Historical Shifts in the Ideology of Work: From Artisanship to Prison Labor and Back

By Valerie Reynoso

The ideology of work has shifted through time by material changes imposed by capitalism-imperialism, an ongoing process that forms the condition of the working class and the social order that indoctrinates them. James R. Farr, Catherine W. Bishir, Karl Marx, John Ruskin, William Morris and Erin O'Connor are authors who have explored the relationships between work, history, and people. The historical shifts in the ideology of work are rooted in class struggle, in the synthesis of the thesis and antithesis of the proletariat (working class) and the bourgeoisie (capitalists), reminiscent of the former synthesis between the serf and feudal lord. Work becomes a practice of resistance when the proletariat realizes its socioeconomic value and moves toward seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie. But before this can happen, workers must experience an ideological awakening of sorts - something that creates the realization that our constant struggle to survive under a system of wage labor is not only unnatural, but is an artificial arrangement made by a very small percentage of people who seek to make a perpetual fortune from our exploitation. In doing so, we must also recognize the various and ever-shifting forms of labor that we are systematically coerced into. Breaking from this coercion is the key to our liberation.

Lessons in Assimilation

The key concepts from Bashir's Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina are slavery, race, class, gender, and segregation. These concepts are engaged with the empirical experience at hand of Black artisans given that their professions were informed by their race and socioeconomic status, or was part of their oppression if they were enslaved. In the Bishir text, details are given on a free Black plasterer and brickmason named Donum Montford who was forty years old in the year 1810, a master craftsman with apprentices for children and a slaveowner who also owned real estate and was qualified to vote. Montford had lost a diamond tool with a monogrammed handle that was used to score precise lines to cut and install windowpanes as part of his trade[1]. Ownership of craft tools was central to artisan identity and following 1776, it was common for urban white craftsmen to brandish their craft tools as a symbol of their elevated socioeconomic status and to display patriotism. New Bern, the town where Montford lived, was considered to be a hub of opportunities for Black artisans and racial integration between white and Black artisans in the workplace.

In this given context, craftsmanship was being implemented to the benefit of the white supremacist social order through which upwards social mobility necessitates the subordination of the lower classes. Montford is emblematic of a Black free man who had become assimilated into the bourgeois class. He became essentially an enemy to his own people via aligning with the white bourgeoisie through usage of artisanship, ownership of private property such as real estate, and becoming a slave master himself, despite having been enslaved for approximately half of his life. The importance of craft tools to socioeconomic status of craftsmen informs Montford's bourgeois assimilation, seeing that he had a diamond-head tool monogrammed with his name, a practice that has been prized and rooted in colonialism from the US partition from Britain, despite the figures of the US revolution having been colonizers and enslavers as well. This also plays into respectability politics, since in order to fully fit Anglo-Saxon constructs of masculinity as a formerly enslaved and Black man, having a prized craft tool would make Montford seem more respectable and "manly" in the eyes of white craftsmen.

Montford's elevated socioeconomic status as a Black free man is also an instance of bootstrap theory. Bootstrap theory posits that if one simply works harder, they can achieve their goals, and an inability to achieve this goal is a product of individual failure rather than systemic oppression. This rhetoric is idealist and anti-materialist, as it implies that changing one's attitude in itself will elevate one's socioeconomic status when this is not the case under capitalism-imperialism due to racism, classism and other discriminations that make it nearly impossible to shift the status quo unless one is already categorized as a first-class citizen. Montford being a wealthier, free Black man who was also a slaveowner was the standard held for African-American craftsmen and enslaved persons during that time period; that poor and enslaved people can simply work their way out of slavery and excel to the point where they, too, can become an oppressor who maintains the capitalist-imperialist social order through their capitalist conception of work.

Bootstrap theory and justification of capitalism-imperialism is also found in the section titled "Artisan Trades in Wartime" of the Bishir reading. Bishir details that the liberated city of New Bern had provided Black artisans with profitable employment opportunities in catering to soldiers and refugees during wartime with limited competition from whites. Cooks, gardeners, butchers, drivers, housekeepers and barbers also experienced an augment in their earnings during the war. Skilled workers took advantage of every new opportunity to advance their business and increase their wealth [2]. This example Bishir provides demonstrates that the income of the Black working class was reliant on industries that imperialist wars spearheaded by the U.S. necessitated. Similar to Montford, this instance is also emblematic of bootstrap theory given that Black people were inciting themselves to accumulate more wealth by working more, which is not always realistically the case as poor people usually work without any significant increase on the socioeconomic ladder due to capitalism-imperialism.

Understanding the Layers of Proletarian Exploitation

Capitalism-imperialism produces hierarchies reliant on exploitation and submission, which disproportionately affects proletarian women and children. Moreover, Marx and Engels believed that women and children were being used as tools for more capital for the bourgeoisie. In Engels' The Origin on the Family, Private Property, and the State, he argued that the subordination of women is a product of social relations, as opposed to biological disposition, and that efforts made by men to achieve demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties had become institutionalized in the nuclear family. Engels stated that the shift from feudalism to private ownership of land had a great impact on the status of women, given that women who do not own land, nor means of production, are enslaved and obligated to work for landowners in a system founded on private ownership [3]. Capitalism has separated private and public spheres and has provided disproportionate access of waged labor to men. The gender oppression of women is directly related to class oppression given that the institutional relationship between men and women is comparable to that of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the former profits off of and benefits from the systemic oppression of the latter under capitalism and patriarchy.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx argued that the societal position of women could be used to indicate the development of society as a whole. He stated that new social relations based on individuals seeing each other as valuable in themselves, as opposed to only worth what one individual can provide to another, would have to be formed in order for society to transcend from its capitalist form [4]. Women, especially nonwhite women, would be particularly important in this regard given that they are a marginalized group in virtually all societies. In Marx's Capital, women and children are rendered valuable under capitalism since they can be pressured and obliged to work for less - which then results in more capital gain for the upper class [5].

The condition and perception of the feminized and racialized proletariat is also informed by the science of dialectical materialism throughout history. The Marxist concepts of dialectical materialism and historical materialism may accurately describe the situation of colonized people through analyzing previous historic events that led to the present, even in a so-called post-colonial world. Dialectical materialism refers to the objective reality independent from the mind and spirit; it describes the tangible consequences of class struggle and life under a capitalist system. Historical materialism refers to the idea that all forms of social thought and institutions are a reflection of economic relations modified by class struggle. Karl Marx incorporates these ideas into his text Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this text, Marx analyzed the development of the 1848 revolution in France through usage of historical materialism. He had written this book with the purpose of explaining how the 1848 revolution in France led to a coup headed by Louis Bonaparte in 1851.

In Brumaire, Marx states that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" [6]. Today, globalization necessitates the constant expansion of markets in search of infinite profit extracted from the finite resources of the planet and its populations. Due to this, the bourgeoisie must settle everywhere and expand its empires in the name of capitalism-imperialism, and perpetually exploit low-cost labor from the underclass and the Global South in order to do so.

Historical materialism also insinuates that history is a movement of ideas and the unfolding of the relations of production. History is the expansion of the natural, which cannot exist outside of external modifications of it in order to turn it into capital. The material is always embedded in the relations of production and all relations of society are modified by class struggle. As stated by Marx in Brumaire, "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce" [7]. History is a spirit that unfolds as a phenomenon, the continuous synthesis and antithesis of ideas that accumulate through time.

Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts illustrate how the worker under capitalism suffers alienated labor and exploitation from the bourgeoisie. In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx specifies that the worker under capitalism suffers from three types of alienated labor: alienation from the product, where work is experienced as torment; alienation from our own humanity as we produce blindly, not in accordance with ourr truly human powers; and alienation from other people, where relation of exchange replaces satisfaction of mutual need. Marx showed how the economics of the bourgeoisie are derived from the presence of alienation and that people reinforce their own structures of oppression. Therefore, we must have an urge to move beyond said condition and take control of our destiny in order to eradicate the bourgeoisie from power [8]; this is the moment when work is realized as a practice of resistance.

Domination attains submission from its subjects not only through oppression, but it also requires a resistance, a reaction, signifying that the domination is undesired and exploitative in the eyes of the marginalized. Classism is organized by violence under capitalism, which James R. Farr details in his book Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914. In this text, he explains that "Violence and conflict often functioned as means to make inclusion and exclusion in these groups clear" [9]. Farr emphasizes that violence is used to keep the workers in submission and deter them from disobedience. The motif of worker mistreatment is emblematic of how workers, especially workers of oppressed backgrounds, are rendered mediums for ongoing exploitation; hence, dehumanized under a capitalist-imperialist system that does not value our lives. This deterrence enforces proletarian support for the capitalist social order that oppresses us and prevents us from transforming our work into a form of resistance.

This relates to the points made by William Morris and John Ruskin in the Preface to The Nature of Gothic, where Morris states "For the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it" [10]. The pleasure of the proletariat in their labor is desensitized under capitalism, which turns labor into an experience of torment, as Marx claimed, driven by the sole purpose of producing more capital for the bourgeoisie to extract. As stated by Erin O'Connor in her yet to be published "Breathing Work: Time, Space and The Vessel in Glassblowing," "The way we understand "body" is via the objective perspective of the sciences…If accepted as the first and most important site of the "education" of the individual, the body became much more than a sum of its natural functions; it was a set of relations - habits, gestures, expressions, etc. - a system of meaning, sculpted by society" [11]. As the body of a worker goes beyond its biological component, it is informed by social constructs that are artificially implemented by capitalist society. The labor alienation of the worker reduces us to a vessel through which the upper class obtains its profit. Despite this, as Marx said, the proletariat can move beyond capitalist exploitation and seize the means of production, which necessitates an expansion of awareness that goes beyond individualism and the single existence of a worker.

Modern Prison Labor

An example of labor and craft movement that directly ties to the readings by Marx and Farr is contemporary studio craft in US prisons. Prison labor is argued to be a form of modern slavery due to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery with the exception of usage as a punishment for a crime. This loophole has been implemented within the US prison industrial complex, particularly in regards to furniture artistry. Two popular arguments made about prison labor is that it is a way for incarcerated people to learn valuable skills to enable them to contribute to society once released, or that it is a means to exploit incarcerated people. Some prisoners in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas are not paid at all for their labor in government-managed facilities. In addition to this, the national average for the lowest wage incarcerated people receive for prison labor is 14 cents per hour [12].

Prison labor and craft is an important factor in the US economy, yet incarcerated people are typically paid either minimum wage or well below it. Prison labor has no real substance in granting incarcerated people useful skills but is only another force of opposition. Many of the incarcerated people have claimed that the work has no value for them besides the possibility of a shorter sentence. Even to those prisoners who are actually learning useful skills, the reintegration process can be intimidating. Some states uphold policies that bar ex-convicts from obtaining licenses for skills they learned in prison. For instance, there was a New York State prisoner who applied for a barber's license but was denied because "owing to state law, La Cloche could only practice his trade … if he remained behind bars" [13]. The skills La Cloche learned had been confined by a policy that is practiced by several US states, which renders skills gained from prison labor useless outside of prison. This undermines the presumption that prison labor is valuable to the incarcerated. On the other hand, prison labor is indeed valuable to capitalist institutions, seeing that "Virginia Code § 53.1-47… stipulates that all 'departments, institutions, and agencies of the Commonwealth' supported by the state treasury must purchase 'articles and services produced or manufactured by persons confined in state correctional facilities'" [14]. Prison labor can only do this because it exploits its incarcerated people. In addition to this, incarcerated people make a low wage in the Commonwealth of Virginia by earning $0.55 to $0.80 an hour [15].

Farr argues that work was often tied to moral systems of authority. Likewise, it has also been argued that prison labor and craft often gain psychological authority over incarcerated people - as Marx also contests, when he details that labor alienation of the worker reduces them to a vessel for the bourgeoisie to exploit. Farr believes that while labor relations differ depending on the type of workplace, control of the labor market emerged as the most issue dividing masters and journeymen [16]. Similarly, prisons tend to deduct costs of living from wages so that many of their incarcerated people earn cents per hour.

The impact of prison labor and craft on social change is that conviction results in social death for formerly incarcerated people: "To be sentenced to prison is to be sentenced to social death. Social death is a permanent condition. While many people integrate themselves back into the society after imprisonment, they often testify that they permanently bear a social mark, a stigma" [17]. This ensures a life filled with detriment for incarcerated people, especially those who are non-white. In August 2018, incarcerated people across the US initiated strikes to protest poor conditions and exploitative labor practices that many of them considered to be "modern slavery". According to the NAACP, over 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the US, which is an increase of 340% compared to 1980 [18]. With the rise of incarceration, prison violence, sexual violence and other issues have also increased. Protesters addressed these issues in their demands. Additionally, incarcerated labor is used to manufacture furniture and other assets with an hourly wage of between 33 cents and $1.41, provided by the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) [19].

Private prisons are a billion-dollar industry, which exploit prisoners who are predominantly non-white for profit. These prisons are run by private companies and have been on the rise since the mid-1980s, especially following the crack epidemic during the Reagan administration. Over half of US states as of 2017 depend on for-profit prisons in which approximately 90,000 inmates are held each year [20]. Incarcerated people are paid slave wages: "Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other" [21]. Labor alienation and modern prison slavery, the productivity of the incarcerated craftsmen, is solely based on accumulating capital for the bourgeoisie.

Artisanship as Subversiveness

Despite the modern prison scenario, craft and other forms of artisanship can represent radical forms of labor and engines of social movement because, historically, they have been initiated in direct resistance to the status quo imposed by capitalist society. An instance of this is the usage of guilds in Medieval Europe. Guilds formed a central component in a theoretical system that arose in the late Middle Ages which historians label corporatism. Corporatist theory of the 14th Century intertwined with the demographic and economic forces to solidify a political and juridical system that would function until the 19th Century. Corporatism was informed significantly by confraternity associations, which was also the means through which craft guilds were established. The confraternities included work activity as their association developed despite the social security, morals, political identity and sense of place being the most paramount aspects provided to its members [22].

Jurists from the 12th and 13th Centuries alluded guilds to the collegium of the late Roman Law and enabled constituted authority to form and regulate this. As a result, the jurists had imposed a Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority onto the guild organization. Despite this, guildsmen continued to adhere to their theoretical legacy of autonomy stemming from the Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association and self-governance. Although medieval guilds continued to serve their main purpose as mutual aid societies, their connotation to governance and regulation of economic aspects also grew [23]. Johannes Althusius of Emden, author of the "Systematic Analysis of Politics" which was first published in 1603, was a German Calvinist who incorporated economic exchange into the moral foundation of guild values. He elaborated that exchange is rooted in mutual need and thus, reciprocity is vital to exchange [24]. Following France and Prussia, Germany was most associated with corporatism with its "hometowns" populated by less than 10,000 citizens [25].

Leather shoe cups are usually associated with craft guilds in which members would pass the cup in a circle to drink in allegiance to the guild. Jobs such as shoemaking were associated with men, hence the usage of shoe cups as a symbol of allegiance to the guild is akin to a reinforcement of a rite of passage into this representation of proletarian German brotherhood. This also interrogates authority in light of the Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority onto the guild organization, which the guildsmen, and particularly the German ones, would reject by continuing to adhere to their Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association and self-governance.

German guilds that used leather cups also represented self-authority, self-determination, and autonomy in the face of growing Roman influence and the incorporation of guilds into societal hierarchies and classism. The act of sharing the drink is representative of the main function of guilds as a structure that upholds mutual aid. It was marked by Calvinist influence inspired by the teachings of Emden, since the exchange of the leather shoe cup among the guildsmen is emblematic of reciprocity.

In the Middle Ages, European societies were marked by the idea that life was a struggle over classification, over accession to or preservation of a hierarchical status, especially given the growing influence of Roman and Calvinist thought on their societies. The hierarchical status of artists and craftsmen was represented by their position through a guild, which represented their securing of communal living as well as formed their social identity in relation to their place in the social order [26]. The leather cup represented the guildsmen's collective identity as craftsmen and celebration of their role despite their pending degradation in Medieval society, where they were eventually doomed by the classist hierarchy.

Ultimately, the historical shifts and evolution of work is informed by class struggle and the historical-materialist process. Work becomes a practice of resistance in the moment when the proletariat realizes they are alienated from their labor and begin to go against the capitalist social order. Craft and artisanship, especially those that operate on the fringes or in the so-called underground market, are radical forms of labor and initiate social change because they reject the parameters of systemic exploitation set up by the capitalist system. Such work can serve as both a catalyst and a supplemental force of class consciousness.

Notes

[1] Catherine W. Bishir, Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 . University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Friedrich Engels, The Origin on the Family, Private Property, and the State ( Hottingen-Zurich: 1884).

[4] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[5] Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Verlag Von Otto Meisner, 1867).

[6] Karl Marx, "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Die Revolution, No. 1 (1852).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[9] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[10] William Morris, "Preface to The Nature of the Gothic by John Ruskin" (1892).

[11] Erin O'Connor, "Breathing Work: Time, Space and The Vessel in Glassblowing" (2017), pp. 5.

[12] Daniel Moritz-Rabson, "Prison Slavery: Inmates are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government," Newsweek, August 28, 2018.

[13] David R. Jones, "Ex-Prisoners and Jobs," GothamGazette, May 24, 2006.

[14] Katherine Smith, "Smith: Sleeping on Exploitative Prison Labor," The Cavalier Daily, April 19th, 2018.

[15] Ibid.

[16] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[17] Joshua M. Price, "Prison and Social Death," Critical Issues in Crime and Society. Rutgers University Press (2015).

[18] Emily Moon, "Modern Slavery: The Labor History Behind the New Nationwide Prison Strike," Pacific Standard, August 22 nd, 2018.

[19] Daniel Moritz-Rabson, "Prison Slavery: Inmates are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government," Newsweek, August 28, 2018.

[20] Valerie Reynoso, "The Politics of Mass Incarceration," Counterpunch, October 12, 2017.

[21] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[22] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 20.

[23] Ibid. pp. 20.

[24] Ibid, pp. 24.

[25] Ibid. pp. 31.

[26] Ibid. pp. 22.

When and Why Did Unions Start Signing Contracts?

By Robin J. Cartwright

In 1911 Bill Haywood complained that

the A. F. of L. couldn't have a general strike if they wanted to. … They have 271,000 different agreements that expire 27,000 different minutes of the year. They will either have to break all of those sacred contracts or there is no such thing as a general strike in that so-called 'labor organization.'

Today labor relations professionals take it for granted that unions seek to sign contracts with employers, but in Haywood's day this was a relatively new and controversial practice, one that started when he was a teenager. Contracts were originally invented by labor unions that believed they needed to give national leaders authority to restrain strikes and militancy, which could bankrupt the union or subject it to state violence. As labor unrest increased, employers looked for new methods to control their workforce and undermine strikes, eventually choosing to work with and co-opt moderate labor leaders and use their authority over union members to discipline the workforce. Over several decades, employers and union leaders experimented with a series of contracts, gradually developing a workplace contractualism that served both groups.

Labor relations before contracts

Prior to the rise of contracts, unions practiced a variety of other methods to interact with management. During the Lowell textile strikes of 1834 and 1836, among the first factory strikes in the United States, the workers made no attempt to get management to sign a collective bargaining agreement. The strikes were waged in response to a wage cut in 1834 and an increase in the price of room and board in company boardinghouses in 1836. In 1834, the workers, nearly all of whom were young women, organized mass meetings and signed petitions against the cuts, pledging to refuse to work if they were not rescinded, and imposing penalties on any worker who broke her pledge. Although the 1834 strike was defeated, the 1836 strike was better organized and succeeded in reversing the price increase - without signing a contract and with little in the way of labor-management meetings and negotiation.

Nineteenth-century craft unions , with a mostly male membership, often attempted to unilaterally impose their preferred wages and working conditions on employers without signing a written agreement, or even negotiating. Typically, union members would meet and vote on what they called "legislation" (i.e. union work rules). This legislation set wages, working hours, break times, days off, terms of apprenticeship, and specifics of how work was to be done (such as the size of work crews, how many machines could be run at once, and how many products would be produced per hour). Union members were obliged to refuse any order which conflicted with this legislation, and refuse to work at any company that did not abide by it. These craft unions organized skilled occupations that required extensive training - making it difficult for management to replace any worker. If a sufficient portion of the limited pool of skilled workers refused to work for any employer that did not abide by union legislation, they could compel employers to abide by the union's terms. For this strategy to work, the union had to ensure that the number of workers who were trained in their craft remained limited, and many craft unions attempted to do this by restricting the number of new apprentices taken on, and by keeping women, people of color, immigrants, and/or the Irish out of their trade.

Another common practice among nineteenth-century workers was to issue a "bill of prices" or "wage scale" - a written list of occupations in the workplace and the pay rate the union demanded for each one - and go on strike. In some cases, workers were able to compel management, via this direct action, to sign these bills of prices. In other cases, management met with a committee of strike leaders and negotiated a compromise bill. Perhaps the most common result, when management did not defeat the strike outright, was to raise pay rates - but not raise them as high as the union wanted - without signing anything. For example, during the New England shoe worker strike of 1860 , a few employers agreed to a bill of prices with the union, but most raised pay by a moderate amount without formally signing an agreement. The strike gradually petered out as management gave workers much of what they wanted; in some cases, the union unilaterally called off the strike after management made sufficient concessions.

If you equate any written agreement between labor unions and management with a union contract (an overly broad conception of contracts), then these bills of prices would be the first union contracts. However, they differed from modern union contracts in that they did not have expiration dates and normally only set the pay rate. None of the other normal components of modern union contracts - management rights clauses, grievance/arbitration procedures, no strike pledges, language on hours and working conditions, dues checkoff, etc. - were present.

In the latter part of the Civil War and after, American workers began organizing trade unions on an unprecedented scale. Prior to the Civil War, labor unions had primarily been local or regional bodies with little in the way of a national or international structure to coordinate local activity. Unionists now established labor organizations that spanned coast to coast, with national conventions, elected national leaders, and a nationwide strike fund for each trade. They formed the National Labor Union as an umbrella federation (and, after a split, the Colored National Labor Union).

Samuel Gompers, who would later become President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and an advocate of contracts, first joined a union as a young man during this time period. In his memoirs he wrote:

There was a vast difference between those early unions and the unions of today. Then there was no law or order. A union was a more or less definite group of people employed in the same trade who might help each other out in special difficulties with the employer. There was no sustained effort to secure fair wages through collective bargaining. The employer fixed wages until he shoved them down to a point where human endurance revolted. Often the revolt started by an individual whose personal grievance was sore, who rose and declared: "I am going on strike. All who remain at work are scabs." Usually the workers went out with him.

Thus, even after the Civil War and the rise of a truly national labor movement, contracts between employers and labor unions were still unheard of.

The Knights of Labor and the attempt to abolish strikes

Most national trade unions collapsed in the 1870s in part due to a severe depression. High unemployment made it easy for employers to replace union members, and insured a large supply of scabs in the event of a strike. Trade union after trade union went bankrupt funding failed strikes.

When the labor movement revived at the end of the 1870s, the new unions, both the Order of the Knights of Labor (KoL) and the new trade unions that would later found the AFL, were determined to avoid what they thought were the mistakes of previous trade unions. They required all locals seek permission from the national leadership before launching any strike. Any strike not authorized by national leaders would not receive any support from the national organization.

For example, the KoL's regulations stated,

Strikes … are, as a rule, productive of more injury than benefit to working people, consequently all attempts to foment strikes will be discouraged. … No strike undertaken without the sanction and orders of G.A. officers … shall be supported from the Strike Fund.

The KoL's Grand Master Workman (president) Terence Powderly explained ,

Strikes are a failure. Ask any old veteran in the labor movement and he say will the same. … An association well organized need never strike. It is only half organized unions that do so.

In response to the idea that the Order "protect and foster strikes" he satirically proposed that the union also "purchase a rifle and bayonet; also one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition for each member" and acquire "the latest improved style of Gatling gun." He elaborated that men in office had "enacted laws which make it impossible for you to strike without the troops [being] called out" and that consequently encouraging strikes would bring severe repression upon the Order. Powderly further argued :

There are times when, under certain indignities and tyrannies, a refusal to strike amounts to downright cowardice; but these circumstances seldom arise. The average strike is brought about by the inflammatory speeches of some firebrand. … A strike seldom fails of one result, that is, to create confusion and distrust, and finally break the Union up. Whether the strike was successful, or not, it generally breaks up the branch engaged in it. One reason is, men expect that, as soon as they strike, they ought to walk up to the treasurer and draw five dollars a week, even though they have not paid in five cents.

Like the trade unions, the Knights felt that national union leadership needed to have a degree of authority over the membership to ensure members did not engage in strikes that would deplete their funds and/or provoke severe state repression. However, the Knights had a more ambitious approach to strikes than the trade unions - they wanted to abolish them. In the long run, the Knights intended to abolish strikes by abolishing capitalism, thereby making them unnecessary. In the medium term, they wanted the state to pass laws providing for the compulsory arbitration of all labor disputes. That objective was never achieved in the United States, although laws for voluntary arbitration were passed, and the Knights of Labor in New Zealand did get parliament to pass compulsory arbitration legislation during the 1890s (which the New Zealand IWW would later campaign against).

In the short-term, the Knights arranged for private arbitration with employers, instead of resorting to strikes, whenever possible, reserving direct action as a last resort. This private arbitration took several forms. KoL leaders were empowered to arbitrate disputes between their members and employers; they could order their members to accept a settlement they did not agree with. If the employer agreed, disputes could be submitted to a neutral third-party for arbitration.

In areas where the Knights of Labor were strongest they sometimes signed a written list of "rules and regulations" with an employers' association, laying out a process to use arbitration to resolve all conflicts. Usually one or two pages long, the rules forbade all strikes and lockouts and established a joint board of arbitration to resolve all disputes. These boards were composed of an equal number of representatives from the union and the employers' association, and had the authority to settle any dispute between workers and their employer in the factories covered by the agreement. In the event of a tie vote, each side was to select a disinterested person, those two would select a third person, and then the three of them would decide the matter at hand. Typically, they also provided for grievance committees and established a closed shop (or, as a compromise, permitted members to refuse to work with non-union co-workers).

These rules and regulations signed by the Knights of Labor have a great deal in common with twentieth-century union contracts, but there are some important differences. Perhaps most importantly, they had no expiration date - they were intended to last forever, to permanently end strikes and lockouts. They were much briefer and left most things specified in modern union contracts (including pay rates and working conditions) up to arbitration. There was no seniority and no dues checkoff. The Knights also had difficultly compelling their own members to abide by these terms. In 1886, in response to the failure of the Knights to suppress a wildcat shoe worker strike in Philadelphia , local shoe manufacturers locked out all of their employees for several weeks and then decided to arbitrate with a company union, on an open shop basis, rather than with the Knights - destroying the shoe workers' union in the city.

Initially, the Knights of Labor were larger than the trade unions and they grew rapidly until 1886, becoming larger than any previous labor union in North America. From 1886-1890, employers founded a series of employer associations that led a counter-offensive against the Knights which managed to destroy the union with a series of lockouts, aided by state violence and the backlash against organized labor after the Haymarket affair . The newly founded, and more conservative, American Federation of Labor then took the Knights' place as the largest labor union in the country. The reluctance of the Order's national leadership to authorize strikes did not save the union from being targeted and destroyed by employers.

The early twentieth century: progressive employers embrace contracts

Unlike the Knights, the AFL did not harbor grandiose plans of abolishing strikes or ending capitalism. They viewed strikes as labor's most powerful weapon, but one that should be used sparingly. The AFL compared going on strike to going to war - it was a powerful act, but one that was risky and dangerous, and which should only be undertaken when attacked or in extreme circumstances. They were willing to sign a peace treaty, but unlike the Knights were not willing to give up the right to strike permanently. So their agreements with employers only lasted for a fixed amount of time, after which they were free to strike again. Initially these agreements were called "trade agreements" but by the twentieth century the terms "contract" or "time contract" were used as synonyms. It was these AFL trade agreements that the early IWW denounced when it rejected contracts .

When the AFL began to grow steadily in the late 1890s and early 1900s, it found a section of the employing class (mainly the wealthier section) was now open to compromising with unions - something they were largely unwilling to do with previous labor organizations. This shift occurred for several reasons. Some larger employers believed they could use unions to undercut their smaller competitors . The general trend over the preceding forty years had been for labor unrest to increase, and the growing cost of suppressing it led some employers to start searching for a more cost-effective means of retaining control over their workforce. In addition, some employers were concerned that the suppression of organized labor encouraged the growth of socialist, anarchist, and other radical movements. They worried that the growth of radicalism, combined with the tendency for labor unrest to increase over time, could, in the long-run, result in revolution if left unchecked.

In 1900 these progressive employers, with the participation of AFL leaders, founded the National Civic Federation to advocate for reforms meant to stabilize capitalism. The NCF lobbied for progressive legislation, mediated between employers and unions in labor disputes, and encouraged employers to sign contracts with trade unions. The year it was founded it passed a resolution declaring "trade agreements between employers and workmen where established for a definite term of years have so fully demonstrated their value in maintaining industrial peace that they should be generally adopted." They told their fellow employers that "the practical operations of the trade agreement systems disprove the criticism that they mean a surrender to unjust or uneconomic demands of labor." An article in their newspaper , seeking to persuade their fellow capitalists to sign contracts, argued:

One of the permanent advantages of the trade agreement system is the influence which organized employers have in improving the organization of the workers. As long as employers are hostile, or as long as an association of employers exists solely to fight the lion, the latter is forced to put forward its fighting men. But when employers organize for conference and agreement, and are able to remove the long standing suspicions of the workmen, a change comes in union leadership. The officers become negotiators and bargainers-business men, like their employers.

The reformist wing of the employing class consciously set out to corrupt and co-opt union leaders by signing contracts with labor unions.

The NCF contended that unions would generally abide by the terms of their contracts and that union leaders could be relied upon to suppress strikes by their own members. Their newspaper argued that:

An agreement between an organization of employers and an organization of workmen is backed by the machinery and the power to enforce observance. In the thirteen years of the Iron Molders' and Stove Founders' agreements there has not been a contract violation nor a strike or lockout, except occasionally in a single shop, soon settled by the national officers of the two organizations. … These officers, as in all labor unions, have power to fine and expel members and to revoke the charters of local bodies that interfere with the enforcement of trade contracts.

The longshoremen's organization in their contracts with the dock managers on the Great Lakes have occasionally been called upon to discipline their members for violations, and in the case of the Buffalo strike in 1900 the International President, after revoking the charter of the local union and supplying the places of a majority of the strikers with union men from other locals, filled the remaining places with non-union men. Mr. Samuel Mather, of the Dock Managers' Association, … says regarding their agreements with the Longshoremen's Union, "I am very happy to be able to testify that since that continuous arrangement was inaugurated, about three years ago, our business has been conducted with great advantage compared with what prevailed before. … If any occasion of dispute arises, it has not caused the work to terminate"

By signing contracts with labor unions, employers could convert them from organizations that incited strikes into organizations that broke strikes. In the eyes of the NCF, this was a more effective and cost-effective means of controlling their workforce than their previous reliance on violence and repression.

The NCF also praised a contract signed by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which established a cartel in bituminous coal mining . As settlement of a nation-wide strike in 1897, the union and coal operators signed a national contract, and a series of district contracts, that not only covered wages, hours, etc., but also specified the minimum price coal could be sold at and the amount each operator was to sell. Prior to this contract competing firms often undercut each other by increasing the amount of coal they sold, flooding the market and causing the price to plummet. This contract allowed them to sell less coal at a higher price, increasing their profits. The UMWA acted as the cartel's enforcer by striking any firm that would not sign the contract and abide by its price fixing. The UMWA also insured that a portion of the operators' increased profits went to its members in the form of higher wages. This early contract is one of the more flagrant cases of larger employers using union contracts to undermine their smaller rivals and deter competition. Higher wages undercut smaller firms because their lower profit margins made it more difficult to afford them. Higher wages also buttressed the cartel's position by acting as a barrier to entry, discouraging the founding of new companies in the industry and protecting operators from increased competition.

A more important contract from this time period was the Protocols of Peace , negotiated between the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (a predecessor to UNITE-HERE) and the Cloak, Suit, and Skirt Protective Association (an employers' association), as settlement of the cloak makers' "great revolt" (strike) of 1910 in New York City. The Protocols established a modern system of grievance machinery to settle disputes and enforce the contract. Its grievance procedures were foreshadowed by the Knights of Labor's arbitration system, but the Protocols was more elaborate, with added layers of bureaucracy, and focused more on enforcement of the contract's terms. Earlier trade agreements, too, had provisions for labor-management meetings to resolve disputes but did not have a true grievance system with numerous steps and arbitration involving outsiders. The Protocols not only allowed union members to file against their employers, but permitted employers to file grievances against the union, usually for wildcat strikes. In order to suppress wildcat strikes and uphold its part of the bargain, the ILGWU put locals into receivership when they defied the no-strike pledge, and recruited unionized scabs to undermine wildcat strikes.

The ILGWU succeeded in signing similar Protocol-like contracts with employer associations in other parts of their industry and in other cities, and it influenced the content of other unions' contracts. Larger employers signed not only to deter strikes and regain control over their workforce, but in hopes of undercutting their smaller competitors (who had smaller profit margins and would have greater difficulty paying union wages). In some cases they secretly agreed to sign a Protocols-like contract with the ILGWU before a strike even began, provided the union was able to compel smaller companies to join the employers' association and sign the same agreement.

After the First World War and the Red Scare, employers largely abandoned their interest in signing contracts with the ILGWU or other unions and attempted to go union-free. Some returned to the use of violence and repression to suppress labor unrest (others had never abandoned violence and repression). Some experimented with what historians call "welfare capitalism" - giving workers relatively generous benefits to reduce turnover and prevent unionization. Some established "employee representation programs" (company unions).

1940s-1970s: Heyday of the union contract

After the great depression began, labor unrest and left-wing radicalism revived, prompting employers and the state to institute many of the reforms they had first experimented with in the early twentieth century. In response to the strike wave of 1934, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, in an effort to protect commerce and prevent future strikes by encouraging employers to sign contracts with labor unions. The author of the act, Senator Robert F. Wagner, had been a member of the New York State legislature when the Protocols of Peace was signed, which he supported. The architect of the Protocols of Peace, Louis Brandeis, was appointed to the Supreme Court several years after mediating between the ILGWU and CSSPA during the cloak makers' great revolt, leaving his position on the board of arbitration (the final step in the Protocols' grievance process). He was still on the Supreme Court in 1937, where he voted in favor of the constitutionality of the NLRA.

Force of law alone was never sufficient to compel most employers to abide by the NLRA or sign contracts with business unions. A version of the rights in the NLRA were originally included in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, but they were ignored by employers and the law was later struck down as unconstitutional. When the NLRA was passed in 1935 it established a government agency to enforce those rights, but because there were no punitive damages for violating it most employers simply did not obey the law. It was the wave of sit-down strikes at the start of 1937 that convinced many employers of the need to sign contracts, or at least keep their anti-union activity legal. Most famously, the notoriously anti-union U.S. Steel (which controlled the majority of steel production in the U.S.) chose to sign a contract with the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee to prevent a sit-down strike at its plants and regain control over its workforce. Most unionists expected that unionizing U.S. Steel would require an enormous battle, but they signed a contract without a fight.

A minority of employers continued to violently oppose unionization even after the sit-down strikes. Perhaps the best known was Republic Steel, which committed the Memorial Day Massacre along with the Chicago police. These employers were finally brought into line during the Second World War. In exchange for a no-strike pledge, the federal government denied any contract for war supplies to any company that violated the NLRA, giving the law some teeth and bringing an end to corporate America's long tradition of murdering union organizers.

Although the NLRA did a great deal to institutionalize workplace contractualism, dues checkoff did not become a near-universal part of union contracts until the Second World War . During the war, union dissidents would sometimes withhold dues as a way of pressuring union leaders, which could encourage them to violate the no-strike pledge. Union leaders and the state insisted that employers directly deduct dues from employees' pay to remove this source of rank-and-file leverage. There were unions as early as the late nineteenth century that had dues checkoff, but it was not until the war that nearly all union contracts had it.

For the next thirty years, it was a social norm for employers to abide by the NLRA. Although most employers remained non-union, they largely kept their union-busting activities legal until the 1970s . To control their workforce, employers treated their employees relatively well (this was the low point of income inequality) and, when that failed, signed contracts with unions, relying on union leaders to keep workers in line. Flagrantly violating the NLRA was stigmatized.

Beginning in the late 1970s, employers began looking for alternative means of disciplining their workforce, which they eventually found in the form of higher unemployment and permanent replacement scabs. In the 1980s, they used these tools to destroy the labor movement and de-unionize much of the workforce, inaugurating the current era of low union density and low strike rates. They have spent much of the past thirty years gradually dismantling the remains of contract-based unionism.

Workplace contractualism and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

Workplace contractualism developed in fits and starts, with different components added in at different times. What we think of as a standard union contract was really only commonplace for roughly forty years (1940-1980). The previous period of experimentation with different forms of contracts (1880-1940) lasted longer. The later period (1980-present), of tiny, weak unions and very few strikes, has now lasted almost as long as the heyday of the union contract. The exact point when the labor movement started signing contracts depends on how you define contracts. There is no hard and fast point at which the movement passed from non-contracts to contracts, and even agreements that clearly count as contracts took on different forms at different times. One way to approach the issue is to look at how the early IWW viewed contracts, and then find the point in history in which an agreement matching that conception was first signed.

Historians generally write that the early IWW refused to sign contracts, and the IWW of that time repeatedly issued pamphlets and public proclamations denouncing contracts. A 1913 pamphlet written by IWW General Executive Board member Joseph Ettor and published by the IWW stated:

Industrial Unionists disdain to lower the history and ideals of the working class by entering into contracts or agreements with employers … Contracts and agreements tend to foist a false feeling of security on the worker.

In the pamphlet The IWW - its History, Structure, and Methods , Vincent St. John (the second General Secretary-Treasurer) wrote, "No part of the organization is allowed to enter into time contracts with the employers." In her old age, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalled that the IWW

did not believe in making any contracts. They believed that as long as you were organized, you could hold the office to what it said it was going to do. But a contract, a piece of paper held you and so they didn't make any contracts.

Bill Haywood told Congress

We say that no union has a right to enter into an agreement with the employers because they are members of the working class; and finally we say that the working class has no right to enter into an agreement because it is the inherent mission of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish itself in its place.

However, despite this rhetoric, the early IWW actually did make agreements with employers. On Philadelphia's waterfront , the IWW made several verbal agreements with employers to terminate large strikes in exchange for a number of concessions, including a closed shop and partial control over hiring and firing. In the 1912 Lawrence textile strike it drew up a "list of grievances" similar to the "bill of prices" used by unionists in the mid-nineteenth century, negotiated with management, and agreed to call off the strike after management granted most of their demands. If we look at the early IWW's constitution, we find it didn't explicitly ban contracts by name. What it said was:

Any agreement entered into between the members of any Union, or organization, and their employers, as a final settlement of any difficulty or trouble which may occur between them, shall not be considered valid or binding until the same shall have the approval of the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World.

No Union of the General Organization, Industrial Department, or Industrial Union of the I. W. W. shall enter into any contract with an individual or corporation of employers binding the members to any of the following conditions:

(a) Any agreement wherein any specified length of time is mentioned for the continuance of the said agreement.

(b) Any agreement wherein the membership is bound to give notice before making demands affecting hours, wages or shop conditions.

(c) Any agreement wherein it is specified that the members shall work only for employers who belong to an association of the employers.

(d) Any agreement that proposes to regulate the selling price of the product they are employed in making.

(e) No Industrial Union or any part of the Industrial Workers of the World shall enter into any agreement with any Labor Organization.

This section was removed in the late 1930s, except for the requirement for GEB approval, which was not removed until the 1940s. Histories of the IWW generally label this removal as the IWW signing contracts for the first time. It appears that by "contract" Bill Haywood and others who claimed that the IWW did not sign contracts meant an agreement that violated any of these five conditions, not any agreement in the broadest sense of that term.

The Knights of Labor's arbitration agreements would have been contracts in this sense because they violated part (b) by permanently forbidding strikes, although they did not violate part (a). The AFL's trade agreements violated both (a) and (b), and in some cases other clauses. The UMWA's contracts establishing a coal cartel additionally violated part (d); those contracts may be why early Wobblies included part (d). If merely getting things in writing counts as a union contract, the earlier "bill of prices" used by some unions before the Civil War would count as the first contracts. However, they were not contracts in the sense that the IWW opposed because they did not violate any of these stipulations, and because the early IWW itself issued similar documents. Therefore the first contracts, in the sense of contracts that the early IWW opposed, were invented by the Knights of Labor in order to abolish strikes.

Over the course of the twentieth-century, employers and/or the state in most countries eventually adopted measures designed to co-opt and control labor unions, abandoning older, more violent strategies designed to suppress unions. They used co-opted unions to maintain control over their workforce, and sought to marginalize radical unions that refused to cooperate in this process. In some countries this took the form of works councils or state subsidies for labor unions, but in the United States it took the form of workplace contractualism, because that was the form moderate labor unions invented and preferred. The process of co-opting unions was not entirely one-sided; employers had to make significant concessions to moderate union leaders to get them to cooperate and those concessions affected the structure of labor relations. Since the rise of neoliberalism forty years ago, employers have abandoned this strategy in most of the world, adopting alternative methods to discipline their workforce. The paucity of labor unrest has made working with moderate labor unions no longer an attractive option for most of the employing class. The origins of union contracts in restraining strikes, and the extensive history of employers using contracts to control workers, should make those of us who would like to revive labor unrest cautious about reviving contracts - or oppose it altogether.

This essay was originally published at Organizing Work , a media platform associated with the Industrial Workers of the World.

On the Latest Developments Within the U.S. Working Class

By Ekim Kilic

The 2016 Presidential Elections were a turning point for U.S. labor and popular movements. Since then, provocative statements and decisions by the Trump government have been threatening millions of working peoples' lives. However, the actions of the current U.S. government are not independent of its predecessors and their economic applications that also carried out the needs of U.S. capital and its forces. Today, precarious employment and life conditions, a declining social safety net, and not being able to resonate their voice politically are headlines of the U.S. workers' current problems as a result of long-standing neoliberal policies and the 2008 financial crisis.

In the midst of these issues, the U.S. working class experienced a revival the likes of which that has not been seen in a long time. According to an opinion article that was written for CNN by Richard Trumka [1] , the president of AFL-CIO, " In the year since, working people have been doing just that. From airports and hospitals to newsrooms and college campuses, workers are organizing on a scale that I haven't seen in decades. More than a quarter-million Americans joined unions [2] last year - three-quarters of them under 35. Half of the nonunion workers say they would vote to do the same [3] if given the chance, and Gallup has even pegged unions' popularity at a 15-year high. " [4]

As a side note, the unions organized Labor Day 2018 at a time when the workers' struggle was accelerating: the successful state-wide strikes of elementary school and high school teachers, the struggle of the Chicago hotel workers, which then inspired several others in the sector across the country, the strike authorization of the United Metal Workers' Union (USW) on the collective bargaining agreement with the metal bosses, 27% wage increase of window cleaners as a result of their struggle, 260,000 UPS postal workers authorizing a strike and struggling against the union bureaucracy, struggle for unionization from New York construction workers, and the university assistants' struggles for unionization. The US labor forces celebrated Labor Day in an unusual and special atmosphere. On the other side, one should note that the U.S. labor movement saw several struggles for unionizing and wage increases against weak work conditions in prisons and main sectors, such as cable, automotive, packaging, arms, and agriculture in last 2 years.

Despite the recent upsurge in labor struggles, current demands and problems of U.S. labor are rooted in the past. A short account of the history of U.S. labor may be helpful to make sense of the significance and characters of today's labor actions. Because the dominant narrative on labor comes from liberal or social-democratic accounts, which have avoided representing the U.S. labor as a working-class force for a long time. Instead, their accounts consistently blur the line between working class and middle class through using income and level of education as almost the only metrics. Besides that, the story of U.S. labor remained either one-sided and descriptive academic sources on the U.S. labor or narrating the labor history as if it was only a cultural motif.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE U.S. WORKING CLASS

Based on 2016 data from "employment by major industry sector" chart of the U.S. Department of Labor, distributions of the labor force are in mining, construction, manufacturing, 12.6%; in service industry, 80.3%; agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, 1.5%; and nonagricultural self-employed 5.6%. [5] Another important finding from the statistics is that although union membership is more likely to experience a revival, the general situation remains stagnant. According to data on union affiliations was obtained from the Department of Labor website, employees from all backgrounds, industries, and occupations who are 16 years old and over;

Change in union membership and Representation in the US, 2007-2017, by the data from the Department of Labor [6]

As is illustrated in the chart, although the popularity of the unions has an upward trend, according to a Gallup poll referred to before, union membership and representation capability still remain steady. [7] However, this recent situation is not independent of national and international condition for the U.S. labor movement. The Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which strengthened the right to work law, the witch-hunt operations of McChartyist era against American communists after WW2 throughout the 1950s, the removal of communists from union leadership as a result of the Communist Control Act of 1954 [8] , then Nixon's dirty war against Black and Anti-War activists through the "war on drugs" after Lyndon Johnson's acceptance of "civil rights act of 1964" as an adjustment of the American social contract, then trickle-down economics of Reagan era, which sought to decrease taxes on the companies that they may encourage growth in the short run and benefit society in the long run, all weakened the labor unions politically, economically and socially. Even though some of the honest unionists maintain their struggle to some extent, most unions are stuck with an extremely legalist approach, which directly or indirectly broke the workers' initiative.

As a matter of fact, the historical processes considered above also grew U.S. capital's capacity for outsourcing and movement overseas. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) increased the mobilization of the U.S. capital, and reduced tariffs, which caused loss of many manufacturing jobs, and increased the competition to the detriment of small producers. Seeking markets that have lower labor prices left American workers jobless eventually. On the other hand, weak healthcare services, precarious employment conditions, weak access to education, affordable daycare, safe housing, healthy and reasonably priced food, gender wage inequality in non-unionized workplaces, open-shop practices, and politicians who ignore workers' concerns are main challenges that the U.S. working class currently has.

All in all, this overview may draw attention to the background of the current situation of the U.S. working class. The escalating problems of the working class generated a discussion around the 2016 presidential elections among the media, pollsters, and academics. Despite the imposition of the caricatured idea that " president Trump was supported by the white working class" it is becoming clear that the radicalizing right-wing anxiety of petty-bourgeois classes as a result of losing their class positions, unemployment, and years of years of nationalist and religious propaganda were other main reasons. This caricatured idea is utilized as a scapegoating attempt by the Democrats to avoid their responsibility in the current political, economic and social atmosphere in the U.S.. While Charles Post explains why white workers supported Trump, he underlines that casting no vote as white workers could be more effective than casting a vote for Republicans, which Christine J. Walley and Claudine M. Pied make similar points. [9] In other words, the loss of trust in the electoral democracy that may fundamentally shift the tides of U.S. politics can be read as another reaction to neoliberalism. As a result of analyzing three workers' cases, their resentment and voting behaviors/rationalities, Pied concludes that " there is… not one white working-class reaction to neoliberalism ." [10] That is, one may say that the US working class has been seeking different solutions instead of just supporting right wing nationalist candidates. Yet, we have to acknowledge the considerable impact of right-wing nationalism on white workers.

CHARACTERS OF CURRENT WORKING CLASS ACTIONS 2017-2018

Since the 2016 presidential elections, new Trump anti-labor appointees to NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) [11] , recent restrictions by the NLRB to unions' right to picket, and demoralizing decisions in the cases "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" [12] and "AFSCME vs. Janus [13] have been unrelenting, successive defeats for the labor movement.

In April 2018, the U.S. Senate confirmed pro-business lawyer John Ring to the National Labor Relations Board. The senate handed control of the board over Republicans. Ring is a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, and was appointed to a five-year term. The board now has three Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump and two Democrats.

An October ruling of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared that janitors who were picketing for better working conditions were not protected from unfair labor practices committed by their employer. The Board ruled that the janitors, who were being contracted by a building management company, were engaged in secondary picketing. [14]

In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the bosses could hinder workers' rights to collective and legal action for better wages and working conditions in the "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" case. Another case, which was concluded in June and known as "AFSCME vs. Janus," was again decided against the unions. Even if the U.S. unions manage a majority in the workplace, not all workers in that workplace are required to become members of that union. However, workers who are not members of that union paid a certain amount of contribution to the union, because they still benefited from the collective bargaining in the same workplace. In June 2018, such a necessity has now been eliminated in unionized workplaces of the public sector by the Janus ruling.

However, tides are still turning for the U.S. working class. Even if the labor movement received significant counter-attacks, these are not likely to end this new and energetic tide. Because patterns of today's strikes for wage increases and betterment of working conditions and unionizing struggles in non-unionized workplaces appear as radical, contagious, and encouraging worker and laborer actions.

Radicalization of workers for their economic demands are important as future opportunities for the political transformation of the unions and boldness of the labor movement. For a long time, U.S. unions have relied on collective bargaining processes with bosses, in which the most union leaderships would seek were ways of compromising with bosses. On the other hand, except a few labor occasions, one may find union presences mostly through their political action committees, which run election campaigns for a candidate that union endorsed. And those candidates are mostly from the Democratic Party. Additionally, union representatives run their campaign through the motto "more middle class jobs" as if they already acknowledged that being a part of the working class is unsustainable. Hence, these unions are more likely to avoid even from the strike authorizations since they can negotiate with bosses through union lawyers and court cases.

Worker and laborer struggles in the aftermath of the 2016 elections reveal radical characteristics in many aspects. Pending strike authorization of UPS workers, whose union has tended to compromise with bosses, state-wide wildcat strikes of teachers, early morning protests of New York construction workers once every week, hunger strikes, and occupations of grad students are several examples of this radical turn. In addition to that, laborers in the same sector, but from different states, follow each other's example. Hence, this pro-active pattern may spark a fire easily in the same sector, such as in teachers, grad students, prison complex, and hotel workers.

Therefore, it shows that emergent radical union members will not necessarily tolerate waiting for legalist solutions as it has always been; because these are generally long-lasting court cases, which may break workers' initiative. On the other hand, workers' reactions to the Democratic Party became apparent in the 2016 presidential elections. Rising support for the Trump's Republican Party, not casting a vote at all, or voting third parties instead of for both grand parties were different reactions against the neoliberal policies that are being supported by former labor Democrats, especially in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Wildcat teachers' strikes had an encouraging effect on the labor struggle. On February 22, starting with West Virginia, wildcat strikes spread out among 8 states, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, and West Virginia with reactions to low wages for teachers and support staff, inadequate school budgets, overcrowded classrooms, and other problems. Following this wave, workers at 26 hotels of Chicago went on strike as members of UNITE HERE Local 1 on September 7, which was then followed by Marriott hotels workers' strike in 8 cities, in Detroit, Boston, San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Maui, and Oahu. Wages, workloads, and health insurance are among the issues at play. [15]

Although grad students are the most vulnerable one because of their recent recognition of employee status, their strikes and unionizing struggles are still ongoing. Cafeteria strikes, occupations, hunger strikes and ongoing strikes take place at the country's most privileged schools, such as the New School, Columbia University, and Yale University. They are also faced with weak working conditions, precarious insurance-pay, and lack of resources for their livelihoods. Additionally, the CUNY adjunct's struggle arose from precarious work conditions. Full time lecturer positions are difficult to come by. As academic laborers say, more than half of CUNY classes are taught by CUNY adjuncts, their salaries make 5% of the budget.

As another type of precarious work, seasonal farm workers, who are mostly Central American immigrants, from Sakuma Brothers and Driscoll's (the world's largest distributor of berries) were successful in their struggle for unionizing and obtaining their rights for minimum wage. In a statement from their website, the union claims that Sakuma Brothers is guilty of " systematic wage theft, poverty wages, hostile working conditions, and unattainable production standards. " [16]

On the other hand, since December 2017, New York construction workers, who work in the Hudson Yards redevelopment project, have been fighting against the union-busting tactics of the bosses, who impose the open shop model. The Hudson Yards redevelopment project is the largest construction project in North America and the largest private real estate project in U.S. history. The open shop agenda pushed by Related Co. may create a precedent for the expansion of the already growing open shop work model. The struggle of workers against the open shop model is crucial for future labor struggles that will take place in the city. Since December 2017, workers have been regularly doing protests in front of the construction site every Thursday morning at 6 a.m near their workplace. That can also be count another radical characteristic of the recent labor struggle.

Last spring, negotiations between the Teamsters, UPS, and UPS Freight started over the union's proposals, which would address a range of critical issues facing UPSers - ending forced overtime for package car drivers, raising part-timers' wages, imposing monetary penalties for management harassment, and protecting jobs from automation, among others. This negotiation included about 260.000 workers. Even though an overwhelming majority of workers voted yes for strike authorization last summer, and no for UPS contract in this fall, union leadership ignored the decisions of workers, creating a wave of reactions to union leadership from rank-and-file union members and workers.

In another important development, the U.S prisons saw the largest strike in their history. Beginning at the end of last summer, prisoner workers were on strike for voting rights of millions of American prisoners and better prison conditions against slavery-like work conditions. In the U.S., the anti-slavery law includes all citizens except prisoners. According to 13th Amendment, it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

Moreover, in heavy industry, USW's (United Steel Workers) pending strike authorization, IBEW's (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) struggle against Spectrum Cable Company last year, and UAW's (United Automobile Workers) unsuccessful attempt to organize union in a Nissan factory of Mississippi in summer 2016 have been other headlines of the U.S. workers' struggle. Unfortunately, the struggle is relatively weak while comparing with other sectors. Considering that terrific and racist anti-union campaign in Nissan plant, especially against African-American workers, the union's inability to build a strong organizing committee, and the fear of losing their jobs at Nissan, underlines how the U.S. represses their workers while hiding it from public eye. However, as one of Nissan workers mentioned, those are educative processes that may prepare workers for future struggles.

As a last note on the current struggles, Amazon workers' voices are still up for a union in the U.S. A month ago, McDonalds' workers led by Fight For $15 went on strike for better wages, against weak working conditions, and harassment. For Chicago teachers, strikes are on their agenda.

TEACHERS AND UPS WORKERS SHOW HOW TO USE "THE STRENGTH THAT COMES FROM PRODUCTION" [17]

Among all fruitful labor struggles, wildcat teachers' strikes and UPS's collective bargaining process show many other lessons specifically and clearly. Wildcat teachers' strikes were named by the U.S. media as "the red wave" which refers to dominant Republican politics in those states. Another reference to "the red wave" is that almost all statewide strikes happened in right-to-work states. Beyond being widespread, teachers' strikes have a daring character as we mentioned before. These strikes had that daring character because they were mostly led by grassroots organizing among teachers with the progressive rank-and-file teacher union caucuses in AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and NEA (The National Education Association) since the union leadership had shown a trend of abandoning the working class. [18] Similarly, the progress among Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters) affiliated UPS workers is being directed mostly by rank-in-file members. A pending strike of UPS workers has been unexpectedly persistent. One may expect that workers would quickly lose their hopes in the struggle, but it consistently developed while challenging the union bureaucracy and bosses in a well-organized manner. Considering that this labor issue involves 260,000 workers, it is not easy to maintain such a struggle.

Teachers' strikes took the stage in West Virginia on February 22, 2018 with the demands of lowering health insurance costs, made worse by stagnant wages. [19] Undercover groups in social media were utilized as a way of organizing, and debating. West Virginia has a famous history within the U.S. working class struggles. Including the famous struggle of the Battle of Blair Mountain, heroic miners struggles of the 1920s, wildcat strikes of the 1970s, and the victories of the Miners for Democracy movement are several key historical moments, which make American worker today "proud to be union." [20] It truly shows that the memory of class struggle is alive, which appears through discussions on social media, or the general trend of daring to follow rank-in-file instead "the leadership."

Teachers went on strike against budget cuts, decreased employee benefits, low per pupil spending, low salaries, right-to-work laws, school choice, and school vouchers. A 20% pay raise in Arizona, 2% pay raise and increased school spending in Colorado, increased school funding, teachers raises by $6000, support staff raises by $1250 in Oklahoma, and 5% pay raise in West Virginia are the gains of these struggles. [21] Arizona teachers, for instance, won their struggle with their gradual action from low-intensity to high-intensity actions, such as wearing red T-Shirts on Wednesdays and posting photos on social media, then handing out flyers, then rallying at the capitol with signs and stickers: " I Don't Want to Strike, But I Will" and finally, walking out and massive marches. [22] The West Virginia teachers' strike, the most advanced struggle of the many that erupted in 2018, started with rallies and walkouts from the beginning of February 2018, the strike month. [23] Therefore, one may say that although the social media reach-out played an important role, more or less all strikes and labor struggles escalated from low-density actions to high-density actions.

However, strikes remained valuable considerable remarks. Almost 80% of U.S. public school teachers are women, and women made up almost all of the leadership of strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Particularly because of this, some of West Virginia teachers carried out the matter of preserving abortion rights into the strike efforts. Another positive development is exposure of the betrayal of the union leadership, or their compromising tendencies with state governments. Teachers do have a feeling of being undervalued by the business and state governments. But the political perspective of many teachers, for example in Kentucky and West Virginia, doesn't exceed the slogan "vote all the enemies out of office," which means for them supporting teacher-friendly candidates in the Democratic Party. [24]

As a note for our readers, one may expect that the U.S. democracy values on the surface liberal values and human rights, besides the racist history and present that could not be solved totally. Ironically, similar to slanders and racial slurs of the bosses and their associates against black workers of the Nissan factory, teachers were mostly blamed by the state incumbents and political authorities to hurt educational process. Kentucky governor went further, and said " You know how many hundreds of thousands of children were left home alone today? I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them. " Oklahoma governor found her cure to the strikes by classifying striking workers as: "a teenage kid that wants a better car." [25]

CONCLUSION

Some of the struggles considered here are still ongoing among the workers. The most important characteristics that may be extracted from these examples are the radical, contagious and encouraging actions. In addition, a majority of these actions ended with relative victory. This new accumulative process as for workers' experiences may provide future opportunities to transform unions politically towards unions which are strongly tied with workers and their class interests. On the other hand, the awakening sections of the youth, and an increase in sympathy to socialism are turning towards to the working class and the organizational problems they face. Although it might be early to make a guess about what may happen, one may definitely say that the U.S. working class is seeking ways to escape from this recent, oppressive and extremely exploitative situation, while organizing politically and economically.

Notes

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/03/opinions/labor-day-working-people-deserve-our-fair-share/index.html

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/biggest-gains-in-union-membership-in-2017-were-for-younger-workers/

[3] https://aflcio.org/2018/6/22/study-popularity-joining-unions-surges

[4] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[5] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm

[6] https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab3.htm#union3.xlsx.f.1

[7] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[8] "The Communist Control Act of 1954", The Yale Law Journal 64, no. 5 (1955): 712-65. doi:10.2307/793898.

[9] Post, C. (2017). The roots of Trumpism. Cultural Dynamics, 29(1-2), 100-108.

[10] Pied, C. (2018). Conservative populist politics and the remaking of the "white working class" in the USA. Dialectical Anthropology, 42(2), 193-206, sf. 204.

[11] https://www.reuters.com/article/labor-nlrb/senate-confirms-trump-nlrb-nominee-handing-control-to-republicans-idUSL1N1RO28L

[12] https://theredphoenixapl.org/2018/05/22/a-blow-to-the-working-class-reveals-capitalist-ruthlessness-and-fear/

[13] https://www.afscme.org/now/janus-for-leaders

[14] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[15] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[16] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-18/workers-who-pick-your-summer-berries-are-asking-you-not-buy-them?fbclid=IwAR03gjveysa610ss2nzGxqiaGe_H56hpBjtqtUh8Y_LLerArll_20On14nk

[17] The Strength Comes From Production: A widely used worker slogan from Turkey. One may encounter with this idiom in workers' and unions' informative materials in Turkey.

[18] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/05/whats-behind-teachers-strikes

[19] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[20] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/03/west-virginia-teachers-learned-1970s-miners

[21] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-teacher-protests-20180503-story.html , https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/12/pueblo-teacher-strike-is-over/ , https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/teachers-strikes-oklahoma-socialism-sanders-unions , https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/west-virginia-teachers-strike-future-unions/index.html

[22] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/04/heres-how-arizona-teachers-organized-their-first-ever-statewide-strike

[23] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[24] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3732-striking-teachers-and-wildcat-politics

[25] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/04/04/oklahoma-governor-compares-striking-teachers-to-a-a-teenage-kid-that-wants-a-better-car/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c9f793c87e21 , https://www.vox.com/2018/4/16/17242812/kentucky-governor-bevin-teachers-strike-child-assault , http://time.com/5176094/west-virginia-teacher-strike/ , https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/23/arizona-teachers-walkout-governor/544535002/

The Immiseration of Labor: Capitalism, Poverty, and Inequality in Philadelphia

By Arturo Castillon

"...the more alien wealth they [the workers] produce, and… the more the productivity of their labor increases, the more does their very function as means for the valorization of capital become precarious."[1]

"...within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; …all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers..."[2]

The Theory of Immiseration

How are we to understand the contemporary economic situation of most people, who experience increasingly unstable conditions of employment and life?

This essay analyzes the growth of poverty and income inequality within the context of a developed capitalist [3] economy, using Philadelphia as a case study. Some might think that this city is an extreme example; for many years now Philadelphia has ranked the poorest of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.[4] However, the basic thesis of this essay is that immiseration is not an exception but instead a normal outgrowth of the capitalist economy.

The concept of immiseration is usually associated with Karl Marx, as he insisted that the nature of capitalist production resulted in the devaluation of labor, specifically the decline of wages relative to the total value created in the economy. For Marx, this meant that the proletarian class, [5] or working class, was fundamentally defined by precariousness, i.e. material instability, uncertainty, insecurity, and dependency. This theory stems from Marx's analysis of the changing organic composition of capitalist production and the reduced demand for labor that emerges as technology develops and labor becomes more productive. With increasingly productive machines, less labor produces more commodities at a faster rate, leading to the gradual replacement of labor by machines. Marx observed that the realities of capitalist competition necessitated this tendency towards mechanization and rising productivity. If a factory in the South restructures production to raise its productivity - allowing it to sell more commodities, at a faster rate, and at a cheaper price, while employing less labor-while a rival factory in Philadelphia does not, then after a while the factory in the South will run the factory in Philadelphia out of business. In order to protect their market from more productive competitors, therefore, capitalists must reinvest part of their capital into increasing productivity, or perish in the long run.

As capitalists competed and became more productive, Marx noted that labor became more impoverished: "The growing competition among the bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious."[6] In other words, increases in capitalist productivity were uneven in their effects-they benefited the capitalists, not the workers. As capitalism became more productive and labor produced more capital in a given amount of time, economic output increased; but at the same time, real wages stabilized and even declined, because the input of human labor stayed the same or declined relative to the output of capital.

This constellation of ideas would later be referred to by Marxists as "the immiseration thesis." However, this term is somewhat misleading since throughout his life Marx developed several theses about the absolute and relative immiseration of labor under different phases of capitalist development. Nonetheless, Marx always theorized the devaluation of labor relative to the self-valorization of capital, and in this sense, he did posit a general theory of immiseration.

An Uneven Economy

Even accounting for periodic crises and recessions, it seems that the US economy is strong and growing, locally and nationally, from the standpoint of those who rule it- the capitalist class.[7] It is still the largest national economy in the world;[8] the world's largest producer of petroleum and gas [9]; the world's largest internal market for goods and services [10]; and the world's largest trading power, [11] with roughly a third of this trade based in the export and import of international commodities, while domestic trade between regions in the US generates even more capital, accounting for roughly two-thirds of US trade.[12]

The majority of this trade is concentrated in the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US. Those ten metro areas, ordered by largest total trade volume, are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston. All the commodities that move throughout the nation, in freight trains, trucks, and shipping containers, flow through a vast transportation infrastructure made up of rail lines, roads, and ports that link these ten metropolitan areas in an extensive network of "trade corridors." New York and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Riverside, and San Francisco and San Jose are among the largest corridors within the national network.[13] These regional trading networks also provide access to distant markets that allows US capitalists to take part in global commodity chains. Still, the largest single part of capitalist value in the US comes from domestic trade.

Primarily as a result of their complementary industries in energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and mixed freight, New York and Philadelphia are the largest trading partners in the national interstate network, [14] making the New York-Philadelphia trade corridor the most valuable in the nation.[15] Because it serves as a crucial node in the national trade network, Philadelphia is home to the 7th largest metropolitan economy in the nation, [16] generating the 4th highest gross domestic product in the nation, and the 9th highest among the cities of the world.[17]

The Philadelphia metropolitan economy, which includes Camden, Chester, Norristown, and other peripheral cities and towns, continues to generate massive profits for those who own it. Still, for most people-who are not capitalists, but workers-wages are low, jobs are increasingly insecure, and poverty continues to grow.[18] Despite regional economic growth, poverty has increased more rapidly in Philadelphia than any other major city since the 1970s. However, this trend is not isolated to Philadelphia; poverty has steadily increased throughout the nation since the 1970s.[19]

During this same period which people became poorer, the national economy has continued to grow and wealth has continued to concentrate in fewer hands than ever before. After two decades of relative stability following World War II, US income inequality once again began to grow starting in the early 1970s and continued to grow despite rising business cycles in the 1980s and 1990s.[20] By 2013, the top 1 percent of households received about 20 percent of all pre-tax income, in contrast to about 10 percent from 1950 to 1980.[21] By 2017, the income of the top 20% of households in Philadelphia was up by 13% since 2007, while the income of the bottom 60% of households was below 2007 levels.[22]

While a strong national economy in the late 1990s helped drive down the number of people living in poverty for the first time in decades, this trend was short-lived. Not long after the 2000s began, the bursting of the dot-com bubble sent the nation into a recession, a regular occurrence in capitalism. Millions of people lost their jobs and incomes during the early 2000s, and poverty continued to grow even as the economy recovered by the mid-2000s. The onset of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 only accelerated this trend, and the number of people living in poverty grew even faster. Even with the end of the Great Recession, poverty continued to grow throughout the nation, and Philadelphia registered declines in typical worker wages during the first five years of the recovery. By 2010-2014, 14 million people in Philadelphia lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more-5 million more than before the Great Recession and more than twice as many as in 2000.[23]

Although poverty increased among white Americans in the post-Recession period, for Black and Latino Americans poverty rose even more sharply, locally and nationally. [24] In particular, Black Philadelphians today continue to experience record high levels of poverty [25] and low teen employment.[26] This racial disparity is the result of a longstanding pattern in which white workers, allied with capitalists (who are almost entirely white), exclude Black and Brown workers from the better-paying, more-secure jobs.

The De-Industrialization of Labor

How do we explain this disconnect between growing wealth at the top and deepening poverty at the bottom?

It's obvious in retrospect that the rise of poverty in Philadelphia and other former industrial centers is the result of a shift in the capitalist mode of production-from manufacturing industries to service industries, and from city to suburbs. During most the 19th century Philadelphia was a center of craft-based industrial production, well known for its diverse array of small and medium-sized manufacturing industries-textiles, metal products, paper, glass, furniture, shoes, hardware, etc. By 1900, manufacturing workers made up about one-half of the city's entire labor force.[27] However, manufacturing jobs began to decline in Philadelphia in the 1920s, and by the 1970s, the service industries came to eclipse manufacturing entirely. Rather than manufacturing, most people now work in the service industries-food service, retail, health service, and logistics sub-industries such as warehousing, transportation, and delivery services. This "de-industrialization" of the economy and workforce resulted in a loss of income for most workers.[28]

The de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the corresponding rise in poverty throughout the region, began earlier than most other cities in the North American Rust-Belt, shortly after the economic upturn that came with World War I (1914-1918), which resulted in growing mechanization, automation, and standardization of production on a national and global scale. In contrast, Philadelphia's manufacturing businesses for the most part continued employing the labor of highly-skilled craftsmen who worked in small and medium-sized firms, known as "workshops," which produced custom goods for niche markets. The "Workshop of the World," as Philadelphia was still known in the 1920s, could not compete with mass industrial production, for mass marketed consumption, by means of the unskilled and disposable mass assembly line workers of the factories in Northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The new system of mass industrial production signaled the end of the highly specialized manufacturing processes which characterized most of industrial Philadelphia before World War II.[29]

With the national economic downturn of 1929, major sections of the city's craft-manufacturing base began to collapse. By the 1930s, the only manufacturing businesses that remained in Philadelphia were the few that developed mass production methods-factories along the peripheries of the city in Manayunk, Germantown, Kensington, etc. These were the only manufacturing businesses in the city that could compete on a national level.

Eventually, the demand for manufacturing in Philadelphia would pick up as a result of the revival of the national economy during World War II (1939-1945), when federally-funded factories hired over 27,000 new workers.[30] The wartime economy opened new possibilities for Black workers to join the industrial workforce; while only 15,000 African Americans worked in manufacturing jobs in the city in 1940, their representation rose to 55,000 by 1943. Although this represented an increase in wages and jobs for Black workers, more than half of these jobs were in unskilled positions that offered the lowest wages.[31]

Despite a boost in production during World War II, Philadelphia's manufacturing industries began a steep decline during the peacetime transition. Industrial capitalists continued to face the challenge of superior competition, and this time the competition was increasingly global. International trade grew in the decades after the war, as European and Japanese manufacturers began to compete with US manufacturers. In this context, most factories in Philadelphia either went out of business or left the city. By 1955, fewer than 1,000 workers were employed in the city's formerly expansive textile industries.[32]

Black industrial workers hired during World War II were particularly affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs. A big factor in this process was the seniority system embodied in most union contracts, which meant that when recession, closure, or layoffs happened, those with the least seniority were the first to go. Since Black workers were usually the last hired, they were also usually the first fired.

By the early 1970s, when other major cities throughout the North and Midwest were beginning to experience de-industrialization, most of the manufacturing businesses in Philadelphia had already shut down or relocated to the suburbs, as well as to cities in the South and West of the country. The few industrial firms that remained in Philadelphia were those that invested heavily in automation and raised their standard of productivity.[33]

In the 1980s and 1990s the pattern of de-industrialization became international, as it began to hit most nations in Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the beginning of the 21th century, the Southern and Western cities of the US that once drew manufacturers from the older cities have also struggled with the loss of manufacturing jobs. After the economic crisis of 2008, the effects of de-industrialization only intensified on a global scale, especially in underdeveloped nations in the global South.[34]

Hence, the de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the concomitant rise in poverty, was mostly the result of capitalist market competition. Industrial Philadelphia was mostly composed of craft-based manufacturers that could not compete with highly-mechanized and increasingly-automated factories elsewhere. The manufacturers that kept up their profits in the face of competitors stayed in business by investing in technology that increased productivity. Some also relocated their businesses to cheaper, less-regulated labor markets. In the process, these transformations led to the devaluation and displacement of labor.

Besides the pressures of market competition, another important factor influencing de-industrialization was the militant resistance of the workers who carried out mass strikes and secured higher wages, pensions, health benefits, and better working conditions during the 1930s and 1940s. With the help of the leadership of the major industrial unions (the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations), the capitalist class responded to the workers movement by shutting down or relocating their facilities to the non-unionized South and West in the 1950s. In this way, de-industrialization undermined the power of the unionized working class, and took back the wages and benefits that the capitalists conceded to the workers in previous decades of struggle.

The Growth of Inequality

As capitalism reorganized itself, the service industries came to supersede manufacturing as the primary source of working-class employment. Today, the number of industrial jobs in Philadelphia represents only 5 percent of the total workforce of the city, while service jobs represent 40 percent of total employment, making the service industries the largest sector of the city's workforce.[35] Even within the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the region, they employ increasingly fewer workers, and those they do employ are increasingly part-time, part-year, and paid less.[36]

The social composition of the service industries is much more diverse than that of the manufacturing industries, which are highly unionized and still dominated by white men. Women make up over half of all service workers, while Black workers form a higher-than-average concentration in lower-paying service jobs. While service jobs have grown by 56 percent since the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of these jobs are part-time, part-year, require few skills, pay low wages, and offer few to no benefits. At the same time, the number of high-salary professional and managerial jobs has grown by 85 percent since the 1970s.[37] This means that de-industrialization has improved the earnings of those in the top-tier of the workforce, while most workers have seen their incomes shrink or stagnate since the 1970s.

Further exacerbating the livelihood of the urban proletariat, jobs have increasingly shifted towards the suburban peripheries of the city, after the pattern of large cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. This transformation was facilitated by the massive construction of interstate highways in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. While low-income populations in the region concentrate in Philadelphia, Camden, and a number of older urban centers, most jobs are now in the suburbs, often in areas accessible only by automobile, and distant from housing that is affordable to these workers. If city residents do manage to find a job in the suburbs, their wages are effectively lowered because of substantial traveling expenses; if they decide to move to the suburbs, wages are effectively lowered because of higher rent.[38]

The decline of manufacturing jobs was particularly devastating for Black workers, who concentrated in unskilled manufacturing jobs and in service jobs within the city, but were almost completely excluded from professional/managerial jobs and skilled trades. Due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, coupled with the suburbanization of the rapidly expanding service industries, Black workers have seen their incomes and jobs decline dramatically since the early 1970s. Although employment rates declined for both white and Black men since the 1970s, the black decline was twice that of whites. Furthermore, while there was an increase of employment for white women in Philadelphia since the 1970s, the employment rate for Black women hardly changed at all.[39] In this way, de-industrialization eroded the gains made by Black workers in the industrial sector in the decades after World War II.

The Immiseration of Labor

As I've shown, the transformation of the Philadelphia economy-from manufacturing to services, and from city to suburbs-has resulted in a deepening of poverty and inequality for most workers in this city. The question remains, why does capitalism develop itself in such a way that results in the immiseration of labor? This much is clear from the outset: nature does not produce, on the one hand, fewer and fewer rich people, and on the other hand, a growing army of workers who own nothing but their labor, which they must sell for an increasingly lower wage. The immiseration of labor results from the contradictions of what Marx called the "capitalist mode of production."

In brief, Marx argued that capitalism was distinct from all other modes of production in its unique aim: the creation of capital. Whereas other modes of production might find their purpose in producing useful things to satisfy human needs (communal production), or in producing a surplus of luxuries to satisfy a class of nobles (feudalism), capitalism, in contrast, produces the abstraction known as capital. Capital is not produced for the private consumption of its owner, the capitalist. If this were the case the aim of capitalist production wouldn't be the creation of capital but the consumption of things (or what Marx called "use-values"). Under capitalism, however, capital is not produced for use or consumption; capital functions as an end in itself-it is the starting and finishing point of production.[40]

Beginning with the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, capitalists made labor more productive by investing a greater part of capital into the instruments of production, introducing newer, more efficient, and more expensive machines. Such an accelerated development of the forces of production did not exist in any other mode of production before capitalism. Theoretically, this heightened level of productivity could raise people's standard of life while reducing the amount of time that they had labor for others. However, Marx was quick to point out that "[capitalist] production is only production for capital and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers."[41] Under capitalism, labor is only an instrument for the valorization of capital, i.e. capital accumulation, and nothing else. Instead of serving the needs of society as a whole, capitalist production serves the specific needs of capital accumulation, which requires the devaluing of labor in order for capital to expand. The immiseration of labor, therefore, is not an aberration, but a fundamental feature of the capitalist mode of production.[42] Thus, Marx concluded: "On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labor, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labor, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labor-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital."[43] This is a fundamental contradiction of capitalist development: as capitalism becomes more productive, and the means of production become more extensive and technically more efficient, the labor that works up those means of production becomes increasingly devalued and unnecessary.

According to Marx, the drive to accumulate capital at the expense of labor is not based on greed or any other negative psychological trait on the part of the capitalist, but rather survival - in other words, it is in the system's nature to operate this way. If a capitalist does not accumulate capital, if profits are not continually transformed into a further increment of value, then that capitalist is unable to keep up with competitors and eventually goes out of business.[44] This is what Marx refers to as the coercive law of capitalist competition. Workers lose their jobs and their incomes not because of the ill will of particular capitalists, but because the sole aim of capitalism is the valorization of capital, which depends on the maximum extraction of value from labor. In the face of obstacles like market competition and (to a lesser degree) labor struggles, capitalists perpetuate the accumulation of capital by reducing jobs/wages/hours, mechanizing and automating production, and relocating to cheaper, less regulated labor markets.

Marx provided us with the analytical tools for thinking about this internal contradiction of capitalist development-the contradiction between the declining value of labor and rising surplus value, i.e. the basis of capital formation. As capitalist production becomes more productive, the working class can only become more precarious, since the increasing accumulation of capital requires an increasing devaluation of labor. This contradiction is inherent to capitalism-it arises independently of the level of class struggle, fluctuations in wages, state interventions in the economy, or economic crises. At the same time, the relative intensity of the immiseration of labor can rise or drop with the limits set by the accumulation process, depending on the degree of control that workers as a class exert over the economy and the state. At different times in history workers have asserted their interests over and against the drive for capital accumulation, and as a result, have been able to gain a larger share of the total value that their labor produces. Still, for Marx, even if wages and standards of living rise for a time, this does not end the immiseration of labor. That would require the end of capitalism.

Implications for the Future

The story of the immiseration of labor in Philadelphia is particular, but not exceptional; it can serve as the basis for general observations on the dynamics of labor-capital relations within a developed capitalist economy. Capitalists in Philadelphia adapted to the challenges of market competition and labor struggle in much the same way that capitalists did in most mid to large-sized manufacturing centers-by shutting down, relocating, and/or automating production. Over time, the bulk of jobs in most US cities shifted to the services sector and to the suburbs. In every city that these changes took place the results where the same: the decline of wages and regular employment for the urban poor.

After having analyzed the antagonistic nature of capitalist production, we can see that the immiseration of labor is the natural result of capitalist development. Therefore, there is no prospect for a return to a so-called "golden-age" of capitalism characterized by moderate wages, benefits, and full-time employment. The easing of income inequality in the developed nations immediately after World War II was an exception, not the rule, in the history of capitalism. Outside of this brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, capitalism has not delivered on its promise of upward class mobility for most workers, and this promise can only continue to fade as capitalism continues to develop.

Today, most people find themselves within the throes of a drawn-out process of immiseration that shows no signs of reversing itself. Incomes have declined since the 1970s to allow for a greater acceleration of capital formation and accumulation. Even as total economic output continues to increase, and even as the job market continues to grow, working class incomes continue to decline, since most jobs are now in the unskilled, unprotected, low-wage service industries. Under these circumstances, the instability that a developed capitalist system subjects the employment and working conditions of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs.[45] The production process reaches a point of no return, continually reproducing a permanently marginalized mass of low-paid laborers with no hope of a professional career.

Rather than functioning as a site for upward mobility and income growth, the late capitalist megalopolis increasingly functions as a warehouse for low-wage service workers. Over the past fifty years, these structural trends have steadily asserted themselves on global level, especially in the global South.[46] As Mike Davis painstakingly details in his devastating book, Planet of Slums, poverty and occupational marginality are especially prevalent in the cities of underdeveloped nations, where urban existence is increasingly disconnected from mass employment. With unprecedented barriers to large-scale emigration to developed nations, slum populations continue to grow at an unprecedented rate in the global South. For Davis, this is the real crisis of world capitalism: the crisis of the reproduction of labor and the inability of capitalism to stabilize (yet alone improve) the livelihood of the proletariat.

The growing division of the workforce into 1) a small, privileged core of professionals and managers that can expect continuous, high-paying employment, and 2) a large periphery of precarious "floaters," to which capitalists provide little more than a low wage, for as long or as short a time as capitalists require these workers-this division will only widen as capitalism continues to develop. To the extent that most workers have access to increasingly irregular employment and smaller wages, the trend toward racial and class inequalities will persist, globally and locally. Black workers will continue to be the "last hired, first fired." White workers will continue to act as labor aristocracy, allying themselves with capitalists to monopolize the professional and managerial jobs, while relegating workers of color-especially Black workers-to the worst paying, least secure, lowest status jobs.

The housing market will continue to reflect the uneven distribution of income and jobs. The white workers who hold the managerial and professional jobs will continue to predominate in the suburbs, or in some comfortable, tree-lined areas of the city like Chestnut Hill, and in the gentrifying neighborhoods close to center city. In contrast, low-income workers will remain in the vast stretches of row houses in Philadelphia and Camden and in the older suburbs like Chester or Norristown.

The Struggle for a Classless Society

Capital seeks to gain the greatest return on its investment in labor and means of production. In pursuing this end, capital has reorganized the production process and with it the realities of working-class existence. This raises strategic questions from the standpoint of class struggle: what forms of struggle are developing today that point to a different future? If industrial production created a particular conception of class struggle, what do the service industries mean for the future of class struggle? What does working class power look like in the context of a service economy?

These are complex questions that must be explored via further research of the class composition and dynamics of class struggle in specific regions. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of this essay, which at the most serves as the groundwork for such an investigation. Still, on a general level, this research makes this much clear: as long as capitalism continues as the dominant state of affairs, the contradiction between capital and labor can only become more pronounced. Therefore, it is not enough to reform capitalism or morally condemn capitalists-we must develop a plan to overthrow the structure of capitalism in its entirety.

Of course, the design and implementation of such a plan would take different forms depending on the conditions of working class existence in different regions. Nonetheless, at its core, this plan must entail the abolition of private property in the mode of production and the organization of a system of production that is no longer carried out with the goal of capital accumulation, but instead in a way that is systematically regulated by society-not the capitalists, not the market, not the state, but society as a whole. The members of such a society would have to reorganize the production process in such a way that frees their labor from the constraints of capital-an external, independent force standing above society.

However, given the contemporary circumstances of late capitalism, it is unclear whether workplace-centered struggle is the primary organizational form for building this social project. Even though capital continues to accumulate in industrial production, employment has shifted from the sphere of direct commodity production (agriculture, manufacturing) to the sphere of circulation (services). In such an economy, workplace struggles pose little to no threat to capitalism. Even if workers took over every McDonalds or Walmart, the economy would continue to operate in highly automated essential sectors like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and logistics. If a proletarian revolution were to occur in such a context, the communization of production would not entail proletarian control of workplaces-as conceived by the traditional approach to labor struggle-so much as proletarian expropriation and elimination of workplaces, most of which are nonessential (i.e. most of the services industries) and serve no useful purpose outside of the context of capital accumulation.

The critical period in US mass industrial relations, which began about a century ago and saw a rapid growth in the power of industrial workers' unions in the 1930s and 1940s, was followed by capitalist counter-organization and restructuring. By the early 1980s it was clear that the New Deal order of relatively strong labor unions was over in the US. Today, the material basis for workplace oriented struggles has fallen apart, shattered by capitalist automation, deindustrialization, and decentralization.

Despite these difficulties, there is still no logical argument for why a classless society is impossible. Even when such a society can only be achieved with difficulty and struggle-in light of rising poverty and racial inequality; in light of constant imperialist wars; in light of the ecological destruction brought about by capitalism-in light of all that, there are still good reasons to fight for a world beyond capitalism, where production is carried out by an association of free people who collectively regulate their own labor. To be victorious, however, we must build organizations that correspond to the present circumstances, instead of simply inheriting the idealized and ready-made organizational forms of the past.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 793.

[2] Marx, Capital, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 798.

[3] "Capitalism" is the dominant mode of production in the world. It is defined primarily by the production, circulation, and accumulation of capital. "Capitalists" own the means of producing capital.

[4] Alfred Lubrano, "Throughout the country, incomes are rising. In Philly, their falling," http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/census-data-poverty-income-philadelphia-suburbs-20180913.html

[5] The "proletariat," or "working class," is the largest class in capitalist society. "Proletariats" do not own any means of production ( of their own and therefore must sell their labor-power (their ability to create capital) to those who own means of production (capitalists), in exchange for a wage which is a only fraction of the capitalist value they produce.

[6] Engels, Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 89.

[7] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, "U.S. Economy at a Glance," https://www.bea.gov/news/glance

[8] "Report for Selected Country Groups and Subjects (PPP valuation of country GDP)" . IMF. Retrieved 29 December 2017. Digital History; Steven Mintz. "Digital History" . Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved April 21, 2012.

[9] "United States remains the world's top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons" . EIA.

[10] "Trade recovery expected in 2017 and 2018, amid policy uncertainty" . Geneva, Switzerland: World Trade Organization. 12 April 2017. Retrieved 2017-06-22.

[11] Katsuhiko Hara and Issaku Harada (staff writers) (13 April 2017). "US overtook China as top trading nation in 2016" . Tokyo: Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved 2017-06-22. Office of the United States Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, "Trade and Economy," https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/economy-trade

[12] For overall trade patterns, see: Adie Tomer, Robert Puentes, and Joseph Kane, "Metro-to-Metro: Global and Domestic Goods Trade in Metropolitan America" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013). For export statistics, see: Brad McDearman, Ryan Donahue, and Nick Marchio, "Export Nation 2013: U.S. Growth Post Recession" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013).

[13] "Trade corridors" are streams of commodities that flow within and through spaces in regular geographic patterns.

[14] Source: Brookings analysis of EDR data.

[15] Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane, "Mapping Freight: The Highly Concentrated Nature of Goods Trade in the United States." Global Cities Initiative. A JOINT PROJECT OF BROOKINGS AND JPMORGAN CHASE. November, 2014. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Srvy_GCIFreightNetworks_Oct24.pdf

[16] "Gross Metropolitan Product" . U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. September 29, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.

[17] "Global city GDP rankings 2008-2025" . Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Archived from the original on May 31, 2013. Retrieved November 20,2009.

[18] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[19] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," The PEW Charitable Trusts, November 2017, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[20] "US Census Bureau. (2001). Historical Income Tables - Income Equality" . Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208142023/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ie6.html

"Shaprio, E. (October 17, 2005). New IRS Data Show Income Inequality Is Again of The Rise. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities" . Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://www.cbpp.org/research/new-irs-data-show-income-inequality-is-again-on-the-rise

[21] Wiseman, Paul (September 10, 2013). "Richest 1 percent earn biggest share since '20s" . AP News . Retrieved September 10, 2013. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130910/DA8NN7U02.html

John Cassidy (November 18, 2013). "American Inequality in Six Charts" . The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

[22] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[23] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, March 2016 https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[24] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[25] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[26] Brookings, "Employment and disconnection among teens and young adults: the role of place, race, and education." https://www.brookings.edu/research/employment-and-disconnection-among-teens-and-young-adults-the-role-of-place-race-and-education/#V0G0

[27] The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport, 1980), 141-168.

[28] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, (Temple University Press, 2008) . The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places , (UBC Press, 2017).

[29] Workshop of the World, "Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview,"

http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/overview/overview.html

[30] John Bauman, Public Housing: The Dreadful Sage of a Durable Policy, 57.

[31] Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, 99-107, 121-122, 125-133.

[32] Gladys Palmer, Philadelphia's Workers in a Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), page 37.

[33] Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City, (Temple University Press, 1991).

[34] David Koistinen, Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England (University Press of Florida; 2013)

[35] Larry Eichel and Octavia Howell, "A Key Driver of Poverty in Philadelphia? The Changing Nature of Work," January 2018, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/analysis/2018/01/08/a-key-driver-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-the-changing-nature-of-work

[36] Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/#sthash.FIcRzwW3.dpuf

[37] Adams, Bartelt, Elesh, Goldstein,Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, 56.

[38] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region , 37.

[39] Philadelphia , "Economic Erosion," pages 55-56.

[40] Capital , 769.

[41] Capital , vol 3: 358.

[42] Capital , "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 772-773.

[43] Capital , 798.

[44] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 582.

[45] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 580-82.

[46] "Inequality on the Rise?: An Assessment of Current Available Data on Income Inequality, at Global, International, and National Levels," Servio Vieira, December 2012, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_papers/bp_wess2013_svieira1.pdf

West Virginia's Ongoing, Anti-Capitalist Struggle

By Michael Mochaidean

One year ago, teachers and school service personnel in West Virginia rocked the nation with their historic nine-day statewide walkout. The movement was sparked in part due to declining state revenue for state employees' insurance plan - PEIA - and a persistent lack of wage growth compared to contiguous states. In the wake of the Mountain State's first statewide walkout in twenty-eight years, a rupture began to emerge between education workers and their states. Soon thereafter, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona witnessed their own statewide actions, ranging from a few days of actions to weeklong walkouts.

State legislatures were forced to compromise by these strike actions. In Oklahoma, teachers won an additional $6,000 raise and an increase in school funding by over one hundred million dollars. In Arizona, teachers won a twenty percent raise and increase in support staff salaries to entice teacher retention. West Virginia's victory was smaller by comparison, but no less impactful. There, state workers won a five percent pay raise (equivalent to $2,000 for teachers), a one-year hiatus on PEIA premium increases, and the promise of a PEIA Taskforce whose sole purpose was to find a long-term revenue source for the state's ballooning health care costs. The year had ended with an empowered, engaged, and militant rank-and-file, who were at the forefront of these battles.

The present legislative session in West Virginia is reminiscent, in many ways, of last year's militant struggle. Before the session had even begun, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael had touted Senator Patricia Rucker's appointment to the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee. Senator Rucker, a bourgeois reactionary Venezuelan who has spoken damningly about the Bolivarian Revolution, ended 2018 with an attack on socialism in her op-ed, "Socialist-style policies won't grow WV." Senator Rucker, who moved to West Virginia only a decade prior, founded a local Tea Party chapter in 2009 whose sole purpose it was to recruit "liberty-minded" candidates to run for office. Rucker even claimed that she and her family had moved to West Virginia "as refugees from socialist Montgomery County [Maryland]," and thus her desire to implement right-wing libertarian fringe elements into the state's political discourse could be better accomplished in more conservative-leaning West Virginia.

Yet despite her consistent redbaiting, which became an all too common feature during last year's legislative session, Senator Rucker's most troubling pieces of her background are her ties to the far-right in both the religious and education realms. Rucker is a self-described member of the Traditionalist Roman Catholic strand of Catholicism, a right-wing segment of the Roman Catholic Church that believes Vatican II was an illegitimate liberal reform effort. Rucker is also a homeschool advocate who has no experience teaching in public schools. Though Rucker had initially claimed to be a public-school teacher, a freedom of information request with the Maryland State Department of Education found that Rucker never held a teaching certificate with the state board of education, but was only a substitute teacher between 1993 and 2002, before she began homeschooling her children full-time.

In conjunction with her role in the reactionary right's religious and education fields, Rucker is also one of a handful of West Virginia legislators affiliated with ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a front group for corporate lobbyists and state legislators who help funnel resources from large corporate donors into crafting legislation beneficial to the ruling elite. Corporate backers of ALEC help to draft "model" bills that are then used by ALEC-sponsored legislators in a hastily-fashioned copy-and-paste procedure, whereby tax breaks and deregulation maneuvers are inserted into legislation on a state by state basis. Ninety-eight percent of ALEC's revenue, according to ALEC Exposed, comes from "sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations." Some of the largest donors to ALEC include the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, all backed by some of the wealthiest Americans - the Koch, Coors, and Scaife families.

Rucker was highlighted as ALEC's "State Legislator of the Week" last year as a model for right-wing libertarian deregulation and privatization efforts in state legislatures. Her down-home charm as a candidate, running for "limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom" obscures her larger role as an austerity-minded politician whose proudest achievement at the time was the repeal of Common Core. The ability to receive taxpayer funds to provide religious indoctrination - either at home or in private school settings - appears to be one of Rucker's larger goals now as Chair of the Senate Education Committee. Intersecting her relationship to ALEC with the reactionary religious right makes it evident that Rucker's initial goal to help modernize West Virginia's education system is a ruse, obfuscated by her larger desire to implement neo-liberal "reforms" within the state's public education system.

Once this legislative session began, Rucker's Senate Education Committee wasted no time in pushing their privatization, austerity-ridden omnibus bill - SB 451.

The omnibus bill would impact education in the following ways:

- Unlimited charter school development throughout the state.

- The creation of educational savings accounts (ESA's) that provide families with a percent of district funds should they choose not to send their children to public schools.

- Payroll protection clauses, which force unions to individually sign up members rather than having members sign up and have their paychecks automatically deduct their dues.

- Eliminate seniority as a factor in transfers and layoffs when consolidations occur, potentially eliminating higher scale workers in favor of lower scale state employees.

- Increase student cap sizes in elementary schools.

The bill itself passed quickly through the Education Committee - spending less than a week in committee - before it was debated for only two hours, passing in the State Senate on an 18-16 vote. Senator Mitch Carmichael stated at the time that, "It's a historic, great day for the state of West Virginia," at a press conference soon after. "We are so thrilled about the vote today and the aspect of finally, comprehensively, reforming the education system in West Virginia." Senator Rucker likewise claimed that she and her committee were "determined to do the right thing no matter the political pressure."

Education workers, however, were prepared for the worst retaliation from the Senate in advance. On the first day of the legislative session, roughly one month prior to SB 451's passage, hours before Governor Jim Justice held his State of the State address, teachers in twenty counties held walk-ins to remind their fellow workers, parents, and community members what it was they were fighting for. The theme of the walk-ins was a need for mental health and community support for children most impacted by the twin factors of neo-liberal capitalism and the opioid crisis.

To give some perspective on the relative crisis schools are facing, West Virginia:

- Ranks forty-sixth for child poverty, and last for child poverty for children under the age of six.

- Has over one-third of children being raised by their grandparents, which ranks it second in the nation for this. Grandfamilies, as they are called, make on average $20,000 less than the average household in the state.

- Is operating at sixty-six percent efficiency for school counselor to student ratio, and at twenty-three percent efficiency for school psychologist to student ratio.

- Has more than one-in-four children experiencing an adverse childhood experience (trauma leading to depression, violence, substance abuse).

The educator and activist Bob Peterson describes this brand of unionism social justice unionism in that the union represents the interests of the community in conjunction with the material interests of the workers themselves. It is little wonder that this was the theme, given that the walk-ins were organized by the newly-formed West Virginia United caucus, whose five core principles include social justice unionism. An affiliate of UCORE (United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators), West Virginia United began in the wake of last year's statewide walkouts. The caucus is a combination of members from the state's three primary education unions - West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association (WVSSPA). In a video released back in September that announced the caucus' formation, steering committee member Jay O'Neal stated that, "We need a caucus, because we saw what happened when teachers and service personnel came together, stood together, and said, 'Enough is enough.' We know that our power lies in us; it's not in the politicians down at the capital."

Worker self-management of unions with respect to bargaining and actions is a component of what the famous Wobbly historian and organizer Staughton Lynd calls solidarity unionism. Solidarity unionism, in its broadest form, is a concept in union organizing that recognizes that the individual union member knows best their conditions and their contractual obligations. In lieu of relying on business unionism - lobbying and mediation to gain power - solidarity unionism utilizes direct action to mediate disputes between members and management. Union representatives become less impactful in organizing efforts or disputes, as workers themselves take on the task of building their union at the local level. In addition to social justice unionism described above, solidarity unionism is also one of United's five key principles.

Already, West Virginia United has begun the work of constructing a left-libertarian dual power institution that can challenge both their own business unions and the reactionary right. Members engage in online-on-the-ground campaigns that work to build power across the state within online spaces that are then transformed into on-the-ground efforts. On the Public Employees United page, which was used last year during the nine-day walkout for organizing efforts, over 20,000 public employees engage with one another across the state to educate themselves on this legislation, agitate their co-workers against it, share stories of triumph and anger, and organize as a larger collective. West Virginia United is uniquely poised to capture and redirect this anger towards the larger struggle against austerity, given that their model of organizing relies on worker self-management in both a right-to-work state and in a state where public employees do not have the ability to collectively bargain. The primary education unions in West Virginia act more so as business representatives for teachers, assisting them with insurance, certification, and classification issues. Both WVEA and AFT lobby the legislature to push for laws that benefit members while holding electoral campaigns through their PAC's to provide resources that help elect likeminded candidates. The disconnect between business unionism and the militancy West Virginia has sparked nationwide last year, however, means that the tactics of solidarity unionism and social justice unionism must be central in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism.

The battle between the austerity-minded education reformers and the militant education workers will continue regardless of what happens to SB 451. As of the writing of this article, SB 451 is being debated in the House of Delegates, and its longevity is uncertain. Whatever may come of this lone bill, it is clear that the fight West Virginians are taking on once again is one in opposition to the rampant capitalism we have witnessed since privatization of public education began a little over two decades ago. The victories of the recent UTLA strike provide hope to many in the Mountain State that unions, driven by a desire to protect public services and in direct confrontation with neo-liberal capitalism, can win the day, but we cannot concede an inch to privatizers in the meantime. To open the floodgates would be disastrous to far too many engaged in this struggle. Should West Virginia strike again, it will be because the working-class educators of this state have developed a burgeoning class-consciousness that was lit last year, and is now carried on in the ranks of its militant citizens.

Michael Mochaidean is an organizer and member the West Virginia IWW and WVEA. He is currently co-authoring a book detailing the 2018 education walkouts, their triumphs and limitations one year later.

From Cruze to Cruise: False Consciousness and Dialectical Conflict in the GM Paradigm Shift

By Werner Lange

On Monday, November 26, General Motors publicly announced its decision to shut down all production at five major plants in 2019, including the sprawling Lordstown Assembly Plant in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, home of the Cruze model, and shift major investment to mass production of all-electric autonomous vehicles through its Cruise subsidiary, headquartered in California's Silicon Valley. This grand paradigm shift from traditional cars to autonomous ones marks a major change in GM operations, ones which will leave abandoned communities economically devastated and thousands of terminated workers financially paralyzed, while simultaneously paving a path toward zero-emission cars. Yet the resultant communal and private havoc imposed upon victimized communities will likely not lead, as it should, to a workers' revolt and political uprising; at least not in northeast Ohio. That disappointing but realistic projection is based upon the potency of widespread false consciousness among the masses, the seductive temptation of subscribing to false hopes, and the emergence of a new dialectical conflict uniting labor and management in an existential struggle against climate change.

November 26 marked the second Black Monday brutally imposed upon the Mahoning Valley located in the heart of de-industrialized America. The first one occurred in September 1977 when steel corporations precipitously closed several major plants in Youngstown, a catastrophic economic blow from which this once vibrant, but now largely impoverished, city has never substantially recovered. A similar fate of an accelerated decline now awaits Lordstown and surrounding communities like Newton Falls, my hometown for the past 30 years. During that time, despite sporadic sparks to the contrary, this part of America's broad Rust Belt has gotten collectively more rusted, but nevertheless reliably remained a Democratic stronghold - until 2016. The mass frustration of hard-pressed communities and working families stuck seemingly forever in economic stagnancy spilled over into a passionate desire for qualitative change during the last presidential election. Only one major-party candidate appeared in substance and style to offer qualitative change, whereas the other candidate, unlike her progressive opponent in the primary, painfully projected business as usual. After voting overwhelming by 23 points for Barack Obama in 2012, voters in Trumbull County, home to the Lordstown plant, gave a 6-point victory margin to Donald Trump in 2016. Revealingly, the only other Republican presidential candidate who won Trumbull County since 1960 was Richard Nixon in 1972. Masters of deceit have been able to occasionally tap into pervasive false consciousness within this largely working-class community, but never with the ferocity of the most recent presidential election. This, of course, comes as no surprise to progressive social thinkers familiar with the roots and consequences of false consciousness among labor and working-class communities.

The ability to successfully colonize the mind of the oppressed with the carefully construed values and deceitfully manipulated images of the oppressor characterizes all tyrannies to some extent. The cultural substrate for this common success of mass deception is based upon the objective reality that the ruling ideas of any stable society are the ideas of the rulers. Those who dominate a society economically also do so ideologically. It is their agents of socialization which substantively shape the mindset of the new generations, and it is their institutions which seek to sustain that self-defeating mindset throughout adulthood. Rebels are demonized, deviants dismissed, conformists applauded, and out-groups scapegoated. Fascists, in particular, are adept at creating and manipulating false consciousness and suppressing class consciousness. The very name of Hitler's fascist party, NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), for example, would have a bitterly frustrated and justifiably angry German citizen think the party promotes socialism and embraces the interests of the working class. Instead it routinely executed socialists (along with communists and many others), turned masses of workers into industrial slaves, and channeled mass frustration into displaced aggression against the vulnerable and marginalized Other. This repressive pattern is largely repeated in Trump's America with his regime's unbridled attacks upon immigrants and journalists, constant invocation of big lies, demonization of liberals, and conversion of the Republican Party, in substance, into what Noam Chomsky recently called "the most dangerous organization in human history." None of this would have been possible if class consciousness (instead of false consciousness) guided the behavior of America's working-class masses. In fact, the antithesis of the Trump regime would now be in power if the working class-in-itself would transform into a working class-for-itself, a work still in progress.

If false consciousness propelled the rise of the Trump regime and aided the fall of GM Lordstown, then false hope is designed to keep victimized workers and communities passive. The emergent false hope is not identical to the false promises made by Trump in his 2017 visit here, claiming the lost jobs were all coming back and "we're going to fill those factories back up." Everyone, except the hopelessly deluded, now knows that to be an outright lie. More pernicious is the emergent, projected hope for a new fossil-fueled product to be allocated to the soon-to-be-idled GM Lordstown plant sometime in late 2019. "Future products will be allocated to fewer plants next year," stated GM's CEO in officially designating the five targeted GM plants as "unallocated," but leaving the door theoretically open for one of the coming "five vehicle architectures" to resurrect perhaps one of these comatose plants back to full life, thus setting up a bitter competition in 2019 among the impacted communities to win this ephemeral prize. In anticipation of this divisive competition, the regional Chamber of Commerce launched its "Drive It Home" campaign, which, according to its website, is a "coalition of local businesses, community, religious leaders, consumers, and workers, as well as their families, coming together to urge GM to support growing their investment at the Lordstown Complex"… and to "create a positive environment and build good relations with local management." This is in stark contrast to the "labor-management wars of the late 60s and early 70s," as one current local UAW leader castigated the strikes, revolts, and progressive activism at Lordstown two generations ago.

Yet that is precisely the type of protest and activism now needed to avoid community devastation. After all, the dialectical conflict inherent to capitalist management-labor relations has lost none of its validity, despite loss of manifested vitality. Maximizing private profit inevitably translates into minimizing community needs; and expanding labor-created surplus value invariably comes at the expense of labor's necessary value. The objective interests of private capital and labor are not identical in the old industrial setting, regardless of projections to the contrary. To create a community-wide "positive environment" in begging GM for a new allocation is tantamount to suppression of any public criticism of the utter corporate greed driving its "vehicle portfolio optimization," as GM characterizes its termination of several models, including the Cruze. Silence in the face of this economic tyranny is the voice of complicity. On its knees begging for a second chance is not the proper posture of organized labor; but rather, it is firmly standing upright and fearlessly speaking truth to power and forcefully demanding justice. For starters, that demand entails full repayment of the $50-billion loan given GM in corporate welfare a decade ago - an outstanding bill of some $10 billion is still owed taxpayers. Better yet would be implementation of corporate alimony, a mandate requiring corporations to justly compensate communities they abandon after benefitting from decades of enrichment there. Yet, to date, not even a murmur along these lines; just a call from community leaders to be hopeful and quietly wait and pray for a miracle. A recipe for disaster.

However, beyond the viability of the labor-management dialectic, there is another dynamic at work in this transition from traditional cars to electric cars which deserves greater attention and analysis. We live in perilous times of grave existential threats to humanity from the growing challenge and increasingly devastating crisis of man-made climate change. The science on climate change is abundantly clear. Unless radical changes are globally and timely implemented to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep them exceedingly low, the very future of humanity and other life forms is at risk. This grave environmental crisis creates a new dialectic, one which supersedes and transcends the traditional labor-management one. Required in this dangerously new context is a paradigm shift of consciousness from conflicting class consciousness to harmonious covenantal mindsets within both labor and management and beyond, a unified humanity confronting a common existential threat. The thesis/affirmation of humanity and other life forms in covenantal union are contradicted by the antithesis/negation of climate change producers and deniers. Unlike the economic and particular labor-management dialectic, this new one is an existential and universal one. Whereas the former arrives at a synthesis of higher quality of life through class consciousness converting an objective class-in-itself to a subjective active class-for-itself, the current existential conflict encompasses all humanity - all classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures - on one side of this colossal dialectical conflict and climate changers on the other. Conflicting class relations in this new context are superseded by complementary covenantal relations, ones that unite labor and management as well as all humanity facing a common foe in climate change. That objective covenant-in-itself must be transformed into an active covenant-for-itself if the current existential crisis is to be overcome.

In that regard, General Motors is to be applauded for its explicit goal of zero emissions through its all-electric autonomous Cruise operations which are slated to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019. By 2023, GM intends to have at least 20 all-electric models on the market globally in paving the way toward a zero-emission future in the automobile industry. In direct contradiction to a zero-emission future, on the other hand, are potent political and economic forces bonded to fossil fuel extraction and consumption, like the Trump regime and mother earth frackers who foolishly promote the existential threat of climate change and thereby constitute the negation of this new dialectic. America's ruling class is clearly split on this question of energy options, and therein lies real hope for needed qualitative change. While the majority still favors and actively fosters fossil-fuel industries, a growing minority within corporate America, as evidenced by GM's embrace of a zero-emission future, has become enlightened to the urgent need for clean energy everywhere. That enlightenment must expand at all levels of our deeply divided society to ensure sheer survival, let alone safety and security. If and when this new global consciousness based on covenantal relations grips the mind of the masses along with the corporate and political power elite, climate change and global warming will not only be reduced; these existential threats will be negated altogether, and a new chapter in human history will open. The alternative is not only unacceptable, it is unthinkable.

Political Automatons and the Politics of Automation

By Bryant William Sculos

What's in a Meme?

While it would be easy to exaggerate the significance of any meme shared on social media, it is widely acknowledged that memes are inherently limited and simplistic. But their value in conveying important political messages is also clear-especially through sarcasm and irony. One need only spend a few seconds on social media to see the creative energy that people put into making and sharing these often-captioned images across various digital platforms. With that said, I came across this meme below (shared in a number of Facebook groups), and it seems like a useful starting point for a discussion about its central claims regarding political-economic change and the overall goals of such change. The meme's central argument (insofar as we can say a meme has an argument) is that consumers should not use the increasingly prevalent self-checkout lines at grocery stores, because the more they are used the fewer people the company will hire to work as cashiers and baggers. If consumers make the ostensibly simple choice to not use these lines and instead use the lines with human cashiers, grocery stores will not only stop installing these automated checkout lines and will even remove the ones they have already put in place-hiring more cashiers to work the in-person lanes that would be needed to service the customers once the automated systems are replaced.

Given the dire life circumstances that unemployment can cause, especially for previously underemployed, low-wage workers, the goal of struggling for more jobs for people is a noble one. However, this essay will show how that goal, as articulated in the context of a grocery store-and in society more broadly-is misguided, rooted in problematic assumptions about capitalism and transformational change, and is ultimately ineffective and an inefficient use of political energy. The core misunderstandings that produce the argument of this meme are two-fold: 1. individual consumer choices are an effective means of resisting the devastating consequences of capitalism (e.g., automation-induced unemployment), and 2. That resisting automation is productive goal.

There is an automated character to these modes of thinking, a kind of superficial intuitiveness that if we (each as individuals) simply behave differently the forces of the market will adjust to the implications of those choices in aggregate-as if neither the forces of the market (of capitalism) were to blame nor the individual choices difficult to make. Politics is not primarily about our individual daily choices. In fact, the least positive political thing you can do is act on your own. This is the liberal-influenced ideology, ensconced in capitalistic assumptions about society and human nature, that "individual choices matter"-and matter more than collective choices. In fact, liberalism doesn't even have the theoretical architecture to think through the concept of collective choices. Neither does capitalism. Aggregating individuals is all they can do. Socialist political praxis-rooted in democratic, egalitarian solidarity- on the other hand, knows better.

Your Choice Doesn't Matter, But Ours Do

In the 1960s, we saw a number of direct-action campaigns utilizing tactics like sit-ins and occupations to fight against segregation, the Vietnam War, and even capitalism itself. While these actions were taken by consumers of a certain kind, it was not primarily as consumers that these actions were conducted. Thinking about student protests specifically, students are often-and increasingly-treated as consumers within more contemporary neoliberal capitalism, but it is worth remembering that this conception of the student-as-customer is relatively new. Despite historically (and too often still being) bastions of elitism, too often excluding the poor and people of color, college campuses in the 60s were communities of radical dissent, often engaging positively with local communities, with people coming together to enhance their political power through collective action as affected (and effected) human beings with moral and practical interest in challenging violence, exploitation, oppression, and antidemocratic politics. They were not exercising political power rooted in "consumer choice."

We see similar, seemingly automatic, consumer-choice arguments made by left-liberal environmentalists. We are encouraged to recycle, to "shop Green," to use reusable bags, to use energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances. But in a world where something like 100 companies account for approximately 75% of carbon emissions and pollution more broadly, I can assure you that what kind of lightbulb you use could not matter less. You could burn all of your recycling daily in a tire pit using 1950s hairspray as an accelerant and it wouldn't matter in the slightest compared to the ecological footprint of just the US military (the single greatest ecologically-criminal entity in human history). We need collective, solidaristic, organized solutions on a massive scale to make a dent in the ecological damage wrought by centuries of extractive capitalism. In other words, fuck your lightbulbs. The planet's biosphere is dying. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to think outside of our individual consumer choices. Choose organized resistance, not Starbucks' Ethos Water.

Marches, protests, occupations, organizational meetings, public talks and discussions, sit-ins, and strikes, on the other hand, are all forms of collective political action that tend to speak better to the depth of the systemic forces that need to be resisted and superseded. They tend to be more effective at rejecting the forces of exploitation and oppression that drive our societies in the contemporary period, because they do not reinforce the underlying logic of automated consumerism produced through manipulative marketing and advertising, themselves driven by the profit-motive. It is not the choice of product on which you spend your almighty dollars that expresses your political power, but instead it is your capacity to act in concert with others. One of these conceptions of politics challenges the status quo-but the other conception is the status quo.

Thinking back to the meme that started this piece, the implied activism here is undergirded by a false alternative: I can either use the self-checkout line or use the human-clerk line. That is all. What should I do? What is the best political decision? First, it is useful to accept the fact that despite this decision taking place within a highly politicized context, in general, this decision is politically irrelevant. The structures involved are deeply political. We may feel that the appearance of our decision is reflective of a certain perceived set of political commitments-but compared to the political character of the political-economic structures that shape the circumstances where we feel like there might be important political consequences of one choice or another-or simply the fact that we have those two choices-the actual choice we make is functionally irrelevant. In aggregate, which is what I take this meme to be expressing, if customers stopped using the self-checkout lines, supermarkets would indeed stop expanding their use; they may even remove some of the ones they've already installed and hire more human cashiers, but given the enormity of the systemic evils we face, we should be thinking much bigger, broader, and deeper about our politics.

Given the degree of forces levelled against us, the severity of the problems we face, and the time and effort and general difficulty of collective action and organizing, it is too easy to think well at least I'm doing something. The problem is, after a long day or week or month or year of alienating labor, raising children, filling out memos, whatever wears you out, it is easy forat least I'm doing my part to become, I'll try again tomorrow. Our political engagement, our reflective capacities are increasingly automated. Like the automated checkout lines, we are (re)produced as (de)politicized subjects with little sense of any activity other than what we've been programmed-conditioned over years and years-to think. My individual choices matter. And, in fairness, to some degree they absolutely do, but some choices matter more than others.

Which choice matters more here: the decision as to which checkout line I should use, or the decision to get involved in a political organization or local social movement? Again, there is a false alternative here. You can do both, but if you're only going to do one, it should be clear that because of the depth of the structures of exploitation and oppression most people face daily, the latter choice-and the content of that choice-is the choice that really matters. It is a choice that, if made in the affirmative (and the choice is made to get involved in an organization that is socialist, anti-imperialist, pro-worker, anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc.), the choice automatically challenges the programmed automated political (un)thinking that is predominant in our society. Building solidarity in collective struggles with others directly challenges the automated, one dimensional, pathological (anti)politics of individualized consumer choice-oriented slacktivism.

With that criticism laid out, it is worth noting that collective consumer-side actions can be effective in short-term, limited circumstances. They can be a productive dimension of a broader strategy which utilizes a variety of tactics. One of the most historically significant examples of this is the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While it was certainly an exceptional example of collective consumer action rooted not in the ideology of individual choices. A boycott is not an individual act, so, if we give the meme a more charitable reading, we could interpret it as a call for collective action against self-checkout lines. Again, that isn't made clear in the meme explicitly, but it still leaves open the broader question of the limitations of consumer actions, even when done collectively, but it also leaves open the issue of whether resisting automation is a good idea for those interested in progressive or socialist political-economic change.

A Robot Could Do Your Job (and It Should)

As for this second dimension of the meme, the opposition to automation itself, I want to suggest here, in line with what has been argued elsewhere by Peter Frase, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, that automation-done democratically and equitably-is a process that we should support. There are, quite simply, jobs, where if there is an opportunity to make them not exist, that is precisely what should be done. Where is the expression of humanity in being a cashier or bagger? In what ways, other than simply engaging in casual sixty-second conversations with customers, do people employed in these kinds of professions express their humanity in any significant way? I want to be clear; I'm not criticizing the people who, for whatever reasons, do these jobs. I'm criticizing the existence of these jobs as such.

Who should feel compelled to clean piss or shit off bathroom walls in order to make some more money to pay for basic human needs, such as: healthy, nutritious food; safe, clean housing; and/or quality health care? Who should feel compelled to pick strawberries or lettuce in 100-degree heat? Who should feel compelled to install roofing in the scorching sunlight day after day? There is nothing wrong with manual labor per se, and certainly many people would prefer it to sitting in a cubical for eight hours per day, but the problem with any of these options is that none are typically chosen freely. Very few people, if any, would actively choose to undertake the most revolting, dangerous, uninteresting, and socially-unrewarding jobs if it weren't for the lack of better alternatives, if it weren't for the fact that freely chosen labor is barely a mythology in our societies (in that we can hardly even fantasize about it).

In an automated political economy, there will be plenty of creative, hands-on, salt-of-the-earth jobs to do. There will also be plenty of time for other, perhaps a bit more sedentary, creative, and productive activities for those of us who are less callously-inclined. The point is that automation driven by democratically-organized movements of working people, everyday people, the 99%, is the best way to make freely-chosen productive, humane labor thinkable again.

Automation in and of itself is neither a positive nor a negative. At its worst, automation deskills jobs so that the cognitive engagement and technical know-how needed to do the job decreases. Sometimes whole job categories disappear. All the while, companies continue to rake in record-breaking profits. These are the very real, if still exaggerated, fears that underlie this meme.

History need not go in that direction though. We can have an automation that increases quality of life for all people. In order for automation to have the liberatory effects that the above meme eschews, there would need to be a corollary supplement in the form of a universal basic income and/or shorter workweeks or job-share programs with no loss in pay - but it is highly unlikely either of those options would be achievable without the kind of mass organized political action that the individualized, automated politics of consumer choice activism undermines.

Automation-only when combined with genuinely democratized workplaces, companies, homes, towns, cities, states, and countries-can set us on a path of increased freedom for all people. Put simply, we want our shitty jobs automated, not our capacities for creative, collective activity. We want to automate toil, not politics. And it is always worth remembering: automation isn't the enemy of working people, their bosses are.

Bryant William Sculos holds a PhD in political theory and international relations. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, contributing writer for the Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power. His other work has been published with a variety of academic and non-academic outlets, including: Constellations, New Political Science, Public Seminar, Truthout, Dissident Voice, and New Politics. His most recent article "Minding the Gap: Marxian Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Postcapitalism" is in the May 2018 special issue of tripleC commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. Bryant is also a member of Socialist Alternative-CWI in the US.

Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Critique of Capitalism

By Jon Bekken

Peter Kropotkin devoted a major part of his prolific anarchist writings to two related themes: examining the actual workings of capitalist economies and developing the broad outlines of an anarchist-communist society. Kropotkin was not satisfied to merely assert that a free society was possible, he sought to show how such a society could be constructed from the materials at hand - realizing that a revolutionary movement that failed to consider the problems of production and distribution would quickly collapse. This installment outlines Kropotkin's critique of capitalist political economy.

Economic Doctrine

For Kropotkin, the purpose of political economy was to study society's needs and the means available (either currently in use, or which could be developed with present knowledge) to meet them.

"It should try to analyze how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory … [and] should concern itself with the discovery of means for the satisfaction of these needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the greatest benefit to mankind in general." [1]

It was this task that Kropotkin took on.

Rather than engage in the abstract theorizing that dominated, then as now, the field, he carried out detailed studies of the agricultural and industrial techniques practical in his day (whether they were in general use or not) and their capacity to meet human needs.

Unlike most economists, Kropotkin insisted on subjecting economic theories to the same rigorous inquiry he would apply to any "scientific" theory:

"When certain economists tell us that "in a perfectly free market the price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production," we do not take this assertion on faith …. We not only find most of these so-called laws grossly erroneous, but maintain also that those who believe in them will themselves become convinced of their error as soon as they come to see the necessity of verifying the[m] … by quantitative investigation."

While there certainly was a relationship between the price of commodities and the amount of labor necessary for their production, Kropotkin argued, they were by no means proportional to one another (as the Labor Theory of Value would imply). Nor had socialist economists troubled themselves to investigate whether or not the theory was true by actually gathering data to test the alleged relationship. Anyone who took the trouble to engage in such an investigation would quickly learn that the theory was false. We need only consider the price of oil or gold to realize that these prices are set not by the amount of labor power required to extract and process them, but rather by external market and social conditions. Most so-called economic laws, Kropotkin concluded, were mere suppositions. And although socialist economists "criticize some of these deductions … it has not yet been original enough to find a path of its own." [2]

Thus, when Marx argued against Proudhon that all products exchanged at (or, at least, fluctuated around) their labor value, he was implicitly arguing for what has been called the Iron Law of Wages (though Marx later refuted himself by conceding that union activity could decrease the level of exploitation). The Socialist Party of Great Britain and similar tendencies are wholly correct when they maintain that a Marxian analysis requires that all commodities- including labor power-are valued under capitalism at the cost of their reproduction, which in turn is determined by the most-productive available methods. (Thus a shirt that takes 60 minutes to make by hand or five minutes to make by machine sells for the same price on the world market.)

There is, of course, an element of truth to this-which is why the theory was widely accepted by the labor movement. But, as we shall see, it mistakes an association for a causal relationship. The commodity theory of labor would indicate that only by increasing productivity can workers make possible an improved standard of living, and only through socialist revolution can those possible improvements be actually realized. (Otherwise, the benefits merely accrue to the capitalists and their underlings.)

This doctrine leads inevitably to the conclusion that wage struggles are essentially a waste of time and energy (though workers, through hundreds of years of struggle, have proved the opposite), and that the only alternative to competing against each other into ever-greater immiseration is a state-managed, planned economy which can determine labor values and ensure their equitable distribution. But this doctrine is wholly false. I turn, below, to Kropotkin's proof that wage levels have nothing to do with the cost of reproduction. But the essential point is that wage levels, like the price of all commodities, are set not by their cost of production or the amount of labor they require, but by the relative economic, military and social power held by the respective parties. Monopolies, cartels, police clubs, prisons, labor organization, co-operative associations-these and other power relationships skew the relative "value" of commodities, or at least of the price that can be gotten for them. (And it really matters very little whether a canteloupe has a theoretical, labor-derived value of 25 cents if all the stores charge a dollar.)

Capitalism Not Productive

Like most socialists, Kropotkin initially assumed that an abundance of goods was being produced-and thus that the primary problem facing socialists was arranging their distribution. But when Malatesta suggested that this could not be true, Kropotkin investigated the matter, and found that (quoting Malatesta):

"this accumulation of products could not possibly exist, because the bosses normally only allow for the production of what they can sell at a profit … Some countries were continually threatened by shortages."

In fact, there was only enough food on hand in most major cities to sustain the population for a few days. Yet upon further investigation, Kropotkin established that the shortages, economic crises and general distress endemic to his age (and which continue to this day) did not result, as was widely believed, from overpopulation, poor soil, or other such material causes. Rather, they resulted from a failure to utilize the means already at hand to meet society's needs. [3]

Kropotkin presented his findings in Fields, Factories and Workshops- an anarchist classic that proved that people using then-existing technologies could meet all their needs with just a few months of labor per year. Space precludes anything more than the briefest summary of a volume with which every anarchist should have long since made themselves familiar.

He demonstrated that the technical means then existed to produce abundant and healthful food with relatively little effort or expense (a vision quite distinct from today's factory farms-the precursors of which already existed, but which, he noted, destroyed the soil for generations to come, as well as displacing people who might otherwise derive a comfortable living from the land). Contrary to many economists, Kropotkin argued for decentralizing agriculture and industry, noting that huge industrial establishments were both less common than generally believed, and established less to realize largely dubious economies of scale than to facilitate managerial control. The doctrine of national specialization or competitive advantage±then coming into prominence, and which has since been used as an excuse to ravish "third world" economies-was demonstrably harmful to the interests of the population. (As is well known to peasants compelled to grow coffee beans and sugar cane on land that could otherwise feed their families.) If the debilitating influences of capitalist control and ignorance could be ended, abundance for all was well within reach.

"All this has been proved … despite the innumerable obstacles always thrown in the way of every innovative mind …. For thousands of years … to grow one's own food was the burden, almost the curse, or mankind. But it need be so no longer … To grow the yearly food of a family, under rational conditions of culture, requires so little labor that it might almost be done as a mere change from other pursuits … And again, you will be struck to see with what facility and in how short a time your needs of dress and of thousands of articles of luxury can be satisfied, when production is carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for satisfying shareholders …" [4]

And yet, everywhere workers lived in misery. Contrary to the teachings of every economic school, Kropotkin argued that overproduction was far from a problem:

"Far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough …. If certain economists delight in writing treatises on over-production. and in explaining each industrial crisis by this cause, they would be much at a loss if called upon to name a single article produced by France in greater quantities than are necessary to satisfy the needs of the whole population …. What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and State …" [5]

Only exploiters, he concluded, were in abundant supply. Today, 94 years later, there may well be overproduction of some goods (nuclear weapons, toxic chemicals, and products that must almost immediately be replaced)-but it is just as obscene today to talk of, for example, an overproduction crisis in agriculture when millions face immediate starvation.

Thus, rather than celebrating capitalism's development of society's productive capacity, as Marxists do, Kropotkin demonstrated that capitalism resulted in chronic underproduction and deprivation. Capitalists not only do not equitably distribute the fruits of our production, the entire development of technology is distorted by their short-term profit calculations. Employers faced with the possibility of new labor-saving technologies, for example, often move to drive down labor costs rather than invest in developing the means of production (their historic role, according to Marx). The Social Revolution, then, would not merely expropriate the means of production developed by the capitalists-it would be forced to rapidly develop those means in order to meet even the most basic social needs.

Fortunately, the means for doing so have long been in place, and workers are more than capable of meeting the challenge.

Wage Slavery

Like all socialists, Kropotkin recognized the self-evident truth that workers work for the employing class because they are forced to-without their weekly wages they and their families must starve.

"Whence come the fortunes of the rich[?] A little thought would suffice to show that these fortunes have their beginnings in the poverty of the poor. When there are no longer any destitute there will no longer be any rich to exploit them …" [7]

If people had the means to support themselves-if they were capable of meeting their daily needs without hiring out their labor-no one would consent to work for wages that must inevitably be (if the capitalist is to derive any profit) a mere fraction of the value of the goods they produce. Even an independent artisan, the labor aristocracy of Kropotkin's day, could not hope to do better than to support his family and put together an (almost certainly inadequate) pittance for his old age, should he rely on his own effort and diligence:

"Assuredly this is not how great fortunes are made. But suppose our shoemaker … takes an apprentice, the child of some poor wretch who will think himself lucky if in five years time his son has learned the trade and is able to earn his living. …

Meanwhile our shoemaker does not lose by him; and if trade is brisk he soon takes a second, and then a third … If he is keen enough and mean enough, his journeymen and apprentices will bring him in nearly a pound a day over and above the product of his own toil … He will gradually become rich … That is what people call "being economical and having frugal temperate habits."

At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the poor." [8]

Today, to be sure, workers have after a hundred years succeeded in improving their condition-and the apprentice system, already declining in Kropotkin's time, has all but disappeared. But saving one's earnings is no more the route to real wealth than it ever was-at best workers can hope to buy a house, afford some time off from the hated job, and put a little money aside for retirement or hard times. To become wealthy, in economic term, requires exploitation-either directly, from workers' labor, or indirectly, by exploiting workers' need for the necessities of life.

Under capitalism, "the harder a man works the less he is paid." But the solution to this manifest injustice could not be found in reversing this equation-in payment according to the service each renders to society. For who is to determine the value of another's service?

"We know what reply we shall get … The bourgeois economists-and Marx too-will be quoted … to prove that the scale of wages has its raison d'etre, since the "labor power" of the engineer will have cost society more than the "labor power" of the laborer …

[But] the employer who pays the engineer twenty times more than the laborer makes the following simple reckoning: if the engineer can save him a hundred thousand francs a year on his production costs, he will pay the. engineer twenty thousand. And when he sees a foreman, able to drive the workers and save ten thousand francs in wages, he loses no time in offering him two or three thousand .. He parts with a thousand francs where he counts on gaining ten thousand, and this in essence is the capitalist system.

So let no one come up with this talk about production costs of the labor force, and tell us that a student who has cheerfully spent his youth at a university has a "right" to a salary ten times that of a miner's son who has been wasting away down a mine from the age of eleven." [9]

Wage differentials, whether under capitalism or in some future "socialist" society, must be condemned as unjust. Nor is it possible to determine a "just wage" based on an individual's contribution (even if such a system could be tolerated on ethical grounds, which it cannot). [10]

Production is Social

Production is not carried out by isolated individuals whose economic contribution can be isolated from that of each other worker so that its value can be determined. To illustrate this, Kropotkin turned to coal mining. (At that time, miners worked either individually or in gangs at the coal face, and were paid piece rate. In today's coal mines, of course, the issue of individual production would never arise.)

"One man controls the lift, continually rushing the cage from level to level so that men and coal may be moved about. If he relaxes his concentration for an instant the apparatus will be destroyed, many men killed, and work brought to a standstill. If he loses as little as three seconds at each movement of the lever, production will be reduced by 20 tons a day or more.

Well, is it he who renders the greatest service in the mine? Or is it perhaps that boy who from below signals to him when it is time to raise the cage to the surface? Is it instead the miner who is risking his life at every moment of the day … Or again is it the engineer who would miss the coal seam and have the miners dig into stone if he made the smallest error in his calculations? …

All the workers engaged in the mine contribute within the limits of their powers, their knowledge … and their skill to mine coal. And all we can say is that everybody has the right to live, to satisfy their needs, and even their fantasies, once the most pressing needs of all have been satisfied. But how can one estimate their labors?" [ll]

Obviously you can't-no one but a Marxist would attempt such an absurdity. And yet we still have not identified everyone who contributes to the production of that coal.

What of the construction workers who built the railways to the pit head, without which the coal would sit useless. What of the farmers, who raise the food the coal miners eat? What of those who build the machines that will bum the coal-without which coal is merely a rather useless dirt.

There was a time, Kropotkin concedes, when a family could support itself by agricultural pursuits, supplemented with a few domestic trades, and consider the com they raised and the cloth they weaved as products of their own, and no one else's, labor.

Even then such a view was not quite correct:

"there were forests cleared and roads built by common efforts … But now, in the extremely interwoven state of industry of which each branch supports all others, such an individualistic view can be held no more.

If the iron trade and the cotton industry of this country have reached so high a degree of development, they have done so owing to the parallel growth of thousands of other industries, great and small; to the extension of the railway system; to an increase of knowledge … and, above all, to the world trade which has itself grown up …

The Italians who died from cholera in digging the Suez Canal … have contributed as much towards the enrichment of this country as the British girl who is prematurely growing old in serving a machine at Manchester… How can we pretend to estimate the exact part of each of them in the riches accumulated around us?" [12]

And if there is no individual production, then how can private ownership of property be justified? Just as it is impossible to argue that anyone person created a lump of coal or a bolt of cloth, so it is impossible to justify private ownership of buildings or land. Homes, after all, are not built by their owners. Their construction is a cooperative endeavor involving innumerable workers in forestry, timber yards, brickyards, etc.

Moreover-and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring-the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it.

"Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town … which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful." [13]

Like the ground they stand upon, buildings are a common heritage.

"For instance, take the town of Paris-a creation of so many centuries, a product of the genius of a whole nation … How could one maintain to an inhabitant of that town who works every day to embellish it, to purify it, to nourish it, to make it a center of thought and art-how could one assert before one who produces this wealth that the palaces adorning the streets of Paris belong in all justice to those who are the legal proprietors today …. It is by spoliation that they hold these riches!" [14]

That this remains so can readily be seen by examining the value of today's office buildings and shopping complexes. Without even the slightest improvements their value rise so long as the local economy prospers. But no sum of money invested in maintenance or beautification is sufficient to maintain their value when the local economy fails. For their value is not derived from the money invested, or from the bricks and mortar (and plastic, steel and cement) of which they are constructed. Not even the labor of the workers who build and maintain these modem temples to capital determines their value. Their value, in the final analysis, depends almost entirely upon the wealth and prosperity of the greater society. The most luxurious hotel built in a dying city will soon fade with its surroundings, while the meanest hovel increases in value as surrounding properties are developed.

We enrich each other-not only spiritually, but materially as well-as we work, contemplate and play together; and without the efforts of society as a whole, no one prospers.

Private Ownership Absurd

Private ownership, then, is not merely unjust±it is absurd. As early as 1873, when he was only beginning to become active in revolutionary circles, Kropotkin recognized that true equality was impossible under capitalism.

"It is desirable that a person beginning to work not enslave himself, not yield part of his labor, his strength, his independence … to private individuals whose arbitrariness always will determine how great that part should be, then it is necessary that private persons control neither the instruments of labor … nor the … earth … nor the means of existence during work … Thus we arrive at the elimination, in that future society whose realization we desire, of any personal property …" [16]

All property, no matter how it was created, must become the property of all, available to all who contribute to society through their labor. This was, and remains, necessary not only on grounds of social justice, but because all production is necessarily social.

Production for Needs

Kropotkin refused to separate his analysis of what was from what could be. He insisted on asking not merely if the present economic order worked on its own terms but whether:

"the means now in use for satisfying human needs, under the present system of … production for profits, [was] really economical?

Do they really lead to economy in the expenditure of human forces. Or are they not mere wasteful survivals from a past that was plunged into darkness, ignorance and oppression, and never took into consideration the economical and social value of the human being?" [16]

The "economical and social value of the human being," for Kropotkin, was the key to anarchist economics-to the building of a free society.

This was republished from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review .

Notes

[1] "Modern Science and Anarchism," p. 180. In: R. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets (Dover. 1970).

[2] "Modem Science and Anarchism," pp. 177-79.

[3] Errico Malatesta, "Peter Kropotkin-Recollections and Criticisms." In: V. Richards (ed.), Malatesta: Life & Ideas. Freedom Press, 1977, p. 266. Malatesta went on to argue that Kropotkin's revised view was also wildly optimistic in its assessment of what could be realized. History, however has confirmed that agriculture can indeed produce much greater yields than was generally believed at the time-yields that in fact exceed those Kropotkin discussed.

[4] Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow edited by Colin Ward. Freedom Press, 1985, pp 194-97. (This is an abridged and annotated version of Kropotkin's second edition, eliminating whole chapters of statistical data eclipsed in the 91 years since this work first saw print.)

[5] "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal," pp. 126-27. In: Baldwin.

[7] "Expropriation," p. 162. In: M. Miller (ed, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. (MIT Press, 1970)

[8] ibid. p. 166.

[9] "The Wage System," pp. 101, 99. In: V. Richards (ed.), Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society. (Freedom Press, 1983)

[10] Many Marxists, and even some who consider themselves anarcho-syndicalists, continue to argue for maintaining the wage system in such a guise. Their arguments will be presented, and refuted, in the next installment. '

[12] "Anarchist Communism: 'Its Basis and Principles," p. 57. In: Baldwin.

[13] "Expropriation," p. 197. In: Miller.

[14] "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal," p. 125.

[16] Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

[16]

Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

When Fellow Workers Can No Longer Find Work: A Talk with the Long-Term Unemployed

By Devon Bowers

The following is an email interview with three individuals - Cayla, Carlos, and DR - who have been long-term unemployed. They talk about how their unemployment has affected them mentally and emotionally, and also question the idea of work being so deeply linked to a person's identity.

If you are okay with saying, what led to your long-term unemployment?

Cayla: Well, my unemployment wasn't intentional. I am a student. I have been since I left the Army in 2011. I was in the middle of working on a bachelor's degree when I got sick. I am schizoaffective. So, I had to take some time off school. I'm going back in the fall. Because I am a veteran, I get free education and a monthly stipend while I attend school, so I have no need to work.

Carlos: I work in an industry that has a very short span guarantee of employee, I work in the non-profit industry (for a lack of a better term). In the region that I live, South Texas, there are a good number of nonprofits which provide invaluable services to the community. Especially for an area with high poverty rates as those on the Appalachian region and Native American reservations. Funding for non-profits is usually tied to the funding source, which can be from local to national government grants, foundations, or university grants. The life span of grants usually range from one to five years and it is never guaranteed to be refunded. So as much as I love working in community organizing or community-building work, it is very tenuous employment. The times I was unemployed was because my service to a nonprofit ended due to no more funding or end of funding of program. The longest I have been unemployed was about 10 or 11 months.

DR: In 2014, I was working as a salesperson for a regional chain furniture store. They prided themselves on being "family friendly" and their ability to work with staff in arranging or adjusting schedules as needed or in case(s) of a family emergency. This was one of the main reasons I had been so happy to be hired there, as I was the main provider of my two young daughters at the time and in the midst of a somewhat messy custody dispute.

According to their records I was laid off because my sales were below target, but at the time my sales seemed to be on par with just about everyone else's, and the only real difference I could see was that I was the most recent hire. Also, it should be pointed out that at the time I was laid off, I was just shy of the end of my 6-month trial period, after which I could begin receiving benefits. You can draw your own conclusions from this.

Not long after I was hired my ex-wife moved approximately 2,000 miles away to Tennessee, leaving both children in my care, which meant I immediately went from being the main provider to the sole provider of my daughters - something I obviously had no say in. As a newly single father I desperately needed that job, especially as I couldn't even afford childcare as things were. Once let go, I was forced to be even pickier for which jobs I applied. I could no longer accept any other job like say, fast food work, or another minimum-wage or part-time job… that is, unless they knew my story beforehand and were willing to work with me and possibly whomever else also took a chance and hired me, which was already not likely.

Plus, given the large amount of teenagers and retirees in my town who obviously made much better part-time or minimum-wage workers than me, this was basically impossible. Let me tell you, though, I tried and I tried with gusto - my children's livelihood was/is on the line. I could not and can not afford to feed my kids on California's minimum wage. California, as I'm sure you're aware, is one of the highest cost-of-living states.

So, after everything I just detailed, I enrolled in CalWorks - California's form of general assistance. I was already receiving SNAP (food stamps) while working at the furniture store, because again, even with minimum-wage plus commission, I could still not afford food for my family

I was recently listening to a podcast where it was mentioned that the idea of personhood has been linked to work, that in working, we in a way prove that we are people. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that on a societal level that's true? Do you still accept that notion or have you moved on and if so what made you start to reject the idea that work equals personhood?

Cayla: I think our society stresses the notion of work = personhood because we are capitalist. We worship the dollar bill, therefore we associate exploitation with identity. None of us are what we do, we just spend a large part of our day being exploited. I don't need to be exploited to feel like a whole person.

Carlos: This is an idea that you can trace to most ancient societies once they settled into economic classes. The idea of what you do (work, skills) is who you are. In the United States, this is drilled into our psyche. Not only does work reflect us, but the idea that you must be working in or be employed in order to have worth as a person. Fortunately, for me, I am a red diaper baby. So my parents inculcated in me with a different view of the world than the one schools, peers, institutions promote.

DR: Let me say this, the idea that personhood equals value, with value equating work, is absurd. You are a human being, and therefore have intrinsic value because you exist. Not the kind of value that says whatever you can contribute to others equates to what kind of person you are; how you should be treated or where you fall on the scale of who matters and how much.

As Human Beings, we are entitled to life, liberty, and property. Property falls under the label of labor; labor is property. Life includes healthcare -- ALL healthcare: mental and emotional care is the upkeep of our minds and brain; teeth and eyes are parts of our physical body that need upkeep, therefore mental, emotional, dental, and eye care are included in healthcare as well. Life also includes education, childcare, food, clothes, and shelter - these all contribute to the upkeep of our lives.

Last but certainly not least, liberty is (but should be so much more than just) the choice between working to receive what is little more than a slave wage or starving. Which, in all actuality, is not liberty because the idea that it's a choice is a joke in the worst form. It is not a choice, and it is not liberty. The idea that value equals work which equates to personhood is ridiculously able-ist in construct. There are many, many people who cannot physically work… does that take away their personhood? What an archaic, classist, able-ist construct of thinking. This isn't 10,000 years ago, I believe we can and SHOULD evolve from that ancient, unreasonable, dusty form of "Social Darwinism" or "Natural Selection." We are modern humans living in the modern age. I wholeheartedly believe that "from each according to their ability to each according to their need" is fundamentally the best idea and construct for our society and ourselves.

The entire time I have been unemployed, I have not remained idle. I have labored. Intensely. I have: raised my children, grown gardens in my backyard in a step towards self-sufficiency, I have worked my family member's land and houses. I have done handiwork in my own home. I have constructed things. I have educated people, adults and children on a multitude of different issues. While on CalWorks, I have gone to college, increasing my own knowledge, and working towards my goal of becoming an educator; a history teacher to be specific. I have volunteered with countless organizations, including Western Service Workers Association (WSWA), which is a mutual aid organization and a "para-union", or a union for non-unionized workers, like IHSS workers or farmworkers. I am currently a coordinator for their food procurement program, which entails me going to different grocery markets and taking donations for our food bank, so that it may be fully stocked and ready to help other families and individuals in need. I have become an organizer for the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA).

I have organized protests against the DAPL and other such pipelines. I have organized demonstrations in support of universal healthcare. I have organized demonstrations of solidarity with the LGBT community when our local mega-church Bethel openly declared themselves a hate group in support of conversion therapy and told their congregation to vote against a CA Assembly bill which would grant members of the LGBT community greater access to healthcare and would ban the practice of billing people for conversion therapy.

I have organized food drives and supply drops for the homeless, and poor working class families like ours. Most importantly, I have been the in-home caretaker of my partner, and mother to our new son, who suffers from PTSD, agoraphobia, and panic disorder, due to rape-trauma, multiple sexual assaults, including while she was a child. I have witnessed the ableism she has encountered- from her own family no less. We are currently in the process of having me added as an official IHSS worker on payroll, which would end my long spell of unemployment. I have been working this entire time. I am proud of the work I have done.

What are some of the psychological and emotional effects that have been caused by your long-term unemployment? Have any of these problems spilled over and started affecting you physically?

Cayla: My psychological problems are likely caused by my disorder, but I experience a lot of boredom. I have a severe lack of motivation, so even the simplest chores are hard work for me. This has led to a feeling of emptiness that may be associated with a lack of direction or an existential crisis. Anyhow, not working can become boring, if you don't engage in some kind of hobby. I gained weight, though, again, this could be the schizoaffective disorder and the meds I have been put on. My health has suffered, my Dr. gave me some bad news: pre-diabetes and high cholesterol.

Carlos: It is a very stressful time when you are unemployed. Even more so when you have a family. Not only do you depend on your livelihood, but also your spouse and child. When I was unemployed, it created a lot of stress. Each & every day. Not knowing how you are going to pay for rent, utilities, etc. Knowing that you need to keep your core of living expenses to make sure you can make it through. For example, making sure you have enough to pay the phone bill so you can still be connected for interviews, etc. From when you wake up to when you go to bed and hoping you were able to survive that day. And physically it's even worse since you lose your health insurance and you're a diabetic like me. Meds become a luxury, but knowing you need them in order to get to old age.

DR: The psychological and emotional effects of my long-term unemployment have mostly been encountering the ableist and classist constructs of people in society who do believe that as long as I am not officially "working" that my life and myself are meaningless. There is anger. There is resolve and determination to keep working towards the abolition of such a cruel, self-serving, greedy, hateful society.

What are your thoughts on universal basic income? Do you think it could provide something of a cushion for you?

Cayla: I think it's a wonderful idea, though I'm unsure how effective it would be in practice. I've read that it may be ineffective because if it were ever put into place, the resulting price increases would basically render it useless. I have a pension from the VA, so I know how wonderful it can be to have a bit of security. I wish this for everyone, though I'm not sure that a universal income is the way to get there. While I have my doubts, if I were forced to choose now, I would give everyone a universal income. I want everyone to have the opportunity to pursue their passions and chase their dreams.

Carlos: Honestly, I do not know much about the movement or proposal. I have read different variations of it. As a quick reform, it sounds promising. I do think in the immediate, what we would need is to make sure we a) fund unemployment insurance better, b) make sure that the level of unemployment insurance is of a level good enough to live on while also making sure that it is there as long as the person is looking for a job, and c) making sure the unemployed have access to health insurance. I would add that as a democratic socialist, a UBI still doesn't do away with the exploitation of the capitalist on the working class. The end goal is not to reform capitalism, but to birth a new society not based on class exploitation.

DR: Universal Basic Income can only be a good idea if it does not come in place of free healthcare, or education, or food stamp benefits. As it is now, proponents of UBI are suggesting $1000. If you live in CA, you'd be lucky if that even covered rent, let alone food and other necessities. The fact that big CEO's like Mark Zuckerburg, Elon Musk, and more are starting to come around to UBI should be alarming to the working class. They say it will be necessary because automation will replace countless jobs. Now if those jobs are gone forever, you can't call UBI supplemental, it will be the only source of income for working class families to live off of. I've even seen some republicans come around to it, but saying they'd want it to replace food stamps and medical coverage. So UBI by itself, or replacing other benefits would ultimately be destructive to the working class. I would, however, support a UBI that a working class family could actually live on. Along with Universal Healthcare for all, free education from Preschool through College for all, a Job Guarantee for those who are able to work, cost of living controls, and a minimum wage that could sustain a family, and a maximum wage of no more than 10x the minimum. Then, and only then, would UBI be a good idea. Technology has the opportunity to free us from work for necessity, and could free us to working for passion and fulfillment, only if it is hands of the People, and not the elites.

What do you think of a federal job guarantee?

Cayla: Again, I'm not very well versed on the subject, but with my limited knowledge, I would choose to have one. I don't know how effective they have been in the past, but the idea sounds great. I am disabled from the Army. That's how I receive my pension. I am limited as to how many hours or how physically demanding a job can be. It would be nice if the government could guarantee me a good part-time job with benefits. As I understand it, some countries are moving to shorter work days, due to overproduction. We don't need to be constantly working and producing so much. We are destroying the planet doing it. Perhaps if the gov't guaranteed everyone work, we could limit our own work days. If everyone worked together, rather than competing, we could all work less.

Carlos: I think a federal job guarantee should be tied in closely with the aforementioned response. I do think this reform is more viable and easier for mainstream folks to understand and back. This is one proposal from Sen. Sanders, but has been around since the '70s.

DR: As I stated above a Federal Job Guarantee would be useful, if coupled with the following services; UBI, Universal healthcare for all, free education from Preschool through College for all, cost of living controls, a minimum wage that families could live on, and a maximum wage of no more than 10x the minimum. These reforms must exist together if they are to truly benefit the working class.

The Reds in the Hills: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Interpretation of the Contemporary West Virginia Teachers' Strike

By Michael Mochaidean

Historical Overview

In 1990, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers was $21,904, making it the 49th worst state for educator pay; only Mississippi's was worse. The state's Public Employee Insurance Agency (PEIA) was backlogged, with medical expenses taking almost half a year to be addressed. The teacher retirement fund had a $2 billion hole that grew larger each fiscal year, impacting retirees' insurance and state pension.

Today, in 2018, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers is $45,000, making it the 48th worst state for educator pay in the nation. By fiscal year 2020, premiums are set to increase for PEIA recipients by 15.2%, 14.3% (2021), and then another 10% (2022). For retirees, it is even worse. PEIA recipients on Medicare are expected to see an increase in their premiums by 38.9% (2020, 29% (2021), and then another (32.8%).

It is no wonder, then, that in both 1990 and 2018, educators across the state utilized direct action tactics to demand greater action be done to fund the state's public programs. Parallels have been drawn between both strikes in the recent past. In a Sunday editorial in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, for example, a poster reflected in "Not Your Mom's Teacher Strike?" that the 1990 strike and the current strike in 2018 suffered from a recurring theme of long-term underfunding of public health care programs, poor teacher pay, and few incentives built in to retain high-quality educators in the state.

The similarities don't stop there. The rhetorical strategy of positioning educators as hotheaded firebrands, whose only concerns are for themselves, have not changed in the almost three decades since the first statewide walkout. In 1990, soon after the strike was announced, Governor Caperton (D) declared that he would not meet with teachers or their union representatives until "calm and reason are restored and the teaching force returns to the classroom." In 2018, Governor Justice (R) recently declared that he would work towards a resolution to this issue when "cooler heads prevail," signaling that Republican legislators were acting calmer and more collected than the educators themselves. Similarly, the state's primary law enforcement agency, the Attorney General's Office, has made quick use of its power of injunction in an attempt to first break public sector unions, and then to establish precedent in future cases. In 1990, Attorney General Roger Tompkins declared the strike illegal in a formal memo that would later be used in Jefferson County Board of Education v. Jefferson County Education Association (1990). The Jefferson County BOE case would go on to state that, "Public employees have no right to strike in the absence of express legislation or, at the very least, appropriate statutory provisions for collective bargaining, mediation and arbitration." As West Virginia has none of the latter, any formal walkout would therefore be deemed illegal in the eyes of the court. In 2018, Attorney General Patrick Morrissey (R) released his own memo on the teacher walkout utilizing the precedent of Tompkins' 1990 memo and the subsequent Jefferson County BOE case to state that "the impending work stoppage is unlawful. State law and court rulings give specific parties avenues to remedy such illegal conduct, including the option to seek an injunction to end an unlawful strike."

Perhaps the only difference between these two events in the color of the state's legislature and governor's mansion. West Virginia, once proudly staunch Democrats, is now a hotbed of conservative Republican lawmakers. Republicans went from having a 18-16 majority in the state senator to a 22-12 majority in 2016. Governor Justice, who ran and won as a Democrat, switched his political party to Republican over the summer in an attempt to court President Trump's influence and, potentially, a cabinet position.

Such changes matter little in a state where both parties have played on the contemporary cultural fears or economic anxieties of their citizens. From the painful ramifications of trickle-down economics in 1990 to the neo-liberal drive to privatize public services in 2018, Democrats and Republicans have used whichever economic theory happens to be in vogue at their time to harm state workers, bringing them to the brink of death only to resuscitate them with a glimmer of social democracy. In the aftermath of the 1990 strike, for example, annual salary for public teachers increased by $5,000, to be distributed over a three-year period from 1991 to 1993, while the $2 billion pension gap was addressed over the course of the decade. More recently, the state's legislature has proposed meager percentage-based raises to be distributed over the next several years. Proposals vary, but range from a 5% increase spread over 4 years to a 4% increase spread over 3 years; each percentage raise would be $404 per educator. Governor Justice announced only a few weeks ago, when pressure began mounting on the legislature, that there would be no change in premiums or deductibles for state employees using PEIA. Such changes reflect a recognition of the power of grassroots democracy when coupled with direct action and statewide solidarity efforts, yet fall short of any substantive change in the fundamental workings of the state's social or economic trajectory. State Senator Richard Ojeda (D), now famous across the state as a "working-class Democrat" and somewhat of a celebrity (who, coincidentally, is also running for West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District this year) has proposed a series of severance taxes aimed against the natural gas industry to help fill gaps in PEIA funding. For every 1% raise in the state's severance tax on natural gas extraction, the state estimates that it will have around $40 million in new revenue. Much like the coal and timber industries before it, such a severance tax would plug metaphorical holes in the state's public services budget, but would do little to provide meaningful change to the operative conditions of workers. Recent statistics put the death toll for West Virginia miners from 1883 to 2018 at 21,000, while statistics for those that have died in the timber industry are inconsistent. In both instances, corporate profits have trended upward over the course of their history.

As the famed robber baron J.P. Morgan once said, "We are not in business for our health."

Theoretical Interpretation

Sol-i-dar-i-ty (noun): 1) unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; 2) mutual support within a group.

The renowned union song Solidarity Forever is over a century old and has been sung at labor gatherings and trade halls since Ralph Chaplin first penned it in 1915. The chorus extols the listener to remember that through unity in action, with a shared purpose, strength can overcome the greatest odds. "For the union makes us strong."

Chaplin's inspiration for the lyrics came about during his time covering the Kanawha coal miners' strike in Huntington, West Virginia. Over the course of his lifetime, Solidarity Forever would become a mainstay among business and industrial unions. Its lack of sectarianism provided all sympathetic union members the opportunity to sing together, regardless of labor orientation.

Chaplin, however, grew dissatisfied with its popularity and would go on to pen, "Why I wrote Solidarity Forever," wherein he states that, "I didn't write Solidarity Forever for ambitious politicians or for job-hungry labor fakirs seeking a ride on the gravy train." Solidarity, for Chaplin, was a process, a verb. It had to be reshaped in each new movement by a brand of committed industrial unions with a tendency towards dismantling capitalism and abolishing wage slavery. Unlike the more widespread AFL, the IWW, to which Chaplin belonged, took the struggle of workers' rights throughout the first two decades of the 20th century to include direct action politics - ranging from work slowdowns and work stoppages to lock outs and sabotage efforts. Solidarity through unified action, and unified action towards the "birth [of] a new world from the ashes of the old," could be the only end-goal for union efforts.

Peruse the secret Facebook group "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED" and you'll find post after post referencing Chaplin's most famous song. To the passerby, it may seem that the affinity for this song is first and foremost its tune familiarity - sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic - while secondly, the song provides inspiration for trying times to the everyday worker seeking that reprieve from the capitalist system Chaplin describes. Educators on this page have posted signs detailing their "solidarity forever" with fellow unions, such as the UMWA, UE, and IBEW, and vice versa. The highly-paid staff for these business unions, not to mention their traditional lobbying tactics, would be enough to churn the stomach of any good Wobbly, and it appears at first that the teachers are being led by the same sort of social democracy that they have fallen for in the past.

Leninists, too, have begun critiquing the teachers' strike, yet from an angle that argues, in essence, that the class struggle cannot operate within the single-dimensional framework of public employees. Quoting Lenin in Our Immediate Tasks, they argue, "When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class." Utilizing the age-old Leninist argument that a revolutionary vanguard party is the sine qua non of all worker struggles, Leninists have challenged the belief that the teachers' strike can have significant impacts on their own, as they are by and large directed, or funded by, business unions, and that the "trade-union consciousness" which Lenin speaks of in What is To Be Done? inherently casts a shadow of doubt over the efficacy of any worker struggle outside of the vanguard.

The theoretical sectarian struggles to this point have been ones that center the discourse on this struggle as one that de-historicizes the larger framework of this narrative, provides a monolithic overview of individual and independent associations into one larger struggle, and relies on standard tropes to paint broadly the teachers-as-union-slaves narrative. In this sense, I hope to set the record straight on the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike that is currently unfolding while providing my own interpretations of its theoretical foundations.

What Is Our Struggle?

Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend my association's state Delegate Assembly. Every year, the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) hosts an assembly to elect new officers, provides a framework for future legislative efforts, and meets to discuss relevant issues with educators from across the state. It was at this assembly that I began to grow frustrated with the efforts of President Dale Lee and Executive Director David Haney - both of whom used portions of their assembly speeches to denounce educators who had voted for Republicans and "against their own interests" the previous November. In light of this treatment, I wrote a scathing article about these events in The Socialist Worker in July, hoping to simply vent my frustrations with a wider audience of like-minded thinkers, but assuming little would come of it; I was wrong.

A few weeks after the article was published, a now-comrade of mine - who for the sake of anonymity will be referred to as "Fred" - contacted me with a simple request: "We need to talk about your article." Fred had been at the Delegate Assembly, too, and felt as frustrated as I by the inability of union leadership to effectively mount a serious opposition to reactionary legislation. Over the summer, Fred and I began discussing dates for a grassroots "day at the capitol" lobbying day. We settled on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day because we knew the legislators would be in session and educators would also have the day off, so it would be both convenient and time sensitive. Throughout the next several months, Fred began working on a Facebook group that was then called "West Virginia Public Teachers UNITED." Our goal was to agitate and educate sympathetic teachers across the state into one large group. Each educator was expected to add at least 10 new members that they knew would support our efforts. Over time, we saw the page grow from a few dozen members to several hundred.

By November, we began to worry. Someone had added a member of the executive committee to the group and union leadership was not happy at the efforts we had made. Nonetheless, they realized that if they attempted to halt what progress we had made, they would be halting a real attempt at substantive change, something that hadn't been seen in decades; they took control of the lobby day and began coordinating with local leadership for the next few months. During that time, however, educators continued to post about possible legislation that would arise during the 2018 legislative session. Fears turned into anger as posters began to demand action, and it was at this time that serious talks of a statewide strike were seen. Posters who had been present during the 1990 strike or who had a family member who was on the picket lines then began drawing parallels between the two events organically, recognizing the underlying themes of decades of economic exploitation and the inherent failures of the American democratic experience. The posters were being educated daily, and this education led to their agitation at the state of affairs.

As the Martin Luther King, Jr. Lobby Day rolled around, posters began making concerted efforts to find carpools to the capitol. It looked online as if there would be a mass of teachers waiting in the rotunda to hear what could be done to fix public education for the foreseeable future; in reality, only a little over a hundred educators and supporters showed up. They were greeted by President Dale Lee, who in a surprise move, mentioned the upsurge in revolutionary talk. "I've heard a lot of people talk about 'It's time for a walkout or time for a strike,'" Lee said at the time. "But those are not the first steps in that decision. It's not the first step in what we should do to achieve our goals. If we were to get back to that, there's a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid beforehand." In essence, Lee had given the go-ahead to local leadership to begin efforts at rallying people to join in direct action politics. Mobilization efforts began almost instantaneously. Stories of legislators accosting teachers, refusing to meet with some groups, and outright rejecting basic facts and data from others showed the educators who did arrive that there could be no compromise with the reactionary forces they were fighting - it had to be all or nothing.

The next major rally was scheduled for February 17th. In between the rallies, local counties held a vote of authorization. This would allow state leadership to act on behalf of counties and locals at large. Once the vote had taken place, country presidents would meet at Flatwoods, WV to certify the vote in their county and provide leadership with a firm number of who would support direct action and who would not. The total percentage in support of authorizing statewide action was above 85% - well beyond the expectation of 70% that had been floated as an ideal percentage. The numbers in check and the votes certified, leadership decided to prepare for an eventual statewide walkout that would occur on Thursday, February 22 nd.

On that fateful day, estimates of 5,000 individuals met at the capitol to protest the lack of reforms the state has pushed and demanding long-term funding for PEIA, greater percentage raises for teachers, and a halt to reactionary legislation across the board. At one point, the state's Attorney General became so frightened by the protests outside his office that he barricaded his door with a large, taxidermied black bear. Walkouts continued the following day, even though numbers had dwindled significantly from Thursday to Friday at the capitol.

Meanwhile, online organizing had continued unabated. Several months prior, Fred had decided to change the name of the page from "West Virginia Teachers UNITED" to "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED." Fred realized the stagnant numbers we were drawing would not be able to sustain a mass movement, but even more so, Fred realized that the struggle our group faced was one that transcended our profession, yet was inherently wrapped up in the politics of it. West Virginia teachers could not succeed, he argued, without the widespread outpouring of support from all public employees, who have also been at the forefront of this onslaught against the public sector. Moreover, cross-labor solidarity efforts could show the public that a teachers' strike was not intended simply to alleviate the ills of an under-funded education system; rather, they were an attempt to save all public employees from the state itself. It was at this point that the Facebook page had reached critical mass - over 20,000 active posters. Posters began to talk frequently in person about the lessons they learned from the page, the information being disseminated taught them the limits of electoral politics and the need for greater direct action politics to effect any change. Organization began on the site as well during this time, with some counties splitting off to decide how best to coordinate local efforts for picketing, leafleting, walk-ins, walk-outs, and public relations campaigns.

Posters listened carefully for word on Friday afternoon of an impending rolling walkout to circumvent the Attorney General's upcoming injunction against the unions. Local leadership had told members that week to prepare for this action, listing the benefits of it and how to best organize in defense should educators be required to go to work those days under penalty of suspension or firing. During this week, too, posters complained vociferously that such an action would not have the intended consequences for the legislature. If the legislature knew when we would strike and how long to prepare for, then they would have no need to make a compromise, the argument went. Once again, to everyone's surprise, Lee stated that the walkouts would continue into Monday. It appeared that the grassroots push to have leadership take an active role in listening to its members had its desired effect. Even under threat of injunction, union leadership was keen on the idea of pushing for statewide action, almost indefinitely, until the principal demands had been met.

Theoretical Connections to Anarcho-Syndicalism

At the heart of anarcho-syndicalism is a two-fold attack against the ills of capitalism: 1) a decentralized, horizontal model of leadership that treats all members as first amongst equals, and 2) an abolition of the state through workers' self-management. The quintessential anarcho-syndicalist union of the early 20th century - the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) - initially organized around these sets of principals as well. Based in Barcelona, the CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist union organized across all sectors of employment. CNT capitalized on the worsening economic and political conditions of Spain in the lead up to global war to form autonomous collectives in the major urban centers throughout the peninsula. Though still mostly a rural nation, Barcelona became a central hub for modern industry in their singular productive industry textile mills. The Spanish losses of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War over a decade prior had damaged Spain's already fractured economy by forcing it to rely less and less on its sugar production and more on national industries based in the peninsula. Catalonia in the north, for example, was the only region in Spain where industrial output was greater than agricultural production.

Beginning with only 26,000 members in 1911, the CNT initiated a general strike which would later be deemed illegal by local authorities for several years. The illegality of this action, however, provided new in-roads upon which the CNT would build. In the interwar period, the CNT had a central role to play in the organizing of the 1919 La Canadiense general strike. This forty-four day general strike forced the Spanish government to agree to the world's first eight-hour work day. 70% of Catalonia's industry was halted during the La Canadiense general strike, and the CNT reached a membership of 755,000 as a result of their successes. According to libcom, "about 10% of the active Spanish adult population was a member of the CNT in 1919."

Declines among the CNT would slowly matriculate as businesses began hiring thugs - similar to the Pinkerton agents of American lore - who would murder union members and leaders with ruthless efficiency, though over the course of the Spanish Civil War, membership would balloon up to 1.58 million by the end of the war. The culminating blow to the CNT would ultimately come with the ascension of Francisco Franco and his Fascist forces, who outlawed the union and forced it to go underground. Much of the history of the CNT is paralleled across reactionary Europe and the United States, to groups such as the IWW and the IWA, which have recently seen an increase in membership.

The theoretical tendencies and historical parallels between the CNT and the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike can show the deep-seated roots of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies underneath the surface of otherwise conservative states. In theory, anarcho-syndicalists view local autonomy and organizing around shared interests at a directly democratic level will provide the greatest change in society. Noam Chomsky, in his Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice, relays his views of anarcho-syndicalism to be, "a federated, decentralized system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions…" The CNT's model of this association model contrasts with Marxist-Leninist tendencies which seek to form a revolutionary party model upon which a vanguard will appear and act as democratic leaders to herald in the revolution.

Similarly, the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike has both the material and organizing conditions that make an anarcho-syndicalist system possible. First, West Virginia's economic devastation is a result of what has been called the "resource curse" or the "paradox of plenty" - wherein regions have an abundance of natural resources that can spur larger economic growth in various sectors, yet tend to become stagnant economically - and what Immanuel Wallerstein would deem the "Periphery status" within world-systems theory. According to Wallerstein, periphery states lack economic diversity, are semi-industrialized but only insofar as they provide products to core states, become targets for multinational corporate investment in extracting surplus labor or resources, and have high a pool of labor that is disproportionately poor and lacking in education. Wallerstein tended to view nation-states as at least somewhat monolithic in this regard - treating the United States as a collective core nation and China as a collective core periphery state, for example - without a recognition of the complexities of capital within the communities of those states themselves. If we expand Wallerstein's notion of periperhy status to West Virginia as a whole, a more uniform pattern of shared economic destiny can be understood:

In the case of West Virginia:

1. Ranked fourth highest in the nation for obesity and the highest prevalence of adults reporting fair or poor health in the country.

2. Over 30% of the state does not hold a high school diploma

3. The median household income is $36,864, while the median household income for the country at large is $59,039.

What differentiates the conclusions between a Marxist-Leninist trajectory of these material conditions is that a vanguard party is largely disregarded in the state or is too small and fractured to have any larger sense of statewide support. Furthermore, the support from Marxist-Leninist parties has been largely, though perhaps regrettably, superficial. Workers World and PSL have written articles supporting the teachers, to be sure, and have created a diverse range of graphics to show their solidarity with the collective struggle against capital. Yet, these gestures tend to attract only minor attention on an online space with educators.

On the other hand, collective struggles that decentralize power and return the dynamic to a community-oriented and labor-oriented structure has seen greater advances throughout the course of the strike. Over the past weekend when Dale Lee stated that a statewide walkout would commence on Thursday, February 22nd, local communities began their own decentralized organizing for food distribution centers. In Morgantown, for example, the local Monongalia County Education Association independently took on the task of setting up collection sites for food and other resources that could then be distributed to schools with the highest rates of students on free and reduced lunches. The outpouring of support led to this single organization collecting over 400 bags for lunches, 400 bags for breakfasts, and three-dozen snack bags - all with collections for only four schools total. This is without an even deeper analysis of the various food centers that have begun providing resources to local non-profits and managing distribution centers to students living in rural parts of the state where accessibility to resources is limited. In both senses, it has not been a vanguard party structure nor as movement towards social democracy that has funneled this energy into collective action, but rather, one that has a distributive model of community governance.

It remains to be seen what the result of such actions will be: union leadership could allow electoral strategies to win out and a compromise may be reached before any further action takes place; the Republican-dominated legislature could continue to stall on the issue of funding, providing for a special session to take place, costing the state even more money in the process; or, the state could begin a significant crackdown on educators and other potential dissidents in the process of maintaining "law and order." The last scenario is not unfounded, given the fact that the House of Delegates updated a 1933 law to give capitol police the ability to break up "riots and unlawful assemblages" while providing legal cover "for the death of persons in riots and unlawful assemblages." Thus, the state could effectively begin mass arrests against educators and union leadership, similar to what occurred to the IWW, CNT, and IWA, though driving them underground is unlikely. The difference is that such a direct assault would provide educators the necessary public relations to cover themselves and galvanize greater support in opposition to both capital and the defenders of capital. Thus, a direct assault by the state could essentially be the death knell to a dying institution.