Labor, Finance, and Counterrevolution: Finally Got the News at the End of the Short American Century

This article revisits the crisis of the American automotive industry and Fordist industrial labor in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the lens of the radical African American labor organization at the heart of that industry. By way of an analysis of the film Finally Got the News (1970), it considers the activities of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in order to reexamine the dynamics of transition between industrial and financial capitalism as they are captured in this crisis of Detroit at the end of the “American century.” It argues that struggles around labor management in the crises of the Keynesian era implicitly foretold strategies of financial control in our present.