“Whether on factory floors or through economic ebbs and flows, Ignatiev presented class struggle as a sequence of enigmatic forms of conflict, accommodation, and rapprochement. He traced, in microcosm, how the revolutionary processes initiated through the daily activities of ordinary people constituted important “outposts” of a future socialist society in the present”
“Short of imposing a fleet of foremen to monitor the machinists directly, management at Tractor Works could not hope to curb unwanted self-organization like timecard forgeries, just as the capitalist class as a whole cannot hope to block once and for all the development of socialism in the future repertoires of collective action from unforeseen sectors”
“A suggestive thesis found in Ignatiev’s academic work was that plant closures and the general crisis of industrial employment constituted a concerted effort on the part of capital to “break the continuity of the workers’ movement,” to smash the “patterns established over decades of invisible struggle” that workers undertook to plan production in its entirety”
“Irish assimilation in the United States provided a case study for how the oppression licensed by whiteness operates: how the dominant class of the social order (though that class is itself often divided) enlists a portion of the dominated to ally with the dominant class in an alliance, granting this portion a superior status and material advantages”
“In an intriguing metaphor, Ignatiev termed whiteness as a “sort of disaster policy for the ruling class.” It would not be destroyed, he argued, without serious challenges to the mechanisms of social advantage that discourage solidarity and limit political imagination”
“Ignatiev had much earlier identified a compelling argument to remain in the white club: “The white workers are […] conditioned to believe that every step toward racial equality necessarily means a worsening of their own conditions.””
““Every genuine struggle against entrenched power,” he wrote near the end of his life, generates elements of the new society, which “spring up like mushrooms after a summer rain.””