{"product_id":"labor-is-not-a-commodity","title":"\"Labor Is Not a Commodity!\"","description":"Analyzing the history of the movement to shorten the workday in late nineteenth-century New York City and Berlin, this book explores what Karl Polanyi has termed the \"fictitious commodification\" of labor. Despite the concept's significance for present-day social movements, European and North American historiography has largely ignored the impact of free-market rhetoric on the formation of organized labor. Filling this gap, Philipp Reick provides both a contribution to the current reevaluation of Polanyian thought and theory and an interdisciplinary investigation of the trans-Atlantic transmission of ideas. As Reick demonstrates, while on both sides of the Atlantic workers opposed the unchecked commodification of labor power as a violation of their political, social, and economic rights, the emerging movements for protection from commodification did not promote a universalist concept of rights.\nBy showing that American and German workers drew upon a strikingly similar rationality when formulating demands, this book reveals that we cannot label either the US labor movement as a deviation from the supposed norm of industrial contestation or its German counterpart as the embodiment of that norm.","brand":"Campus Verlag","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54250808050008,"sku":"9783593506272","price":62.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9783593506272.jpg?v=1769760916","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/labor-is-not-a-commodity","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}