Response to Richard McIntyre on Shredding Paper

Influenced by the academic work of Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, the author and his close collaborator Richard McIntyre have spent four decades closely reading and contributing research to adjacent radical literatures on the empirical history of workers and capitalism. In this response to Richard McIntyre’s review of Shredding Paper, the author reveals how his own research into the story of Maine’s paper mills has developed since the 1980s, drawing out the class implications of the details embedded in a history that stretches back to the origins of Maine’s paper industry. Hillard highlights the efficacy of reading capitalist histories of focusing on subsumed classes, i.e., a “volumes 2 and 3 [of Capital] approach,” alongside the much more common “volume 1” methodology common to most radical political economy and labor history. For better and worse, this story has culminated in two generations of rural Mainers rejecting the sensibilities of neoliberal capitalism. This local class formation and particular consciousness of class contains many lessons for those who see capitalism problematically, but in the absence of an established U.S. Left, and given the cultural forces and propaganda acting upon them, this critical culture appears to have moved on.