Confronting Adamic’s text seventy-five years after the fact demands that readers ask themselves a number of difficult and politically loaded questions: to what extent is our seemingly peaceful labor system already (and always) bound up in the latent violence of capital? The very notion of a post-war labor “peace” conceals the underlying violence upon which that “peace” was brokered. The illusion of labor peace is predicated upon the state’s power to unleash violence against workers should they break their end of the deal. Was the subsumption of the American labor movement under layers of government bureaucracy–in exchange for an end to violence–on the whole a victory for workers? Or has the post-war labor peace been an unequal compromise? Certainly, no unionist is nostalgic for the days when a worker could be shot dead for walking a picket line, but the alternative we have isn’t that great either.

— No War But Class War: a review of Louis Adamic’s Dynamite

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