Libcom Study Group - Strike! Discussion

"The period of rapid industrialization between the Civil War and World War I was one of intense and often violent conflict between business interests and the new industrial workforce... It might be described as a rebellion by workers against industrial exploitation and economic inequality. From this perspective, one would emphasize strikes and lockouts, focusing perhaps on on those confrontations that were successful from labor's point of view" (p. 372)

"[are]... illegitimate organizations that interfere with an owner's right to hire and fire and workers' rights to work where and for whom they please. Adherents of this view might describe the strikes and labor organizing efforts of the period as the result of 'foreign' or anti-American influence, government organization of industry as violating individual rights and principles of free enterprise, and unions making unreasonable and inflationary demands" (ibid.)

"... labor unions [are] necessary for the protection of the rights of workers in a democracy. The interests of all parties are supposedly served by the peaceful resolution of conflict. Such a narrative might criticize confrontation, such as strikes, and sanction the use of political and social avenues for reaching consensus, emphasizing prevailing arrangements of power and recourse and that were willing to operate within those constraints" (ibid.)

"The United States…had the bloodiest labor history of any industrialized nation."

"a sober, calculating businessman, without ideals." And that "On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie socialistic utopias of every sort are sent to their doom."

From Proudhonism to Leninism, the American proletariat and its most advanced sections largely take instruction from Europe, and attempt to orient themselves according to a European context and organizationalism.

The effect of the entry into the world market of the highly-productive new agricultural sectors of Australia, Argentina, the U.S. and Russia, along with greatly reduced shipping costs, was not merely an agricultural or even economic event. Its social effect was to throw into crisis the agrarian sectors of all the weakest producers, displacing millions of peasants throughout Europe, a displacement which accelerated the emigration of these peasants to North and South America... On a world scale, this drastic cheapening of the cost of food had the additional effect of cheapening the cost of reproducing labor power. In many countries, working-class living standards rose even as nominal wages fell (Ubu Saved From Drowning, p. 28)

By 1890 it was cheaper to ship wheat from Buenos Aires to Barcelona than to ship it 100 miles over inland transport (Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today)

"The Real Great Depression"

The depression of 1929 is the wrong model for the current economic crisis

... the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.

The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, "economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval." Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms "tramp" and "bum," both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York's Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the "Coal and Iron Police," a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.

[...]

From Chronicle of Higher Education, 2008.

I need to re-read Dev's post, but I wanted to comment on this:

Quote:

From Proudhonism to Leninism, the American proletariat and its most advanced sections largely take instruction from Europe, and attempt to orient themselves according to a European context and organizationalism.

Do you think that's true of the early IWW? I've always understood them a distinctly American phenomenon, no?

In my own country
amnesia is the norm,
the schools teach us
to unremember from birth,
the slave taking, the risings up,
the songs of resistance,
the first May first,
our martyrs from Haymarket
to Attica to the redwoods of California
ripped whole from our hearts,
erased from official memory…

... on the basis of an oppositional proletarian culture that the various challenges to capital formed in the era of trustification, the twilight era of formal domination. I only need recite some of those challenges… the first national strike along the Baltimore & Ohio in 1877, the social revolutionary development of the mid eighties in Chicago ending in Haymarket, the great strike of the American Railway Workers in 1892, the intense struggles of hardrock miners in Colorado, Montana and elsewhere (Coeur d’Alene, Cripple Creek) from the mid-eighties until after the turn of the century, and all the various struggles of the Wobblies, Wheatland, Bisbee, Butte, Patterson, etc.; and finally, the huge proletarian upsurge in steel in 1919, one of the three, maybe four, greatest class confrontations in U.S. history… to recognize how profoundly casualizing recomposition of the U.S. working class has transformed its awareness and outlook.

In all these events, a uniquely proletarian-oppositional culture of daily life underlay formation of strike committees that functioned as a center of de facto dual power organizing food and fuel supplies, public order in the community, and armed self-defense. On the employers' side, capitalist terror (mass firings, blacklists, pass systems, and the use of thieves, thugs, and murderers as well as private police) reigned, followed by, and once established, simultaneously with, massive state and federal intervention, i.e., State repression and terror (blanket court injunctions, troops, suspension of habeas corpus, round-ups, and imprisonment). All this was in addition to lockouts and the employment of scabs, which are normal, non-terrorist capitalist practices in any struggle against workers.

In these class confrontations, the class antagonism could be no more apparent.

This culture was so pervasive it characterized even organizations if not entirely reformist, then with thoroughly reformist (not to mention arcane) leaderships: In the 1880s, the Knights of Labor included labor assemblies, workers’ club rooms, cooperative factories and stores, workers’ newspapers, social clubs and singing societies, narrowly political organizations, and workers militias and labor courts. The courts settled worker disputes ranging from workplace to family problems, e.g., from scabbing to wife beating, without recourse to the existing, bourgeois judicial system. Spectacularly homogenized, capitalist societal organization no longer admits of this, a distinctive and alternative, proletarian culture of daily life, a class based community that tendentially aimed at societal hegemony.

I just got finished reading the prologue and I'm wondering if anyone who has a later version of the text could let us know if Brecher later changed it? In particular, I'm interested in the especially radical elements--unions trying to "prevent and contain strikes" and his critique of power ("Ordinary people can only have power over social life when power as we have known it--power of some people over others--is dissolved completely").

(all the way from Portland, Oregon!).

Chilli Sauce wrote:

(all the way from Portland, Oregon!).

powell's? that's where i got my copy of value price and profit.

Instead of seeking out the evidence of revolutionary capacity and inherently revolutionary activity, he begins to look for substitutes for it.

"Strikes," complained the New York Railroad Gazette in January 1874, "are no longer accidents but are as much a disease of the body politic as the measles or indigestion are of our physical organization." Between November 1873 and July 1874, workers on the Pennsylvania system and at least 17 other railroads struck. Engineers, firemen, brakemen, and track hands as well as shopmen and ordinary laborers resisted wage cuts, demanded salary due them, and opposed such employer practices as blacklisting and the use of iron-clad contracts. None of these disputes was so dramatic or important as the general railroad strike in 1877, but together they prophetically etched the outlines of that violent outburst. The strikes also revealed certain explosive elements in the social structure of post-bellum America. Seemingly pathetic and seldom lasting more than a week or two, the significance of the strikes lay not in their success or failure but rather in the readiness of the strikers to express their grievances in a dramatic, direct, and frequently telling manner. Even though the workers were mostly without trade union organization or experience, they often exerted a kind of raw power that made trouble for their employers. Most of the 1873-1874 disputes, furthermore, took place in small railroad towns and in isolated semirural regions where small numbers of workers often could marshal surprising strength. The social structure and ideology in these areas worked to the advantage of the disaffected workers. Large numbers of non-strikers frequently sided with them. Though the railroad operators put down all the strikes, they faced difficulties that they were unprepared for and that taxed their imaginations and their energies (p. 296) [bold by me -- Hieronymous].

Glaberman's critique doesn't seem particularly honest at times. His use of the 'either/or' scenario is really lazy:

Quote:

Unless you accept a conspiratorial theory of history-that labor organizations are everywhere introduced to restrain and defeat workers-you have to deal with the question of why labor organizations of various types arise.

. . .

Quote:

What is the significance of these victories for us today, and for the working class? Is it that workers were stupid and tricked and did the work of the bourgeoisie and were co-opted into bourgeois society? Or is it rather that workers showed and developed the capacity to transform society-to whatever extent was objectively possible?

Much of the 'nuts and bolts' of his critique I'd agree with, but his style of criticism/polemic is awful.

[Endnote #3] Marxists who are familiar with the basis of the Hegelian dialect. In the master-slave discussion in which Hegel indicates that the slaves must struggle against elements of their own class as well as against the masters, will not be surprised by this historical analysis. In Facing Reality (Facing Reality Publishing Committee, Detroit, 1956), C.L.R. James offers the following useful summary of dialectics:

(a) All development takes place as a result of self-movement, not organization or direction by external forces.

(b) Self-movement springs from and is the overcoming of antagonisms within an organism, not the struggle against external foes.

(c) It is not the world of nature that confronts man as an alien power to be overcome. It is the alien power that he has himself created.

(d) The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming of internal antagonisms is not the enjoyment, ownership, or use of goods, but self-realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative universality, not utility.

when i clicked that rawick url, 'server not found', also when i shortened it for the entire www.marxists.org site.

petey wrote:

when i clicked that rawick url, 'server not found', also when i shortened it for the entire www.marxists.org site.

Try this: http://www.marxists.org/archive/rawick/1969/xx/self.html