s. Urban disinvestment and capital abandonment made sustaining community institutions in the city even more difficult.
Moreover, the presence in Berks of white hate groups posed a threat to community efforts. The short-lived House of Soul is a case in point. The social center opened in 1967, sponsored by the federally funded Detached Worker Project of the Reading YMCA. It was shut down by municipal officials only two years later, after the city saw two nights of disturbances. The unrest followed an episode of racist intimidation outside the center: white youths drove by the building shouting racial slurs and then graffitied the façade; young people gathered at the House of Soul took to the streets in response. The intertwined forces of white supremacy, racialized disinvestment, and urban decline stalled progressive activism in the 1960s and 1970s and took a toll on the churches and clubs that had earlier nurtured Black community life (Penn State Berks n.d. a).
Without established organizations in the lead, the racial justice rallies and marches in Reading were planned via social media by new activists. Local LGBTQIA+, education, and arts groups joined in. Amid the upswell, two young women founded Decolonize Reading, with the goal of inaugurating a Black-led initiative to challenge racism and colonialism. As monuments to slave traders and Confederate Civil War officers were toppled in England and the United States, and the symbolic control of public space was in the news, they turned their attention to the Christopher Columbus statue in City Park. In its debut as a local political actor, Decolonize Reading co-sponsored a rally against white supremacy with Make the Road, Sunrise, and Berks Stands Up. Organizers assembled a crowd of about 100 in City Park. A dark-skinned Dominican man, a member of Make the Road, told of his personal experiences of anti-Black racism in the Latinx community. Other speakers recounted harassment by the Reading police, read aloud testimonies of immigrant detainees in Berks detention center, and deplored the Columbus statue for symbolizing European colonialism in a city populated with immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America.
The racial justice upsurge emboldened the left/liberal alignment in Reading/Berks. The new leaders of Berks Stands Up posted on Facebook a statement in support of the BLM agenda to defund the police. Dissent and conflict were posted forthwith. Some group members objected to the word “defund,” and they proposed alternate language they believed might sit better with their neighbors and with the white, suburban swing voters whom they hoped to sway. Young Black, Latinx, and white commentators forcefully countered that it was not the group's place to edit the Black Lives message. The Black Lives platform connected police brutality, skyrocketing police budgets, and disinvestment in Black communities. It linked oppression and violence to the dispossession of labor and property dating to slavery and colonialism, and to the extraction of value via private jails and housing gentrification. It called for public spending on policing to be redirected to improve conditions of life in poor neighborhoods (M4BL; Ransby 2018). Over the course of their argument over the word “defund,” Berks Stands Up members did not explore connections between the struggle to defund the police and their own fight to re-embed the market and win a new New Deal. They missed the opportunity to link these different experiences of oppression and dispossession and to uncover the relations among them. Nonetheless, they stayed the course of alliance. When an African American man was arrested in a Walmart in a Berks suburb months later, members of Berks Stands Up assembled in protest and joined the shouts of “defund the police!”
The relations among them
When social movement groups show up as a heterogeneous, collective presence, they are pushed toward more comprehensive explanations of capitalist processes. Greater combination in struggle may lead to more encompassing alliances, analysis, and politics; it may fuel larger programmatic and ideological abstractions in order to explain the antagonisms and contradictions of capitalism. No such thorough-going synthesis was consolidated when Make the Road celebrated May Day with Latinx non-unionized workers and small business owners in attendance, yet absent members of the large industrial unions. Nor was it forthcoming when Berks Stands Up fought internally over the invocation to defund the police, but failed to recognize the links to the new social contract the group sought to bring about, including affordable health care. Notwithstanding those shortcomings, in each of these instances, the potential for greater abstraction could be glimpsed.
Drawing connections between “our values” and surplus value, labors and labor, differentiation and unity is as much a necessary project for Left activists today as it is an intellectual problem for contemporary Left scholars. The challenge is to “take advantage of the unevenness and particular conjunctural combinations of social relations” (Bond et al. 2013: 254). Mainstream anthropologists document cultural and ontological difference (e.g., Graeber 2004, 2013), while political-economy-minded anthropologists vigorously rebut their cultural essentialist claims in favor of detailed historical ethnographies of uneven capitalist development, the disorganization and fragmentation of working classes, and the production of difference (e.g., Kalb 2018; Kasmir and Gill 2018). We have tended to name heterogeneity as the problem, and correctly so (Smith 2014, 2020). However, we have been less inclined to see unevenness as the political starting point, from which to articulate a grounded study of the making of alliance; that is, we have neglected the dialectic of division and unity, unevenness and combination.
Differentiation is an inner tendency of capital and a lynchpin of its valorization. At the same time, struggles for social betterment make claims on capitalist surplus value. The concept of essential relations brings to the fore of our research the dialectical opposition of those movements for social/political divisions of labor and the counter-force of combined resistance.
Marxist anthropologists renew the concept of class by charting people's shifting livelihoods and forms of work, and by capturing their changing relationships to capital, the state, and each other (e.g., Gill 2016; Kalb 1998; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Kasmir and Gill 2022; Smith 2014). This approach shines a light on class processes as they unfold in concrete places, over time, and influenced by the hard organizing work of building institutions and creating alliances. This is not class as a fixed category but reworked through the struggles of the day. The point is not to declare the (re)making of working classes as an already accomplished fact, nor to prioritize class over other identities or contradictions. Rather the project is to apprehend the combinations of people and struggles that can generate broader political movements. Frontlines of struggle are many, and nodes of conflict may be temporary, incomplete, and fail to cohere. The three social movement groups in Reading/Berks sometimes built their own constituencies around their own issues: immigrant rights; the Green New Deal; or democratic participation. They also reliably showed up for each other's events and supported each other's campaigns. Their alliance produced moments of solidarity, when the relations among divided sectors of Reading/Berks could be seen and broader political horizons could be imagined. “The ‘pure militancy’ of an immediate politics does not easily lend itself to these broader, more general impulses. It situates itself in the conjunctural rather than structural. Rather, dialogue and coalition, among the various sectors of society, at distinct points of contradiction, are the keys to producing a larger and an anti-capitalist political formation” (Bond et al. 2013: 252). The social movement trio is building this broader left/liberal ecosystem in Reading/Berks, and it is a growing collective force in the deindustrialized region.
Acknowledgments
My sincere gratitude to the amazing organizers and members of Make the Road Reading, Indivisible Berks/Berks Stands Up, and Sunrise Movement Berks, especially Gaby Lopez, Juana Mora, Jane Palmer, and Troy Turner, and to the many others in Reading/Berks who shared their experiences and perspectives with me. Thank you to Gavin Smith, Lesley Gill, and Don Kalb who provided valuable comments and guidance on earlier drafts of this article, as well to my colleagues on the Frontlines of Value Project. Research was conducted while I was a member of “Frontlines: Class, Value and Social Transformation in 21st Century Capitalism,” with funds from University of Bergen, Bergen Foundation, and the Government of Norway. A Faculty Research and Development grant from Hofstra University also helped support my research.
Notes
The brutality of George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 was captured on video and widely disseminated via social media. The counter-response was nearly immediate. Protests were staged in cities and suburbs throughout the United States and worldwide. Years of organizing by Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives undergirded these spontaneous eruptions that mobilized veteran political actors, as well as massive numbers of new participants. Floyd's killing occurred in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when racial disparities in health and economic security were fully on display. The spring uprising ushered people out of pandemic lockdown; the marches were interracial, and lasted for months in the run-up to the national election.
Scholars note the importance of organized labor for myriad social and political struggles in which unions do not take a leading role. Susana Narotzky (2016a) underlines unions’ overlooked role in the 2011 Indignados mobilizations in Spain. David McNally (2013) traces the legacy of working-class politics and labor unions, despite their apparent absence from recent mass mobilizations in Colombia, Mexico, Tunisia, and Egypt. Karen Brodkin's (2007) study of student activism in Los Angeles likewise shows the continued significance of unions for building social movements.
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