Strike! - Jeremy Brecher (historical overview of the US industrial worker)

[joshcryer]

In possibly the best book on the American working class movement ever written, Jeremy Brecher narrates the hidden history of mass strikes from 1877 to 1970 from the point of view of the workers themselves.

http://libcom.org/history/strike-jeremy-brecher

Visiting the United States in 1831, the French traveller Alexis de Tocqueville was impressed above all by the equality which marked life in America. The great majority of Americans were farmers working their own land, primarily for their own needs. Most of the rest were self-employed artisans, merchants, traders, and professionals. Other classes -employees and industrialists in the North, slaves and planters in the South-were relatively small. The great majority of Americans were independent and free from anybody's command.

Yet the forces that were to undermine this equality-and to produce the mass strikes which are the subject of this book-were already visible. With sadness, Tocqueville noted "small aristocratic societies that are formed by some manufacturers in the midst of the immense democracy of our age." Like the aristocratic societies of former ages, this one tended to divide men into classes, made up of "some men who are very opulent and a multitude who are wretchedly poor," With few means of escaping their condition.

Further, Tocqueville saw that production tended to become more and more centralized, for "when a workman is engaged every day upon the same details, the whole commodity is produced with greater ease, speed, and economy." Thus, "the cost of production of manufactured goods is diminished by the extent of the establishment in which they are made and by the amount of capital employed." The large, centralized companies naturally won out. This process shaped both the worker and the employer.

"When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work." Thus, "in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. . . he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling that he has chosen." But, Tocqueville argued, while "the science of manufacture lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters," until the employer more and more resembles the administrator of a vast empire.

I hint on Tocqueville's POV in an earlier post.

The industrial hierarchical method is an incredible thing to behold. It can crush a movement so powerful that in 3 short years grew tenfold but was broken by Yellow Dog Contracts in a short period of time. When that didn't work the military had to get involved. Then self-interest took hold and that's the end of that.

Several important factors give mass strikes after 1900 a different character from those before. The decline in the central role of railroads dissolved the automatic process by which railroad strikes in 1877 and 1894 instantly became universal, nation-wide struggles between labor and capital. The growth of a unionism based on collective bargaining contracts tended to counteract the powerful rank-and-file solidarity and made workers tend to think of their struggle in terms of their own industry alone rather than in terms of their class as a whole; further, the contracts themselves operated as a powerful barrier to the tendency of strikes to spread to wider and wider groups. This contrasts markedly with such nineteenth-century labor organizations as the Knights of Labor and the American Railway Union, which considered the sympathetic strike and the solidarity of all labor among their basic principles.

[Sherman A1]

1. K&R

Thanks for posting!

[PETRUS]

2. Revised and expanded edition with a new chapter coming out next spring. nt

[joshcryer]

3. Nice! Hope it's freely available.