Workers’ Revolution in America: Approaching Zero Hour

McCamy Taylor

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Sat Dec-06-08 08:11 PM
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Workers’ Revolution in America: Approaching Zero Hour

Today I read a little gem written in 1926 by Heinz Neuman, called Marx and Engels on Revolution in America . In the journal below, I will quote from this text which quotes liberally from the writings of Engels, but I encourage you to read the whole work (which is quite short) yourself. Here is a link:

http://www.archive.org/stream/marxengelsonrevo00neum/marxengelsonrevo00neum_djvu.txt

If you have ever wondered why the United States has lagged behind Western Europe in work hours, health care, maternity leave and other issues affecting workers, Engels provided some thought provoking answers back in the 19th century. He also spelled out the conditions under which the workers of the United States would stop being complacent and start their own revolution.

From the looks of things, we are fast approaching the right combination of conditions.

“When the Americans once
begin, they will do so with an energy and virulence,
in comparison with which we in Europe will be chil-
dren."

Engels letter to Schlueter, dated March 30,
1892

I. Whose Fault Is It When You Lose Your Job? Your Fault or the Job’s Fault?

This article, linked in DU today caught my eye.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ildwrFjwHYjvJPX2edZgBnNb8EEQD94TAHM82

Angry laid-off workers occupy factory in Chicago

CHICAGO (AP) — Workers laid off from their jobs at a Chicago factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.
About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began staging the sit-in in shifts this week after learning the plant was closing Friday.
Leah Fried (LAY'-uh FREED'), an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, says Republic failed to give 60 days' notice required by law.
Chicago police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak says police are aware of the situation and are patrolling the area.

It was the word angry in the title of the short piece that made me do a double take. The author chose that word, which says a lot. It implies a workers’ revolution in itself, coming as it does at a time of recession when people are talking about a second Great Depression.

The funny thing is that most people who were out of work during the first Great Depression were not angry. They were ashamed .

http://www.studsterkel.org/htimes.php

“That there are some who were untouched or, indeed, did rather well isn’t exactly news. This has been true of all disasters. The great many were wounded, in one manner or another. It left upon them an ‘invisible scar’….The suddenly-idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, ‘I’m a failure.’”

“True there was a sharing among many of the dispossessed, but, at close quarters, frustration became, at times, violence, and violence turned inward. Thus, sons and fathers fell away, one from the other. And the mother, seeking work, said nothing. Outside forces, except to the more articulate and political rebels, were in some vague way responsible, but not really. It was a personal guilt.”
Studs Terkel intro to Hard Times

Knowing what we know now about “banksters”----investors who manipulated the system for personal gain----mega-rich people like J.P. Morgan Jr. who paid no taxes while the nation starved and other crimes of the elite it seems incredible that there was no workers’ revolution. A number of people whom Terkel interviewed in his books are proud of the fact that the Great Depression in America was peaceful, and they speculate that were the same thing to happen now, the reaction of modern workers would not be the same. People nowadays would not tolerate the hardship and deprivation with the same stoic It must be my own fault attitude.

How was the United States different back then? In a letter written in 1886, Engels describes the U.S.:

“For America after all
was the ideal of all the bourgeoisie: a country rich, vast,
expanding with purely bourgeois institutions unleav-
ened by feudal remnants or monarchial traditions and
without a permanent and hereditary proletariat. Here
every one could become, if not a capitalist, at all events
an independent man, producing or trading, with his
own means, for his own account. And because there
were not, as yet, classes with opposing interests, our —
and your — bourgeois thought that America stood above
class antagonisms and struggles.”
Engels

A belief system like this was (and is) easier to swallow if you were a white, male adult citizen Protestant who was protected, even favored by the laws of the land. If you happened to be female, nonwhite, non English speaking then you were a little bit more skeptical of the American Dream. But as long as a large chunk of the U.S work force believed that they could become a member of the capital owning class at any time, they did not think of themselves as enemies of their bosses. We see remnants of this same attitude today, especially in the South.

In the 1930s, if you still bought the myth that America was the land of opportunity and you were broke and out of a job and there was no internet on which to share stories anonymously, then it was only natural to assume that you were no good and your suffering was all your own fault. Especially considering the nation’s strong Puritan strain of Protestantism which taught that material wealth was a sign of God’s grace and physical suffering was a sign of an inferior character (Weber wrote especially eloquently on this topic).

We have come a long way since 1930. Fewer people believe in that kind of Old Time Religion and fewer still believe that this country offers a level playing field that allows anyone to get rich if he just works hard enough. In the past few years, we have seen the Savings & Loan scandals, Enron and now the mortgage meltdown. We known that big business makes its money the new fashioned way---it steals it.

II. Divide and Conquer: Sarah Palin vs. Mother Jones

"The movement in America, just at this moment, is
I believe best seen from across the ocean. On the
spot personal bickerings and local disputes must ob-
scure much of the grandeur of it. And THE ONLY
THING that could really delay its march would be the
consolidation of these differences into established
sects.”
Engels letter to Mrs. Wischnewetsky dated January 27,
1887

Employers and business leaders in the United States must have been reading their Engels and Marx. For the past one hundred years, they have become experts at the art of Divide and Conquer. They have turned every conceivable difference into a “sect”, with the weight of law to enforce the differences. After the Civil War, they were quick to establish Jim Crow laws so that American Blacks would form a permanent low wage work force that could be exploited to dilute the power of unions and redirect workers’ anger away from the bosses towards fellow workers.

They played each successive wave of immigrant off against the next with groups like the KKK and Bill Frist's GOP Congress.

“(Y)our bourgeoisie understands even better than the Austrian
government, how to play off one nationality against
another.”
Engel

Women were denied the vote and other equal rights, which kept their wages low and meant that they were also divided from the main unions. The only union that did not fall for this Divide and Conquer scam, the Industrial Workers of the World or the Wobblies, a group which accepted women and minorities, was routinely harassed, indicted, framed and finally persecuted to near extinction by the law acting on behalf of special interests who favored unions that discriminated (Divide and Conquer). You can read more about the IWW here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World

For over a century, the American employer class successfully prevented workers from uniting by convincing them that their fellow workers of other racial and ethnic groups were the enemy. The election of Barack Obama threatened to upset this game, since his presidency could heal rifts between groups which had been leery of forming a united front before. If the white, Black and Latino workers who selected Obama also decided to put their clout together and form one giant union, the nation’s employers would be shit out of luck—especially under an Obama administration.

That was where Sarah Palin came in. Her job was to convince working class whites that they would be better off joining the KKK or the American Nazi Party than considering a shoulder to shoulder march with their fellow workers who happened to have brown complexions. The recent increase in membership in the KKK is a testament to her success as a Divide and Conquer cheerleader for America’s business community.

However, Sarah Palin’s time has come and gone. President-elect Barack Obama has only just begun to serve. A whole generation of Americans is about to learn---in the only way that they can, according to Engels, through experience ---that Black folks are not scary.

III. Songs of Innocence and Experience

And standing on the altar high,
"Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:
"One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery."
William Blake “Little Boy Lost”
Songs of Experience

In the Neuman pamphlet linked above, Engels writes about the British and American (especially the latter) propensity to discount theory and ideology and insist that only knowledge acquired from experience is accurate, a property that is not shared by most Europeans, such as the Germans, French and Russians, who are willing to embrace communist workers’ theory as part of a workers’ movement. Engels suggests that this anti-theoretical characteristic of the U.S. derives from its relatively recent history and the fact that it began as a democracy, without any prior revered traditions.

While Engels does not expand upon the notion, the Romantic movement was in full flower during the early days of the United States, and one of its tenets was personal experience and validation over traditions which come from outside the individual. These include theological, political and moral belief systems which might come into conflict with personal values. For the Romantics---and for Americans, who have always valued their rugged individualism----the deeply personal trumps the impersonal. Nothing is more personal than experience, except perhaps for emotion.

Engels describes the results on American labor:

"But just now it is doubly necessary for us to
have a few people who are thoroughly versed In
THEORY and well-tested TACTICS ... for the
Americans are for good historical reasons far behind
in all theoretical questions, have taken over no med-
iaeval institutions from Europe, but have taken
masses of mediaeval tradition, English common
(feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short, all
the nonsense which did not directly hurt business and
which is now very useful for stupefying the masses.
And if THEORETICALLY CLEAR FIGHTERS are
available, who can predict for them the consequence
of their own mistakes… many mis-
takes can be avoided and the process can be consid-
erably shortened." (Letter to Sorge dated November 29, 1886).

Back in 1930, American workers were still in a state of innocence. They had seen nothing like the Great Depression before. They had no idea how long it would last or how devastating the damage to their lives or families would be. Since we are, by nature, an optimistic people, the unemployed kept riding the rails, following up leads about jobs, hoping that tomorrow would bring the end of the hard times with a paycheck. As if that would solve the country's ills.

In 2008, the American worker knows that what we are witnessing today---half a million more out of work last month, 40 plus million Americans without health insurance----could get much, much worse. All that natural optimism is tempered by experience. They did not vote for hope in the fall elections. They voted for solutions . Solutions that include health care reform, a balanced budget, checks and balances on banks and a whole host of measures that the business community does not like at all.

Americans did something they rarely do. They voted with their brains. The internet will help keep this trend alive, since it makes an easy forum for dispensing knowledge in a way that all people can understand it. This is the reason why internet censorship has become such a high priority among the right wing Republicans. The internet is for the modern worker's revolution in the U.S. what the printing press was for people like Tom Paine in the original American Revolution.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." (as cited in Padover, 1939, p. 89)

". . . whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right." (as cited in Padover, 1939, p. 88) Thomas Jefferson

IV. Go West, Young Man

"Land is the basis of speculation, and the American
possibility of and craze for speculation is the chief in-
fluence of the bourgeoisie. Only when we have a gen-
eration of native-born workers who have nothing more
to expect from speculation, will we have firm ground
under our feet in America." (Letter to Sorge dated
January 6, 1892.)

Not long ago, you could still homestead in Alaska. I don’t know if that is possible anymore. I kind of doubt it. Nowadays, the only way to escape from your problems is to join the military and under Bush, even that option was eliminated, due to the quagmire in Iraq.

Engels pointed to the abundance of free land as another obstacle to an American workers’ revolution in the 19th century. If a factory worker got fed up, and if he was the kind of industrious, intelligent fellow who could organize a union, he could also quit his job, head west, get some land and start a ranch. This provided a release valve for workers’ discontent well into this century.

Times have changed. All the free land is gone. The game is over, and if your playing piece landed on a square marked factory worker at the last roll of the dice, chances are that is where you will stay. And so will your kids, assuming that the factory does not move to Mexico, and they are not forced to work at Burger King.

That is going to breed a lot of discontent, and no matter how many state lotteries they dream up, people are still going to grumble.

V. Bread and Circuses---Oops, No Time for the Circus. Gotta Get to My Second Job.

The last factor that keeps the American worker complacent, according to Neuman, is their relatively high wage compared to those of workers in other countries on the world. This remained true up until the 1970s, when the United States was a pretty nice place to live if you were working class. Then, real wages began to go down, bottoming out at 86% of 1973 wages in 1995 and recovering slightly by 2000, even though people’s expenditures had risen by 66%.

http://www.nikutai-to-kageboushi.com/discourse/uspovrty.html

We all know how people have managed to keep up with the increased expenses. Two income families. People working two jobs. Kids who never see their parents or who see only one parent at a time as the couple work different shifts so that they can split the job of child care and save money.

Welcome to the American dream.

Now, subtract the job that pays the most money---they are not going to ship the job flipping burgers overseas to India---and you have a real crisis on your hands. And Americans who would never dream of getting political for its own sake---politics is a dirty word to many workers in the U.S.---will fight like dogs if their familys’ security is at stake.

"Just as all preaching is of no avail in England,
until the actual necessity is at hand, so too in America. And this necessity is present in America and is
being realized” (Engels letter to Sorge
dated April 29, 1886).

VI. Summary: Signs of Zero Hour

According to Engels, the American worker will be slow to act, but once he (she)does, the action will be something to watch. I guess the accuracy of his predictions about the Russian Revolution must have scared the shit out of some American capitalists, because they have been working overtime for almost a century trying to derail the U.S. workers’ rights movement. They have called labor leaders commies and crooks and cowards and murderers. They have lynched them and framed them. They have bought them. And they have duped workers into believing that other workers are the problem, not the employers who lie, cheat and steal to squeeze every nickel and dime from each transaction.

The signs that we are approaching Zero Hour include

1. Sudden specter of unemployment and poverty for the American worker
2. No hope for improvement in the lot of the American worker
3. Experience with a similar economic crisis in the past—one which the business community was powerless to solve (witness the appeals for government bailouts)
4. Decline in adherence to Puritan dogma (except among members of the religious right. Evangelicals are Puritans. Now you know why the business controlled Republican Party loves these guys)
5. Most important of all--- unity --- improvement in relations between whites, Blacks, Latinos as well as men and women (we desperately need a wage parity law), young and old and every other artificial distinction that the employer class has used to Divide and Conquer the American Worker.

Expect to see the business community commit most of its resources to undermining number five in the next few years. The GOP backed effort to divide Clinton and Obama supporters was about more than winning the election by splitting votes, and Obama's choice of Clinton for SOS has long term ramifications for his economic policy as well as foreign policy. Sarah Palin and her type will continue to spread their "The Blacks and Mexicans are stealing your wealth!" message of fear and hate to any poor suckers willing to listen. Paid agitators may even resort to old style tactics----lynch a few minorities here, start a few "race riots" there---in an attempt to revive old fears.

Because keeping us sectioned by race, gender and age has worked to the advantage of employers for a long time and worker solidarity scares them more than anything. The diverse Obama cabinet which spans all races, gender, ethnicity and ideology is the most serious threat of all to a system which has deprived us of decent health care, decent family life, decent education, decent work conditions, decent environment and fair elections.

Vive la revolution!