Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Worker's Revolt
Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Worker's Revolt
Josh MacPhee and Kennedy Block
Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next, or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.
Workers have been engaged in a culture of resistance for as long as there have been bosses. Across every movement and in every language, we have joined our voices together in rebellion and solidarity, singing songs that still echo through the history of organized labor. But in the last hundred years, new technology has allowed these militant rhythms and rebellious melodies to be recorded as they were sung–the voices of miners in Northern England, fieldworkers in California, autoworkers in France, and many others–etched into wax, shellac, and vinyl as strike records.
Strike While the Needle is Hot takes readers through labor’s greatest hits, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been preserved on these fragile discs.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781945335549
Published: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 8 x 8 in
Page count: 240
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“Political movements without music may still be called movements, but they are not worth joining. Over the past decade, Josh MacPhee has produced groundbreaking, encyclopedic work on the musical activity of twentieth-century left-wing and labor organizations. Co-authored with Kennedy Block, Strike While the Needle Is Hot compiles and annotates eighty recordings produced by trade unions, workers’ organizations, and left-wing groups for specific strikes. Vinyl records in the twentieth century were a particular kind of capitalist commodity, but the records MacPhee and Kennedy present do something fundamentally different: they break the logic of the capitalist recording industry.... The vinyl record was one tool in the masters’ collection, but workers transformed it into a weapon of their own.” —Jackson Albert Mann for CounterPunch
“This book looks so good on the coffee table. It’s a must for every Union household. Super cool artwork with stylistic, detailed writing about the songs you need to know about. I learned so much from the first moment I got it. I’m going to love this book for a long time!”—Mark Gevaart, My Labor Radio
“Full of gorgeous images of album art and inserts as well as contemporaneous news items, Strike While the Needle Is Hot shows workers taking full control of their messaging—spreading info and raising funds for strikes and documenting their own actions....[T]his is a book that deserves to be heard as well as read." —Chicago Reader
“Throughly researched and invaluable.” —The Wire
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Josh MacPhee has been collaboratively making, researching, and collecting political art for over twenty years. In 2011, he cofounded the Interference Archive, a library, exhibition, event, and research space in Brooklyn dedicated to the exploration of social movement culture. He is also a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, and the author/editor of multiple books including Celebrate People's History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution (Feminist Press, 2010 and 2020), An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), and Graphic Liberation: Perspectives on Image Making and Political Movements (Common Notions, 2023). His solo exhibition, We Want Everything, was hosted by the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2022.
Kennedy Block is an independent researcher and archivist participating in, documenting, and connecting contemporary struggles for control over our own lives.
Forthcoming, ships September 2026
Harry Cleaver
Edited by Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter
Capitalism / Labor / Philosophy
Class Compositions
End capitalism before it ends us.
Harry Cleaver is one of the most expansive Marxist theorists of the global class struggle over work of the last fifty years. Points of Departure is the definitive collection of Cleaver’s best unpublished, translated, or lesser known writings—both historical and current—on working class refusal, class composition, unwaged work, debt, and what he calls the “inversion of the class perspective.” This book puts an essential theoretical weapon into the hands of a new generation of militant workers and organizers re-energizing the class struggle. In these essays, Cleaver rereads Marx to address the crisis of capitalism, articulate strategy for the international anticapitalist movement, and to advance our collective search for points of departure from capitalism, so we can end it before it ends us.