As we go to press, Occupy Wall Street has electrified the world. To even hazard a guess as to its future would be foolhardy in the extreme at this formative moment in the movement’s life. But we can say a few things. First of all, hallelujah! Three years into the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression, a strange silence had settled over the country. Many had reasonably predicted a great rising of resistance and rebellion against what Karl Marx once called “the Vatican of capitalism,” by which he meant the elite world of high finance and its political enablers. But nothing much happened. And then it did, as if out of nowhere, beginning with a small encampment of several hundred young people in a small park a block away from Wall Street. One month later, in a thousand cities around the world all on the same day, millions occupied their own symbolic Wall Streets. Nothing like that has ever happened. Not ever! There are at least two great mysteries of human history. One is why people endure what they endure from the powers that be for so, so long. The second is why, one day, they don’t. We have just been witness to both.

For the labor movement OWS is, potentially, a chance at resurrection. And we are pleased to report that (with little delay) many unions recognized that possibility, quickly endorsed OWS, marshaled their members to march in solidarity, and have explicitly connected their own struggles against corporate domination to the central insight of OWS: namely, that a multitude of miseries—joblessness, poverty, mass foreclosures, environmental poisoning, unprecedented inequality, tyranny at work, deindustrialization, imperial war, sweatshops, inaccessible health care—must be addressed at their root. A pathological form of finance capitalism headquartered on Wall Street has sustained itself for a generation by eating the American (and not only the American) economy alive. This notion that there is a system at work creating all this devastation is actually not alien to the labor movement, but it has been muted within its ranks for far too long. Among the many accusations hurled at OWS is the charge that it is waging “class warfare.” Yes, indeed! Finally! And this has opened up space for the labor movement to engage openly in that battle—something even its otherwise cautious founder, Samuel Gompers, took for granted as an everyday fact of life under capitalism. Already, we can happily mark the first tangible victory in that war; namely, the overwhelming vote to repeal Ohio’s anti-collective bargaining law in this past November’s election.

In future issues of New Labor Forum, we hope to write extensively about OWS and the various forms this still protean movement is likely to take on in the months and years ahead. In this issue, many—although not all—of our articles examine the dark side of what’s been happening of late.

Until OWS erupted, most of what passed for rebellion was happening on the right, a grim development to be sure. Darren Dochuk provides a penetrating analysis of the rise of the Tea Party. He argues that its combination of economic and Christian fundamentalism has been percolating away for a long time and accounts for its enormous throw-weight inside the Republican Party. Jordan Stancil explains why, even in the face of mass street protests, the governing parties in Europe (both Christian and Social Democratic)—who once mounted serious criticism and resistance to the worst abuses of free market capitalism—have surrendered to the bond market. In an article about the broad, state-by-state assault on the labor movement, Peter Rachleff documents the epidemic spread of “right-to-work” legislation and reminds us how in the past the labor movement and its allies have sometimes managed to defeat this kind of anti-union attack. We might now rename America the “United States of Austerity.” Mimi Abramovitz dissects the particulars of this new order to expose the way its impact will be felt disproportionately by women. For African-Americans, the financial meltdown has deepened an entrenched crisis. But, as Andy Kroll points out, the black unemployment rate has for generations stood unchanged at double the rate of white unemployment. The AFL-CIO’s Arlene Holt Baker responds to Kroll with some thoughts about what the labor movement should do about this national scandal. Like many of the promising beginnings of the Obama administration, real action to avoid the looming environmental Armageddon of a fossil-fuel driven economy has died on the vine. In “On the Contrary,” Sean Sweeney provocatively argues that the whole model of economic growth powered by a green capitalism, a model to which parts of the labor movement have been attached for some time, is itself a dead end.

We are happy to note, however, that this issue is not all gloom and doom. For some years now, “Working America” has been an ongoing experiment by the AFL-CIO on how to mobilize those millions of working people outside the union movement without actually enlisting them in trade unions. Amy Dean provides a close analysis of that experiment, in what ways it has succeeded, in what ways it has not, and how it remains a work in progress. One of our columnists, Peter Dreier, is publishing a book this spring comprised of biographical sketches of people he considers the most noteworthy progressive leaders of the last one hundred years. We are proud to publish an adapted version of his mini-biography of Florence Kelley, a pioneer of labor reform. Dreier’s regular column, “Roots of Rebellion,” also appears in this issue (co-written with Chuck Collins) and is devoted to applauding “traitors to their class,” meaning rich people who have invested their money and time in helping build local movements for democracy and social justice.

Our other columns also provide reasons for hope. Jay Youngdahl, in our “Working-Class Voices” feature, tells the story of Navajo railroad workers, whose lot has been a hard one for generations, but whose cultural traditions have sustained them through those privations. Robert Pollin writes about viable alternatives to the kinds of austerity and “recovery” measures that both the Republican Party and the president have suggested. On the web, Liza Featherstone sends us to sites that can inform people about the vital economic role of immigrant labor, immigrant-rights activism, and anti-sweatshop developments, among other matters. Ben Becker’s “Under the Radar” shows off the wit on display at OWS, shines a light on little-reported fightbacks, and (as usual) contains statistics and quotes that may leave you gasping. Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman recount in “In the Rearview Mirror” the remarkably imaginative and courageous ways people have responded to the trauma of unemployment since the antebellum days of industrial capitalism. Our “Books and the Arts” section contains reviews of books about human rights in the workplace; the mostly female workers who provide various kinds of intimate, caregiving services that were, once upon a time, unpaid and confined to private households; and the way economic hard times have spread from blue- to white-collar America. And Matt Witt’s ever-popular “Out of the Mainstream” highlights a host of recent books and films that deserve your attention. We end with the blues, a selection of poems that chronicle the human toll of unemployment, from the abandoned slag heaps and factories to the local bars and backyard gardens.