“…one essential condition for a healthy society is equal distribution of goods, which i suspect is impossible under capitalism. for , when everyone is entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor. and wealth will tend to vary in inverse proportion to merit. the rich will be greedy, unscrupulous, and totally useless characters, while the poor will be simple, unassuming people whose daily work is far more profitable to the community than it is to them.” thomas more. “utopia” [1516] penguin classics edition. paul turner 1965 translation____________________________________________________________________
the end of summer…the end of fun…that’s the holiday celebration labor is allotted in the united states…not the international celebration of labor in the spring that memorializes those haymarket ”anarchists”…no need for american labor to identify with them…except that workers have a shared common interest ( if they could only recognize it…there have been some bitter lessons on that along the way ) and work itself taught them to be organized…still. “…under the law a mere combination of workers violated an employer’s freedom to run a business in a profitable manner. in moores vs. the bricklayers union ( 1890 ) ohio’s supreme court ruled it illegal to make an employer conduct business according to union regulation.” [murlo and chitty.from” the folks who brought you the weekend”p.112 ]…they quietly made efforts to find common voice anyway…from colonial cordwainers to the noble and holy order of the knights of labor founded by uriah stephens in 1869…originally a secret society because of membership blacklisting among employers, it went public in a declaration of principles in 1881..trying to teach American workers they were workers first, with a common interest, and bricklayers or carpenters or poles or germans second…in that declaration they stated, “…we declare that there is an inevitable conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government, the wage laborer attempting to save the government, and the capitalist class ignorantly attempting to subvert it.”...in these tenets they faced two problems…the first was the assumption that workers could easily overcome trade or ethnic distinctions…”america’s working class was most noted for its heterogeneity. native-born workers had nothing but contempt for the irish catholic immigrants, and the irish, in turn, looked own on the late coming poles, slavs, and Italians. whites feared blacks; jews suspected gentiles. employers easily played off one group against another and shrewdly mixed their labor forces to weaken group solidarity.” [dubofsky. from “we shall be all: a history of the industrial workers of the world” p. 4]…think guns, abortion, immigration and you’ll see the “shrewdly” is still in play…there is very little recognition by workers that they form a class…the “classless society” mythos in america is inculcated from an early age ( unless, of course, you are openly and cogently critical of the hegemonic culture…then you are engaging in “class warfare”, something elite interests would never dream of doing )...and humans by their nature are tribal…they split off into groups of common outlook that tend to be small…the larger and more complex they become the more energy there is used in internecine debate rather than focused action…solidarity has many issues…the second problem the knights faced was their thinking that the government was some sort of neutral umpire that would, If capitalists would just let it function the way it was designed, resolve disputes fairly…unfortunately the government has been in the hands of the economic elite since at least 1789 and the government was never neutral...and the governmental bias the knights faced in the gilded age carried over into the next century…”by 1917 the war department ( it was a more honest age in that respect…no euphemistic department of defense…a fairly recent addition of a grey, calming bureaucratic lexicon…we only kill people with drone strikes to defend ourselves, right? no imperial motives here…nothing to see...move along folks…asking inconvenient questions just upsets the digestion…whose digestion is what i wonder about ) had had considerable experience in using soldiers to quell domestic labor disturbances. in 1877 federal troops had repressed strikes, riots, and demonstrations arising from that year’s railroad labor conflicts. fifteen years later federal soldiers went into northern idaho to break a miner’s strike ( that would be a protracted guerilla war around federal silver mines near coeur d’alene…they don’t teach labor history from a labor perspective in public schools…workers are always the disrupters of the system hard working capital is trying to build ), and , despite opposition from governor john peter altgeld, president grover cleveland dispatched federal troops to the chicago area to crush the american railway union’s Pullman boycott ( they were in gary Indiana during the 1919 steel strike as well for those of you from the calumet region ). when the occasion demanded, federal authorities could always justify the employment of troops to preserve the domestic peace. world war one seemed such an occasion…not entirely by coincidence, the first railroads and utilities so protected were in montana and washington state, states furthest removed from the area of german espionage and closet to the scene of iww activity…despite the restoration of apparent stability the troops remained on duty from 1917 to 1919, and in butte until 1920. they had proved so effective in preserving the peace that western governors, united states attorneys, and local employers hated to see them withdrawn.” [we shall be all pp.229-231 ]..so much for neutrality…the great depression changed things a bit…mostly because hard times drove labor to develop more effective tactics…such as the sit-down strike…workers occupied the means of production and so exerted some control over negotiations…come to an agreement and you can have your plant back…that had to stop so the wagner act of 1935 formally recognized the right of unions to exist ( and unfortunately for workers the courts interpreted it as guaranteeing the rights of unions, not workers, and so the conflict between rank and file and union leadership imposed itself on the adversarial relationship with management…war on two fronts )…it also brought them “into the system”…liable to regulation by the department of labor, the national labor relations board, administrative law judges…and one of the first regulation was a ban on sit-down strikes…you could strike but you had to do so from outside and leave room for the scabs inside…this also left labor relying on legislators to give them an equal voice in the process…political rhetoric and political actions are nearly mutually exclusive…some “friends of labor” proved unreliable…particularly after world war two when congress began to chip away at the legislation from the thirties…taft-hartley in 1947…landrum-griffin in 1959…tightened regulations on unions and made union certification elections more difficult to win…and the decline continued through carter’s deregulating of the trucking and airline industries and reagan busted patco setting the stage for another almost forty year decline as industrial jobs fled offshore and “right to work” laws targeting unions proliferated...on the eve of the holiday, trump has moved to freeze the wages of federal workers as work related issues facing teachers and other public workers worsen as well……the prognosis does not seem good…aggressive capital wants all the money they can extract and government is almost wholly on their side…by all means vote in november…vote your conscience…i am not sanguine about finding candidates worth voting for...even the ones who might be are sure to face a system that in inimical to change…a blue wave there may be and that may change the tone of the rhetoric…undoing what has been done is an entirely different matter…it did not begin with the current administration…it is a cumulative process that spans decades of an overt, concerted corporate agenda aimed at weakening the voice of working people concerning, not just the terms and conditions with which they work, but the general drift ( concerted as it may be there is an element of the haphazard about it…the elite are both united and divided by their greed…what’s good for one may be good for the others…but they still have to share an ultimately finite wealth…there is dissent…more drift than course…i wouldn’t take that dissent as an opening for change however…threaten them with substantive change from below and they close ranks…look back at those federal troops in montana, idaho, chicago and gary…look at the late 60s and early 70s…”can’t happen here?”…already has ) of the society…how we live and towards what goal we destroy the environment and hence ourselves…equitable distribution, or upward redistribut
