If McDonald’s is like Convergys in that it involves handling people, it differs in that the unruly customers are right there, in person. They can get in her face. An impatient, bossy one (“Hurry up hurry up hurry up”) demands extra honey mustard from her, which technically she’s not supposed to give. (“Honey mustard! Get me honey mustard!”) Guendelsberger breaks the rule to avoid confrontation. But she’s unsteady with anger, and a packet of condiment slips from her hand and over the counter. “Quick as a shortstop, [the customer] scoops it up and wings it at my chest, hard. The packaging explodes; honey mustard splatters all over me and the surrounding area.” The customer, backed up by a friend, accuses Guendelsberger of having thrown the mustard first. Of course—more victim-blaming. It’s the 2010s.


Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: “Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.” We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart.


“Moloch” is the name Steve Fraser gives to this situation in his new essay collection, Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History. Citing Milton and Ginsberg, he writes, “The Moloch of capitalism is as deadly and merciless as its Canaanite ancestor. But its altars are everywhere, virtually invisible yet part of the warp and woof of everyday life: at one moment prayed to on Wall Street, at another configuring the most hidden desires and anxieties of everyone’s emotional life.” These prayers, desires, and anxieties—their histories, their infernal dynamics—are the subject of the book’s eleven essays, which touch on virtually the full sweep of American history. Where Guendelsberger, the plucky reporter, came at the problem up close, Fraser—an eminent labor historian—stands back to try to size the whole thing up. Echoing an old-fashioned style of American Studies scholarship, he’s interested in origin myths and in something like a national psyche.


The essays in Mongrel Firebugs summarize and build on two of Fraser’s recent books, The Limousine Liberal and, especially, The Age of Acquiescence—a late-career magnum opus. While the new book’s contents were largely written for magazine readerships over the last ten years and Fraser approaches them in the loose way of a storyteller, they display his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. history, especially working-class history. (Fraser’s early career was characterized by pathbreaking original scholarship on the labor movement of the early twentieth century, including a masterful biography of garment workers’ leader Sidney Hillman, Labor Will Rule, and the 1989 edited collection The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, which continues to set historians’ agendas today.) 


In his recent work, and especially in the essays collected here, Fraser traces a distinct arc across the history of American capitalism. The nineteenth century was the age of capital’s ravenous growth, consuming all in its path. “It proceeded relentlessly,” he writes, “appropriating land and resources both human and natural that had once been off limits because they were enmeshed in alternative forms of slave, petty, and subsistence economies.” In the face of this social apocalypse, people resisted vigorously, turning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a period of protracted and often violent social conflict, which he calls a “Second Civil War.” “The legions of the displaced became charter members of an American proletariat. Their new existence was both a promise and a reproach,” writes Fraser.


This is the age of the mass strike and the general strike, events that escaped the confines of any particular employer-employee relationship and became instead the cri de coeur of a whole new world, as for example in the national crusade for the eight-hour day.



It’s likely that Henry “Schmidt” Noll saw some of this action himself: Bethlehem Steel had fierce strikes in 1910, 1918, and 1919.


Decades of such struggles culminated in the New Deal. Workers at Bethlehem Steel, for example, struck again in 1937 and 1941—alongside millions of others around the country in these years. Finally, they won recognition, and they were quickly co-opted into the American mainstream. The conservative compromises that initially stabilized this new order—reinstitutionalized racial and gender hierarchies, coercive deradicalization of labor, private administration of the incomplete welfare state—also left it riddled with contradictions, ultimately producing its decay into neoliberalism in the 1970s.


Here Fraser arrives at his new great subject, the psychic economy of our time. Where the first “Gilded Age” saw enormous resistance to inequality, Fraser argues, ours has seen a distracted, demoralized culture of compliance. Economic risk-taking, positively stigmatized after the Great Depression, is now spoken of in heroic terms: To the risk-taker go the spoils. (Google “risk-taker” and try not to shudder at what you see.) De facto debt servitude and penal labor are back, too, although neither is met with the outrage one might have expected based on earlier historical experience. (Coal miners in Tennessee took up arms in the 1890s to free convict laborers, grasping what the practice portended for themselves.) Unemployment, understood through the late nineteenth century as a grotesque and unacceptable social phenomenon and resisted in spectacular episodes of collective action, is now accepted as natural—cyclical, like the seasons.


Painfully, the most potent strand of resistance instead has been the right-wing populist outrage of the petit bourgeois against the “limousine liberal.” In the book’s later entries, Fraser explores this American demagogic tradition, finding Donald Trump’s clearest predecessor in William Randolph Hearst. Though here, too, he notes, irresponsible populism a century ago required a pro-labor posture. “Today’s right-wing populists are hardly about to invoke the anti-capitalism that impassioned the people Hearst counted on. On the contrary, what draws them to The Donald is that he is an übermensch risen atop the capitalist order.” Trump in this way only exemplifies the phenomenon of the ascent of the family capitalists—like the Kochs, Waltons, and so on—in whose hands enormous wealth has accumulated in recent years, and who, liberal and reactionary alike, manifest “godlike desire to create the world in their image.” The worship they receive, at its apex in Trump’s presence in the White House, suggests that their apotheosis has been successful—“the genie grown monstrous,” as Fraser puts it.


For Fraser, the cause of this deep ideological transformation lies in the altered “metabolism” of capitalism. Where once it produced upheaval by swallowing everything it could chew, today its systems are basically expulsive: unemployment and exclusion, rather than coerced assimilation and employment. “The gears of Progress, that demiurge of the first Gilded Age, were set in reverse,” Fraser writes. Capitalism “autocannibalized” itself, and the spirit of the new age was accordingly the dejection of the social reject, not the outrage of the unwilling conscript.

 

Indeed, Fraser can’t help but telegraph his own dejection. “There is abroad in the world the spirit of Moloch,” he concludes, “luridly lighting up the abyss out of which Trump has emerged.” While his last lines call for renewed dreams of emancipation, he hasn’t devoted much space to searching out where such dreams might come from, and doesn’t seem to have much faith that they’ll materialize. Here the gap between Fraser’s defeated New Left generation and Guendelsberger’s defiant Millennials looms large.


The generational difference is political, but it’s also sociological. Guendelsberger, unlike her direct predecessor Ehrenreich, isn’t exactly slumming it—she doesn’t have as far to fall. Through much of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich is tormented by the ethical implications of the social distance between herself and her co-workers. Guendelsberger, on the other hand, is fairly unbothered on this count; she was already unemployed when she embarked on her project. She sleeps in her car for significant portions of the narrative, and accepts the charity of her workmates gratefully. She began the book, in fact, on spec—she only got her contract during her second stint, at Convergys. “Even if nothing came of it, I figured, I would at least bank a couple thousand bucks.” 


The contrast with the conception of Nickel and Dimed—brainstormed over salmon with Lewis Lapham—is a perfect index of what the last 20 years have done to the once-secure professional strata. Ehrenreich set out to rediscover the lost land of the working class as a self-conscious representative of the complacent middle class, in order to send word back and stimulate the numbed yuppie conscience. After another generation of neoliberalism, the line between these two groups has blurred, so this interpreter act seems less urgent. Guendelsberger herself straddles the line, and she imagines her reader does, too. “Yeah, you, mamá,” she writes in her afterword, hailing the reader the way workers addressed each other at McDonald’s. “You’re a worker too—just like me and Jess and Zeb and Candela and Kolbi and Miguel and the Mustard Lady.”