“At the Origins of Treason to the White Race, On Noel Ignatiev’s Acceptable Men” by Ferruccio Gambino
In Brooklyn Rail, Ferruccio Gambino wrote “At the Origins of Treason to the White Race: On Noel Ignatiev’s Acceptable Men.”
Ferruccio Gambino is a longtime activist in the non-institutional left in Italy who was a friend of Noel Ignatiev for more than 40 years.
He wrote: “Among the many diaries and memoirs written by blue-collar workers, some of the more impressive ones come from militants and revolutionaries on the left. Noel Ignatiev’s just-published Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World belongs to this category and can captivate readers with its unrelenting attention to social relations unfolding around blast furnaces… It is in its account of the shaky relations between workers and industrial capital during the 1970s that we can read Acceptable Men as a dramatic (if subdued) document of stagnant working conditions presaging additional hardships for blue-collar workers.”