Producerism

Transcription

If the Great Strike of 1877 was great, it wasn't great in the sense of creating actual benefits for the workers involved. The army crushed them. But in the aftermath, there was a new sense of possibility, a new sense of identity as workers and also a rising fear, among the capitalist class, about the possibility of a workers rebellion. The first time all these railroad workers really came together in an organized fashion was 1884. Like many of the other strikes over the '60s, '70s, and '80s, it was an unorganized strike at first, something called a wildcat strike. But in the midst of this wildcat strike against Jay Gould, the noted financier and industrialist, something changed. And that something that changed was called the Knights of Labor. Jay Gould was no friend to the working man. He famously said, in a way that kind of reveals everything about this new labor and capital relation of the late 19th century, in his famous quote, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." This is how these new relations were seen at the time. So in the middle of this strike in 1884, all these wildcat strikes on Jay Gould's railroad lines, in comes the Knights of Labor, just one of many upstart organizations. But this organization actually worked. They managed to unite all the disparate workers on Jay Gould's lines and actually frightened him so much that he was unable to find that other half of the working class to be the actual workers on his railroads. The strike won. And in the aftermath, the Knights of Labor achieved a national prominence. They went from only a few tens of thousands of people to, within a year, by 1885, over 100,000 workers being organized through the Knights of Labor. And their leader was a man named Terence Powderly. Terrence Powderly and the Knights of Labor believed that the most successful way to fight against this new organization of capital was to have an inclusive working people's organization. Now, this isn't exactly the same as a union because, in their view, they weren't meant to organize just wage workers but all producers. This hearkens back to earlier 19th century ideas of producers, of producerism, of producerist ideology. And so, basically, anyone who is not a capitalist could be part of the Knights of Labor. They only excluded people that they called "parasites." And these parasites were people like stockbrokers, lawyers, bankers, and my personal favorite, professional gamblers. These are the people that were not allowed to be in the Knights of Labor. But they were so inclusive that they let in elements that, in fact, probably had very different interests. If you were a small business owner, you could actually be in the Knights of Labor because you were considered to be a producer. Your employees, who are now not journeyman or apprentice, but were just wage workers themselves, could also be in the Knights of Labor. And so their interests might not align. But this inclusive quality of the Knights of Labor was pretty striking. In a time marked by a resurgence of white supremacy, they organized across race lines. In a time when women were not expected to be part of the working class, even though they were, they organized across gender lines in factories. They were incredibly progressive in many ways that we would recognize today. And yet, this inclusive quality was also their downfall. This inclusive quality, by the late 1880s, this expansionist notion of what their purpose was, led to their downfall. Many of the Knights of Labor began to think less about bread and butter issues, of fighting for wages, of fighting for better wages and benefits on those railroad lines, than of really transforming American society, of regulating capitalism at the highest level. And so many of the Knights of Labor entered into politics. As the Secretary General of the Knights of Labor remarked, "Trade unions isolated from other trades are failures. It is the duty and aim of the Knights of Labor to wipe out this trade union feeling and make one common brotherhood of man." Now, trade unions, in this moment, were very limited. They were racist. They were sexist. And most frequently they focused just on skilled workers. The Knights of Labor welcomed everyone, skilled workers, unskilled workers. But these were very different kinds of people. Skilled workers were hard to replace, and unskilled workers were not. This is almost what defines what it is to be skilled or unskilled. We all have skills, but whether those skills can be easily replaced is what we're talking about. And it's very difficult to organize people who are easily replaced. The Knights of Labor entered into politics most principally because it was the state that had stood between the workers and capital in 1877. It was the state, with its army, that had broken the back of all those railroad workers. And so controlling the state was, in their view, the best way to advance the interests of working people in America. And so, all across the country, the Knights of Labor enter into politics, focusing on these larger ambitions. The Knights of Labor are crucial, though, for understanding the future course of American labor history because it is the Knights of Labor and their failure that defines the thinking of an entire generation of labor leaders in America. There were two main points that people took away from the Knights of Labor. One, that they were not inclusive enough. And two, that they were, contradictorally, too inclusive. The first vision, that they had to be more expansive, more radical, to truly overthrow the state, was the vision of radicals that led to people like Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party. The other vision, more moderate, that the Knights of Labor had too expansive a vision that had abandoned its bread and butter issues-- this is what led to the American Federation of Labor and more traditional, narrow, craft unionism. So there were two visions that were coming out of the failure of the Knights of Labor. One political and one apolitical. And it was the second, more apolitical outlook that really shaped the future of American capitalism.