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David Roediger , Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (London : Verso , 2014, £16.99). Pp. 230. isbn 978 1 7816 8609 6 .
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Ever since the publication of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935), historians have tried to explain why, after the Civil War, white and black workers did not form any kind of interracial alliance, or, more precisely, why the white northern working class, having clearly supported the abolition of slavery, turned its back on emancipated blacks once the goal was achieved. Arguably, one of the most persistent answers to this question was given by David Montgomery, who claimed in Beyond Equality (1967) that after the war the white working class, in actual fact, continued its fight for interracial emancipation, putting forward a race-neutral agenda against the so-called "wage slavery." Workers, in other words, thought that the next step toward equality was to abolish economic poverty by reforming the heavily inefficient and unjust capitalist system based on the exploitation of the workforce. This fight knew no race colour, therefore it involved both whites and blacks. Montgomery argued that the failure of this struggle was determined by the inability of Radical Republicans to translate the emancipatory afflatus of the working class into political reality. With the failure of Radical Republicanism, workers' movements became peripheral and lost their chance to enforce a racial egalitarian agenda. In the past thirty years, David Roediger has been one of the most vocal critics of Montgomery's idea that the white working class was open to interracial solidarity. His Wages of Whiteness (1991) explained how the will to defend whiteness-derived privileges brought white workers to reject any sort of cooperation with their black colleagues.
After twenty-five years spent exploring the concept of...