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Much of the archaeology and history of labor is based on organized labor, unions, and strikes, and the common rhetoric emphasizes the success or failure of union strike activities. This frames labor activism with clear winners and losers and inadvertently adopts the vantage point of capital. Given the modern world where union membership is plummeting, "success" seems even more unlikely. In this paper, I use the case of the Coalwood lumber camp to argue that labor's "success" was much more complicated than simply winning strikes. Recognizing the difference between concrete and abstract labor provides a way to think about worker's decisions to structure their lives based more on concrete than alienated labor that gives them more autonomy over their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, scholars have turned to Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution to explain the reproduction and development of capitalism. Most accounts focus on elite maneuvers from above. With specific attention to the case of South Africa, I examine the relationship between passive revolution, secured by elites through the negotiated democratic transition of the early 1990s, and mobilization from below in the post-apartheid period. South Africa's passive revolution featured formal racial inclusion, the preservation of extreme inequality and economic insecurity, the demobilization of popular forces, and narrow elite struggles for state resources. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists and residents in the impoverished townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I show how passive revolution produced fractured militancy: the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of popular resistance. I demonstrate this process by examining the policy, organizational, and leadership dimensions of the relationship between passive revolution and popular mobilization. The analysis has implications for the study of both capitalism and social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]