Abstract
The symptoms that characterize the current state of American labor can be understood in the context of what produces and reproduces labor’s relation to capital. What in part defines this relation is capital’s ownership of the means of production. As a result, the working class must sell its labor power for a set period of time in order to live, producing during part of the work day surplus value and labor in the workplace under authoritarian conditions. It is this inequality of social power within political and economic institutions that explains over time why there is labor repression and a corresponding decline in the quality of life of the working class.
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Notes
- 1.
Even mainstream scholars of the Revolutionary era acknowledge the crucial role played by labor before and during the American Revolution: Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York: Norton and Co., 1991); Gordon Wood The American Revolution (New York: Modern Library, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Many progressive historians have depicted labor’s role in the Revolution as essential: Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution (New York: The New Press, 2002); Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Wang and Hill, 2007); R. B. Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 2.
Institutional exclusion of labor from the state is illustrated in the structural shift from the Articles of Confederation to the US Constitution. The implications of this shift are explained in Robert A. McGuire To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and David Brian Robertson, The Original Compromise: What the Framers were Really Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) Max M. Edling, A Revolution In Favor of Government: Origins of the US Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
- 3.
The questions of who had control over the economy and what were the economic goals after the American Revolution are discussed in John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: NYU Press, 1984); Ernest L. Bogart and Donald Kemmerer, Economic History of the American People (New York: Longans, Green and Co. 1947); Michael Lind, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (New York: Harper Collins, 2012); Curtis Mettels, The Emergence of a National Economy (1775–1815) (New York: ME Sharpe, 1962). The impact of industrialization and the formation of the working class with the resulting conflict between capital and labor appears in Bruce Laurie’s Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997) and Mark Lause’s Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
- 4.
The role of law in both institutional exclusion and labor repression can be understood in relation to how it mediates the functions of the state and economy. The idea appears in Jeffrey D. Clements, Corporations are not People (San Francisco, Bennett-Koebler Publishers, 2012); William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Lawrence Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Touchstone Books, 1973); Morton J. Horowitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). This idea of law that developed to create and enforce institutional exclusion of labor is a theme in Christopher Tomlins’ Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The impact of law on organized labor was used to limit labor unrest and tied labor unions to the state; this occurred during industrialization and the formation of the social welfare state as explained in Tomlins’ The State and the Unions: Labor Relations and the Organized Labor Movement in America 1880–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). To use law to enforce the monopoly of ownership by property owners is a theme in Daniel Ernst’s Lawyers Against Labor (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
- 5.
In considering labor exclusion and repression, it is important to take into account how labor responded to both. Over time, the consciousness of labor was at first a social consciousness, assuming the form of worker associations. When labor became more politically conscious, labor unions were formed as workers developed the understanding that their class interests were not the same as those of capital. Broad historical surveys and those that are more period-specific illustrate labor’s limited options and divisions within organized labor when it confronted capital. The nine-volume set by Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1994) details conflicts between capital and labor during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Labor’s limited options are discussed in Mel Van Elteran’s Labor and the American Left (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011); Victoria Hattan, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); John H. M. Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924 (New York: Basic Books, 1970); David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the 19th Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 6.
Institutional exclusion and the resulting use of covert and overt repression had presented labor with two options: collaborate or exist in isolation without any means of shaping decision-making. The concept of a progressive labor movement excluded from the state appears in Patricia Coye’s The War on Labor and the Left (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
- 7.
The fate of radical labor in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, including the wholesale oppression of the IWW and the Communists provide more examples of how institutional exclusion and repression limited mass-based economics and political democracy as discussed in Daniel Fusfeld’s The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor (Chicago,: Charles Kerr Publishing, 1992). While Melvin Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1969), points to the IWW’s shortcomings, it is also apparent that the organization’s demise can be attributed to a mobilization of the US government’s resources to wage an all-out offensive on the IWW as discussed in Eric Thomas Chester’s The Wobblies in their Heyday: the Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014). Although the IWW was targeted for such extensive repression, it survived to the present, but a shadow of its former self, as described in Fred Thompson and Patrick Murfin’s The IWW : Its First Seventy Years (Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World , 1976). A pervasive labor anti-Communism is the ideology that justified the elimination of greater labor inclusion in decision-making, as explained in Robert Justin Goldstein’s Little Red Scares : Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the US, 1921–1946 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014). This anti-Communism, which was, at times, virulent, is reminiscent of what Richard Hofstadter referred to as The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); it is also discussed in articles edited by Robert Cherny, William Issell and Kieran W. Taylor in American Labor and the Cold War, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004) and appears in discussions of the red scare in the post-war period in Murray Levin’s Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
- 8.
This was in the misinterpreted US Supreme Court decision of US v. Santa Clara.
- 9.
The recurring labor repression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved the structure of workplace relations between capital and labor in which capital, by virtue of ownership, enacted various forms of covert repression. They developed in relation to capital’s goal to increase the rate of surplus value in order to maximize profit. In periods of economic transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, the use of covert repression tends to increase. This tendency is described in Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966) and Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), which explains how the rate of exploitation or covert repression increases as capital becomes more concentrated. Overt repression is built into the structure of the modern corporation expressed in terms of a political division of labor, as discussed in Edward Herman’s Corporate Control, Corporate Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). At the shop floor level, the covert repression assumes the form of a reorganization of the division of labor, a theme in Richard Edwards’ Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979). The workplace as a political battleground between capital and labor as well as labor’s inherent syndicalist manifestations, is explained in Howard Kimeldorf’s Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
- 10.
The corporate bureaucracy as a structural means to contain class struggle and oppress labor is a theme of Edward S. Herman’s Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- 11.
The class collaboration of the AFL is an indication of labor’s institutional exclusion. Victoria Hattan in Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) traces the helplessness of organized labor when faced with capital’s monopoly of control.
- 12.
The scope and scale of labor repression in the 1920s has its roots in capital’s class conscious response to the economic downturn of the early 1920s. A deradicalized labor movement that had been subjected to intense labor anti-Communism was another factor contributing labor’s helplessness as explained in Irving Bernstein’s The Lean Years: The History of the American Worker (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).
- 13.
The most striking example of the limits of labor repression in the twentieth century emerges during the economic downturn of the Great Depression. What declined during the Depression was the consistent use of overt repression. Covert repression, while still in place, had declined, due in part to the formation of the social welfare state, which allowed for the inclusion of labor as a junior partner in decision-making. These shifts are discussed in Irving Bernstein’s The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Rhonda Levine’s Class Struggle and the New Deal (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988); David Milton’s The Politics of US Labor: From the Great Depression to the New Deal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982) and Steve Fraser and Gay Gerstle (eds) in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). The continuity and pattern of labor’s revolts against capital is examined in Samuel Yellen’s American Labor Struggles, 1877–1934 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974). It is significant that labor unrest not only impacted the development of the social welfare state, it also put in place a minimum of basic legal rights established during the New Deal as explained in Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross’s Labor Law and the Rank and File (Oakland, CA: Oakland Press 2011). Even though the New Deal measures were intended to generate class collaboration, capital and labor were often in conflict, as capital employed repression against labor, described in John Newsinger’s Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s (London: Bookmarks Publications, 2012). Capital understood its maintenance of a monopoly of control over the state and the economy involved organizing to push back and defeat labor: demands for greater inclusion are discussed in Against Labor: How US Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism, eds. Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017) and Chad Pearson’s Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
- 14.
Most important was the reappearance and increased presence of radical labor, as demonstrated by the rise of the CIO and the Communists as separate forces and also working interdependently, as discussed in Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Roger Keeran’s The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union (New York: International Publishers, 1980); Harvey Levenstein’s Communism, Anti-Communism and the CIO (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin’s Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Fraser Ottanelli’s The Communist Party in the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
- 15.
The role of the Communists in forming the CIO is examined in Bert Cochran’s Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped Labor Unions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
- 16.
The reappearance of labor anti-Communism was a pushback by sections of capital opposed to a class alliance concept put forth by the Roosevelt administration. The roots of this return to labor anti-Communism is associated with the inability of the state to fully address the crisis of US capitalism, as elaborated in Robert Goldstein’s Little Red Scares : Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the US 1921–1926 (London: Routledge, 2014) as well as in David Caute’s The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). Prior to the more fully developed labor anti-Communism of the forties and fifties, labor unrest especially the “little steel” strike was intended to expand the presence of labor unions in the steel industry. Capital then began to establish a strategy as to how to deal with mass strikes. The defeat of labor in this strike made its leaders more willing to collaborate through “business unionism,” as explained in The Last Great Strike : Little Steel, the CIO and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America by Ahmed White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
- 17.
In keeping with the leadership of mainstream labor, which continued to support the idea of class collaboration, labor anti-Communism linked the AFL and the CIO to capital’s goal to oppress by creating a homogenized workforce. In Communism, anti-Communism and the CIO , (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), Levenstein traces this class collaboration between labor leaders and elite policymakers.
- 18.
During WWII, the divisions among elites already manifested during the Depression between those in labor who favored class alliance versus those who favored class conflict had diminished over the need to win the war. Class alliance was the state’s policy toward labor. With the exception of John Lewis, sections of mainstream and radical labor accepted the legitimacy of capitalism. The Communist Party had worked to become more mainstream prior to and just as the United States entered the war, as discussed by Maurice Isserman’s Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
- 19.
Even though a class alliance had prevailed between mainstream labor leaders and elites, labor anti-Communists had continued to call it into question. The persistence of labor anti-Communism over the course of US history is a theme in M.J. Heale’s American Anti-Communism: Combatting the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). In post-war America, this division and tension between capital support for class alliance versus capital support of class conflict increased. Prior to the rise of finance capital in the early 1980s, the class conflict segment would call into question class alliance expressed as the social welfare state. This development is traced in Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolfe’s Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Prior to the formation of a more fully developed welfare state, the US government had no legal obligations to provide social benefits to the masses as explained in Walter Trattner’s From Poor Law to Welfare State (New York: Free Press, 1979) and Sidney Fine’s Laissez-Faire and the General Welfare State (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1966). As a class conflict model increases in scope and scale, labor anti-Communism contributes to the assault on the social welfare state as discussed in Patrick Renshaw’s American Labor and Consensus Capitalism, 1935–90 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991).
- 20.
The wartime strike waves, which intensified from labor’s rank and file added to the idea of labor anti-Communists that strikes were Communist-led and inspired. Harvey Levenstein discusses this in Communism, anti-Communism and the CIO (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
- 21.
The alignment of AFL and CIO leadership with labor anti-Communists prevented a more progressive labor movement, as discussed in Stanley Aronowitz’s The Death and Life of American Labor (New York: Verso Press, 2014) and his earlier False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).
- 22.
The co-optation of the leadership of organized labor increased labor repression. Labor leaders became the enforcers of collective bargaining as a legal means to limit progressive demands from the rank and file.
- 23.
There were two aspects of this process: the reorganization of the workplace and greater political division of labor in the workplace and capital’s divide-and-conquer strategy toward labor. New labor categories, such as contingent and temporary workers, were created and expanded, as described in Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone’s Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Steven Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for American Workers (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).
- 24.
There are various forms of strike -breaking. The more crude examples expressed as overt repression from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are explained in Jeremy Brecher’s Strike ! (Boston: South End Press, 1997). More subtle and covert forms of strike -breaking involved the simple replacement of striking workers as described in Jake Rosenfeld’s What Unions No Longer Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 25.
The downward spiral of American labor in the 1970s coincides with the acceleration of labor repression. In part, this increased repression is the result of organized labor’s leadership embracing corporate capitalism and its association with the Democratic Party. The contradictions inherent in a capitalist economy between accumulation and legitimation, in which the state promotes conditions for accumulation while expending resources to legitimize the market is explored in the argument made by James O’Connor’s The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012). To legitimize requires increased social expenditures, especially in tough times. The fiscal crisis is, in effect, a social crisis, in part alleviated by increased labor repression.
As capitalists seek new means with which to accumulate capital, the exploitation of the working class is stepped up. This is explained in detail in Barry C. Lynn’s Cornered: the New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010) and Matt Taibbi’s The Divide: American Injustice in the age of the Wealth Gap (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2014).
- 26.
From the 1980s to the present, labor repression has had its roots in a shift in emphasis by political and economic elites to finance capitalism. This shift is explained in detail by Greta Krippner’s Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance Capital (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). The social effect on labor amounts to a significant decrease in social welfare spending as well as an increase in economic policies that further favor an upward redistribution of wealth. This political focus was adopted by Democratic and Republican administrations, both of which had clear ties to finance capital, as illustrated in detail in Nomi Prins’ All the President’s Bankers (New York: Nation Books, 2014). The pivotal role assumed by finance capital in the repression of labor coincided with the rise of finance capital, as shown in David Kotz’s The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capital (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015) and Rana Foroohar’s The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business (New York: Crown, 2016). The devastating impact of finance capital is laid bare especially in social services in Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017).
As labor unions, union membership and the social welfare state declined, the economic climate became supportive of the Wal-Mart workplace model with its top-down authoritarian organization of work as explained in Wal-Mart: the Face of Twenty-first Century Capitalism, (New York: New Press, 2006) edited by Nelson Lichtenstein. The Wal-Mart business model represents an advance over business unionism. The role of business unionism set the stage for the Wal-Mart model. See Kim Moody’s An Injury to All: the Decline of American Unions (New York: Verso Press, 1993), which traces business unionism from 1945.
- 27.
While both political parties represent the overall interests of corporate America, the Democratic Party had been willing to support managerial capitalism in the form of a social welfare state. This liberal corporatism was opposed by the conservative and reactionary policies of the Republican Party. Elaboration of this division appears in Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009) and nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Schermer’s The Right and Labor in America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
- 28.
The inherent structural limits and the overall inability of American capitalism to effectively resolve the problems of production and consumption continue to offer possible historical opportunities for labor to challenge its exploitation and repression. The ongoing crisis of capitalism is the theme in David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 29.
The idea of non-capitalist social enclaves has been an aspect of the history of American capitalism, in the following: John Curl’s For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements and Communalism in America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009) and Wilson Carey Mcwilliams’ The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
- 30.
The idea of various kinds of non-reformist reforms should be a goal of progressive labor. Some of these reforms are presented in Micheal Yates’ Why Unions Matter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009) and Thomas Geoghegan’s Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (New York: New Press, 2014). The challenges and possibilities confronting American labor is discussed in Tamara Draut’s Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Alternatives for labor moving forward are a theme in Staughton Lynd’s Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015) and Kim Moody’s In Solidarity: Essays on Working Class Organization in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).
- 31.
To end the historical repression of labor amounts to the development of economic democracy centered on worker-run and controlled workplaces. Social ownership of business exists in various forms; examples are described in details in Michael Albert’s Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy (San Francisco: AK Press, 2000; Robin Hahnel’s Of the People, By the People: The Case for a Participatory Economy (New York: AK Press, 2012); Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright’s Alternatives to Capitalism: proposals for a Democratic Economy (Kindle edition, 2014) and David Schweickart’s After Capitalism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).
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Kolin, A. (2019). Repression, Resistance, and Development of the Labor Movement in the United States. In: Berberoglu, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92354-3_6
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