This panel brings together three different papers which explore the relationship between the histories and configuration of labor activism and specific communities. In conversation with the audience, Wedgle looks at how Jewish children’s stories dampened if not erased Jewish women’s activism in the labor movement. Next, Wijoyo interrogates the changing narratives of cooperatives as some succumb to contemporary managerial practices, highlighting the political struggle of worker oriented democracy on a smaller scale. In the third paper, Martinez traces two conflicting narratives of labor in El Salvador, naming competing visions of transcendent utopianism and utopia-in-place. Together, these papers demonstrate how work organizing is a central site of contestation of social power and of the construction of potential alternative social orders.
This paper examines children’s literature about Jewish women in the labor movement in order to analyze what story about the Jewish past this particular body of work tells, and what kind of Jewish future it wishes to shape. I argue that this children’s literature overwhelmingly erases the politics of the Jewish labor movement, particularly ignoring socialism, communism, and often even unionization, while amplifying the graphic violence of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The resulting stories become moral tales of doing the right thing in line with capitalist American values, rather than ones of Jewish left radicalism which has the potential to inform a future of principled labor activism and working-class solidarity. Ultimately, this paper questions what happens to the past, the present, and the future of American Judaism and of the American labor movement when the radicalism is erased but the violence remains.
This paper examines what might be described as the slow cancellation of the cooperative movement’s promised future. Drawing on examples from multiple contexts, cooperative institutions increasingly diverge from the emancipatory visions that once animated cooperative thought. In Indonesia, the cooperative model championed by Mohammad Hatta has gradually been absorbed into state apparatuses serving neoliberal development agendas. In Europe, some co-ops survive but adopt managerial practices that dilute their role as schools of democracy. Even thriving co-ops face persistent internal conflicts, splintered visions, and member dissatisfaction. Rather than treating these developments as failures of an inherently harmonious cooperative ideal, this paper reinterprets them through Foucault alongside the post-Marxist framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It argues for radical negativity as a working ontology, viewing adversarial conflicts within and with the state as constitutive of democratic economic institutions. Using an agonistic model of politics, the paper reconceives cooperative economies as sites of ongoing political struggle and resubjectification.
The renovation of San Salvador’s Historic Downtown (Centro Histórico) is a central collective dream of postwar Salvadoran society. At its heart is the hyper-modern National Library (BINAES), functioning as a secular cathedral for President Nayib Bukele’s future-oriented, religious-infused politics. Drawing on Laurence Davis, I analyze this urban spectacle as “transcendent utopianism,” a top-down vision demanding an ideological faith in capitalist progress that ultimately drives speculative dispossession. In contrast, I examine an alternative renovation process led by the Salvadoran Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperativism (FECOSVAM). Rooted in the labor movement, these cooperatives provide dignified housing to working-class families formerly in precarious tenements (mesones). Following David Bell, I conceptualize FECOSVAM’s cooperative labor as “utopia-as-place”: an immanent space continuously reproduced through shared governance, solidarity, and convivencia. Theorizing this praxis as utopianism renders visible a contesting horizon of social dreaming, challenging the state’s elite, linear model of development.