[Piccolo]

I recently read a review of Steve Fraser's book The Age of Acquiescence which discusses the rise and fall of popular resistance to organized wealth in the United States. The review, written by Naomi Klein, gives a pretty decent overview of Fraser's thesis regarding why American workers were more militant during the original Gilded Age and why there seems to be so little worker militancy now. In relevant part, Klein writes:

Fraser offers several explanations for the boldness of the post-Civil War wave of labor resistance, including, interestingly, the intellectual legacy of the abolition movement. The fight against slavery had loosened the tongues of capitalism’s critics, forging a radical critique of the market’s capacity for barbarism. With bonded labor now illegal, the target pivoted to factory “wage slavery.” This comparison sounds strange to contemporary ears, but as Fraser reminds us, for European peasants and artisans, as well as American homesteaders, the idea of selling one’s labor for money was profoundly alien.

This is key to Fraser’s thesis. What ­fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future.

It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again in the latter half of the book. The latest inequality chasm has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory — in the United States, at least — of another kind of economic system. Whereas the activists and agitators of the first Gilded Age straddled two worlds, we find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely.

You can read the rest of Klein's article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/books ... .html?_r=0

I just wanted to see what people in this forum thought about Fraser's thesis. Do you think he is on to something? Is his thesis applicable to other First World countries or is the decline of labor militancy just an American phenomenon?

[Harmattan]

I just wanted to see what people in this forum thought about Fraser's thesis. Do you think he is on to something? Is his thesis applicable to other First World countries or is the decline of labor militancy just an American phenomenon?

I can talk about France.

* Until the end of the XIXth century we were busy fighting the monarchy, not the capital. The French revolution arose out of an economic crisis and this revolutionary habit later spawned many revolts (especially the "Paris Commune"). The monarchy was seen as the cause of our problems.

* After that we have been busy fighting Germany: 1970, 1914, 1939. Social advances occurred between those periods. In 39 the communists were allied to the USSR and Hitler, and recent social advances had seriously hampered military production (which does not explain our defeat anyway, which was caused by an incompetent military leadership - but those reforms were blamed and they would have mattered in the long run)

* After the ww2 came a great economic boom, with many social advances. Which then resulted in a crisis (profit rate collapse, undisputed by leftist economists). But the pendulum was still swining on the left and in 81 came the "Great Day" with the election of a socialist president who despised economy by his own words. After two years of socialist dogma and declining economic figures, reality caught him back and he made a 180 turn.

* Slavery was irrelevant for us: for the start it was rare in metropolitan France, being a thing of the colonies. Besides revolutionaries in 1789 were humanists and abolitionists. They saw the end of slavery as the natural extension of their own fight against the monarchy and for their own rights. Abolition was pronounced in 1794 after the first revolution, later restored under the empire, and definitely abolished in 1848 right after the second revolution.

* The first workers' riots occurred as soon as the XVIIIth, before the revolution. At this time factory workers were mostly homeless and dirty poor. I do not think it was shocking for them to sell their labor, as factories were in cities and it was already pretty common to work for wages. Maybe for the peasants moving to the capital to escape famine.



So why is the workers' militancy so low? Because the unions and left-wing disappointed them too much.
a) Lack of realism and unreasonable promises. This led to crises, bankrupts, dysfunctions, and accusations of treason when the leaders came to power and finally understood. The whole idea that there are mountains of gold just waiting to be seized, the reductionism of the class war discourse and the inability of the left to understand capital and corporate dynamics have always been lethal flaws for a part of the left.

On the other hand maybe ignorance is what it takes. Maybe no social advance would have occurred with only reasonable people.

b) The alliance with the bourgeois left and the resulting domination of the bourgeoisie. There have always been two left: the proletarian one (conservative, focused on purchasing power and free health care and education) and the bourgeois one (internationalism, minority rights, rebellion against authority). This casual alliance is dead.

c) The USSR. Communist forces were all pawns of the USSR, voting for them was a treason in the eyes of many. And History proved them to be right given the declassified documents.



Who the workers now vote for? The far-right: Trump and Le Pen. They are anti-internationalists, conservatives, and they claim that Arbeit macht frei. Workers are not worried to get their hands dirty, they are not worried by the idea of working hard. What they want is the end of the bourgeois' domination and its cohort of values they disagree with, a society of order where labor bring you somewhere.

[Dawaldo]

c) The USSR. Communist forces were all pawns of the USSR, voting for them was a treason in the eyes of many. And History proved them to be right given the declassified documents.

What "treason" did the French Communists commit, on the basis of "declassified documents"?

[Andrea_Chenier]

Workers need to think about feeding their families first. Since the Soviet Union, i.e. the actually existing alternative with political influence on half the world, fell, neoliberal capitalism imposed itself as the final, unquestionable stage of global development to the point where even most prominent leftist intellectuals don't believe in radical change of the socio-economic order. If the vanguard already fled into petty cultural topics, what should the poor workers do?

[Harmattan]

What "treason" did the French Communists commit, on the basis of "declassified documents"?

Before the ww2 and until 41, alliance with the Nazis even after they invaded us, sabotages against the French military production, strikes against production increases in military factories, depiction of Germany as a country wanting peace and France and UK as countries wanting war.

After that fortunately they were not in power, but historical documents proved that the French communist party (PCF) was nothing more than a puppet. The USSR did choose the leaders, expelled members, dictated the foreign policy, etc. And the party lent a hand to the Soviet intelligence against the French intelligence.

For many in France, the PCF was the inner enemy. And they were right, the many betrayals are undeniable. It is only in the 80's that it started to distance itself from the USSR.

[Ummon]

That is interesting. Thank you for creating this thoughtful post.

[noemon]

Worker militancy is quite strong in the countries that maintain effective unions, like Greece for example, have you not seen what has been going on down there the past week with the farmers having blocked all national highways and are since yesterday laying a siege in the capital?

Unions in most western countries have been effectively either completely dismantled or castrated or bought. That is the reason in my opinion.

Unions used to have great power, that even gave them their own independent justice system, whence they used to be able to decide for all disciplinary actions regarding people in the union and that gave them the power to override the prosecutor if one of their workers had broken the law and they decided that he/she should not be prosecuted, or they could suggest a sentence.

In most western countries this labour-union-power can only sound laughable today but it was the case for all of Europe once upon a time.