The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict
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16. Capital and Labor | THE AMERICAN YAWP - 2 views
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it was federal troops that finally defeated them
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American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines
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Nearly 100 Americans died in “The Great Upheaval.” Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property.
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galvanized the country
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It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of labor conflict in the United States
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II. The March of Capital
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John Pierpont Morgan
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Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on meager and unpredictable wages compelled armies of labor to organize and battle against the power of capital.
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revolutions in American industry
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Technological innovations
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national investments
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slashed the costs of production and distribution
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New administrative frameworks sustained the weight of vast firms
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National credit agencies
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Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened new national media, which advertising agencies used to nationalize various products.
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Taylorism
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Frederick Taylor
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Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production.
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use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing
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sewing machines
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packers’ “disassembly” lines
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grain reapers
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Duke cigarette rollers
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Henry Ford made the assembly line famous
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Cyrus McCormick
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Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world
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by 1900 the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing nation
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massive economies of scale
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New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating
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A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds of workers and owners
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legal creations used to protect investors and sustain the power of massed capital
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After the Civil War, however, the corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mechanism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while limiting the liability of shareholders. By washing their hands of legal and financial obligations while still retaining the right to profit massively, investors flooded corporations with the capital needed to industrialize.
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But a competitive marketplace threatened the promise of investments
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between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy
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Competition melted away in what is known as “the great merger movement.”
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Monopoly had arrived
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Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity
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But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions
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new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them
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One of Darwin’s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest.
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The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration—it would encourage the survival of the weak.10
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H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”11
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By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders
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American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions
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The typical industrial laborer could expect to be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty line.
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skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.
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Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to organize
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The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s
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It welcomed all laborers,
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In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day,
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culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886.
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The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism
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Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square
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The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocated “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes.
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Homestead, Pennsylvania.
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Henry Clay Frick
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Pinkerton detectives,
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Still, despite repeated failure, strikes continued to roll across the industrial landscape.
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1894, workers in George Pullman’s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country.
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workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.
Angela Davis Still Believes America Can Change - The New York Times - 0 views
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there’s no love lost between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices that arose in the ’70s
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Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact, her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American free-enterprise system unchanged
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she is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their flowers.”
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As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future.
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she expresses a relaxed optimism about the country’s direction.
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a professor who has taught history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades,
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Stuart Hall,
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Prudence Crandall
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Anne Braden
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For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.
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But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women
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had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda
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So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?
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She believes narrow definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented.
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“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.
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and Columbia University.
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that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them
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this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no despair nor frustration —
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Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed
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And yet in so much of what they did accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.
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Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system
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a reimagining of policing and incarceration has been essential to her vision for decades.
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)
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It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?
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I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il
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but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader
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most left-of-center organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the organizations were minimized.
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Fannie Lou Hamer
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Huey P. Newton w
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Mark Rudd
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[Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.
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One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.
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Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi
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all of whom have prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves
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E.D. Nixon,
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Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women — domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused to ride the bus,”
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Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;
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several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.
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the Communist Party supported the struggle against segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example, that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)
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Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools
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she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
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From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.
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t was during these expatriate years that Davis began to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came into vogue.
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After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism
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a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers
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Because of her training and time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not to separate the African-American struggle from that of other marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world.
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In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
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NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,
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oth forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black politics.
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Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.
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There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.
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A part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy. There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”
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There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.
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Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion.
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The elephant in the room is always capitalism,”
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Capitalism has always been racial capitalism.
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We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”
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It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.
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Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.
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Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011
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Black Lives Matter movement.
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this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.
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It’s also the kind of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly.
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there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”
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She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy
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As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.
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AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history.
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We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.
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Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism. Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity