Benjamin Kunkel has written a lengthy article on David Harvey for the London Review of Books. Nominally a joint review of his recent books The Enigma of Capital and A Companion to Marx's Capital, it engages with Harvey's entire body of work, and especially his seminal The Limits to Capital.
Over recent decades, the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey's Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi's Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner's Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded practitioners of what might be called the bourgeois theorisation of the current crisis.
In his review of Rebel Rank and File for In These Times, Joe Burns commends the new collection for "bringing to life [a] fascinating period in labor history," and for pointing the way to "another path to union renewal" at a time when "organized labor's strategies are not working."
Long before today's quieted labor movement came the turbulent 1970s, with its militant picket lines and industry-wide strikes. During this often-ignored period of U.S. labor history, workers tenaciously fought back against employers committed to eroding hard-won union gains. In contrast to today's staff-driven labor movement, workplaces teemed with radical rank-and-file caucuses and wildcat strikes.
In an article for Counterpunch, Steve Early, contributor to Rebel Rank and File, draws parallels between protests against King George III in late colonial America and the emergence of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU):
During the 1970s, a small slice of the trade union left was able to tap into working class discontent and workplace militancy in a very enduring way. The result, in the unlikely venue of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), was an on-going "Tea Party" in the best and original sense of that Boston-based organizing against economic royalists. Just as unruly protests against King George III in late colonial America didn't emerge in a vacuum, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) was the product of a distinct historical period. It has, nevertheless, managed to survive over the last 35 years, and never stopped acting as a much-needed thorn-in-the-side to Teamster tories everywhere.