[Peace-discuss] Kolko on violence and the social order

[David Green]

I think that Gabriel Kolko implies that debates about the alleged racism, etc. of the American working class are, as much as anything, marginal or irrelevant. This excerpt is from Main Currents (1974), in a chapter titled "The American Working Class,: Structure and Limits," a section titled "Violence and Social Control."
_________________________

The question of the role of the working class in modern American history is not simply its desires or nature leading it down a distinctive path differing from that of Western Europe's, but also the limits of social toleration that all forms of working-class or agrarian radicalism and militancy have confronted in American history. Fear of the masses has been a recurrent anxiety among America's rulers since the Civil War, and violence for social and individual goals has been a constant fact and quite unprecedented when compared to European nations during their nominally "democratic" phases. It has scarcely been confined to the interaction between social classes but increasingly pervades numerous aspects of human relations with a deepending intensity most urban Americans now take for granted. In the first two-thirds of this century there were well over a quarter of a million recorded homicides in the United States, with over 200 times more gun murders in
 the United States in 1963 than in England and Wales. By that time about half of the homes of the nation were equipped with arms. "The United States," two quite conventional labor historians were compelled to admit in 1968, "has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world," to which they should have added that workers were far more often the victims than perpetrators of this bloody aspect of their nation's history. That violence was so frequent and omnipresent that it created what was no less than a culture of intimidation in vast areas of the United States, an inhibiting fear that became far more of a deterrent than the assaults and murders themselves.

Polite society's fear of radicalism, communism, and a truly political working class antedated the creation of a significant Marxist party, and began during the 1870s, reaching a peak of close to universal hysteria during the summer of 1877, when a spontaneous national railroad strike, augmented by local strikes in specific industries, led to probably the greatest single labor crisis known in American history. Anyone who examines this strike closely will immediately perceive it was unorganized and wholly a response to the frustrations  and wge cuts that accompanied the first serious industrial depression of 1873-1878. Yet to those in power, it was a clear harbinger of the arrival of the Marxist First International--which was wholly inconsequential before, during, and after the strike--and a justification of the need to protect property and the institutional structures built around it. "It is a pity," typically commented the New York Tribune with a
 callousness acceptable then and thereafter, "that the very first resistance to the law was not met by the shooting of every rioter within the range of a musket ball." It was at this time that the federal and state governments, in response to the demands of "respectable" sentiment and with the aid of large corporate contributions, transformed the National Guard to maintain a system of repression adequate for future labor crises.

The significant moral of 1877 was one recurrent in American history thereafter: So long as political democracy and the social dynamics inherent in the tensions and crises capitalism produces did not impinge on the rights of property, a nominal freedom could be institutionalized and duly celebrated. Its allegedly minor contradictions, such as pervasive corruption at numerous levels of government or police repeatedly symbiotic with crime, could be dismisses as somehow peripheral to the essential order. So long as social stability and mass conservatism led to the voluntaristic endorsement of the esisting monopoly over power and the institutions reinforcing it, freedom flourished and violence was less necessary--hence the illusion of consensus and democracy. It took only a depression, war, or effort on the part of workers or blacks to fulfill the rhetoric of nominal freedom to prove repeatedly how illusory and fragile it was in reality. Yet it was always the
 same during times of trial: vigilantes were almost always led by community elites, the police and troops invariably took the side of property owners against workers, those lynched and massacred were all blacks or poor whites, and the quantity and intensity of violence in modern American history--so fully if belatedly documented after the 1967-78 riots--is without paralled in any industrial nation no under overt dictatorial rule.

From the slaughter of at least thirty black striking laborers in Thibodaux, Louisiana, to the Republic Steel massacre of ten men on May 31, 1937, that history is tragically and predictably repetitive, but always conveys the same point: that those in power will deal sternly with dissidence and occasional militance; and expressions of radicalism and militant workers would always, at whatever time, be subject to the constant threat of legal prosecution, harassment, and violence. All this has been integral rather than exceptional to the process of administrating power in America, and while it has varied in quantity and ferociousness according to the magnitude of the threat, it has been a decisive inhibitor to the emergence of an American radicalism when it has occasionally manifested itself. The few good books on the topic, which deal with the comprehensive destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World before and during World War One, or deportation of
 radical immigrants at the same time, do only partial justice to a phenomenon of repression of the anti-capitalist Left which is integral to the very structure of sustaining power in its largest sense. Although these movements can and should be assessed as minimal in potentially challenging the power of capitalism in America, their weakness in no way mitigates the reality that even when capitalism was depression or, as during 1929-1939, protracted paralysis, it repeatedly showed its capacity and willingness to retain social control via means of violence and repression. If it still was able to survive because of a consensus and dominant ideology that continued to bind the people to its politics and values--and its ability to satisfy the masses at that level was more crucial than than its capacity to deprive them of jobs and economic sustenance--we are obligated also to appreciate the ultimate nature of society's cohesion. Violence was used in America more
 than in any other country that bothered preserving the facade of democracy, but what was clear from this, apart from the fact that the threat to constituted order evoked a response all out of proportion to the real danger, was the readiness to employ yet far more if it were required. That willingness to act, the prerequisite of maintaining power and a continuously repressive political order, is one of the crucial keys for understanding the basis of existing power in America since the Civil War, notwithstanding the fact that the half-century after World War One proved that workers had yet to pose a real threat to the social order.


      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090816/003f84e7/attachment.htm