I laughed when I read this paragraph from the History of the Communist Party

[jtuck004]

5. Sure, I'll try

Sorry for the delay - my wife and her mom are both sick with colds, so I am nursing them

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country....corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed." Abraham Lincoln - Nov. 21, 1864 in his letter to Col. Williams F. Elkins

Talk about good vision...

1870 to about 1932 (slavery and earlier labor is part of this but in a different way) saw the exploitation of millions by the industrialists as immigrants began to pour in for work and opportunity. At least two major labor organizing philosophies seemed to come out of this. One, the Industrial Union (IU) organized to unite all of labor, skilled or unskilled, to quit giving all their labor to the Capitalist and put the workers in charge. Lots of variations of this, differing organizations but at the last major point in that history I am interested in it was the International Workers of the World, or IWW.

Roughly in the same time the second philosophical position, Business Unionists (BU) formed. Sam Gompers, collaborating with business got a little more of the pie, but saw the worker as subservient to the needs of the Capitalists. And, frankly, most workers subservient to the needs of the highly-skilled white craftsman. The BU focused on more skilled, not miners, not the millions of other laborers, whites only, no women. Virulently anti-IU, anti-communist, anti-unemployment, not exactly a big tent. But the bosses liked him. Because the IU was repressed, and because of their alliance with the industrialists, the AFofL survived, the CIO struggled but eventually joined them.

IU-type organizers included Mother Jones, William Haywood, E. Debs (Debs was a socialist, and believed in ownership at another level than Haywood was clear about, I think), William Foster (communist), so lots of subtleties and differences, but they shared the goals of freedom for the workers from the exploitation of the greedy capitalists, that freedom one has when in control of the assets and profits shared as workers. They also more or less shared the view that their opponent was the the corporation, the capitalist, the tyrant.

Around 1919 (I think someone mentioned it below) the "Red Scare" fever was whipped up, the Sedition Act was passed, and the IU adherents were further decimated with lynchings, shootings, (sometimes both), other murders, beatings (tied to a tree, beat with a whip, hot tar poured into the wounds, feathers on top, kicked down the road), prison, government persecution (note: They are still around.). Business linked them with the communists, who they linked with the Nazi's after the Russians declared peace with them in WWI, pushed the communist scare stories of the late 20's, which carried through for some time. (For example, an organizer was hauled out of jail and lynched 3 times, then shot in Centralia, WA, by the good folks at the American Legion. The Coroner declared it a suicide).

The IU won some battles but faced with the might of business who invested in spies, finks, killers, politicians, government, soldiers, bullets, guns, prisons, newspapers, propaganda and Business Unions, they were repressed to a large extent. (At the La Follette Committee hearings an NLRB member estimated business was spending $80 million a year in union-busting, or about $1 billion in today's dollars). Gompers and the AFofL, on the side of business, helped bust the steelworkers strike in 1919 against the IU folks. The IWW can still be found.

Both Mother Jones and William Haywood came out of the coal fields and mining areas.

Here is Mother Jones autobiography - http://www.angelfire.com/nj3/RonMBaseman/mojones.htm
- other subjects here http://www.angelfire.com/nj3/RonMBaseman/

William Haywood wrote "Bill Haywood's Book: The autobiography of William Haywood" published after he skipped bail (wisely) on the Sedition Charge and, facing 20 useless years in prison, was offered safe harbor in Russia.

The book you can find in a decent college library or through inter-library loan, though there is something to be said for walking through the stacks surrounded by the words of all those people.

Here is a link where Lenin mentions Haywood in a report on an experimental industrial colony. Funny, here are communists talking about investing, and we can't get our own so-called capitalists today to let go of their own rubles.

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/kuzbass_colony.html

Here is a line from that report denoting the difference between IWW and AFL:
"The "Industrial Workers of the World" (IWW) arose in the USA in 1905 as a counter-balance to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was conducting a policy of class collaboration. "

Of course, that was before a hundred years of teaching us communist-socialist-nazi-industrial union organizer-archist-IWW member-scary traitor-all-the-same-thing. We even have people screaming about communists today. Sigh. (Today they are trying to link animal rights folks, Occupiers, etc to terrorists. I hope those people are reading these histories - it might save them from a lynching. One could ask the two Middle-Eastern men who were beaten in the aftermath of the OKC bombing how scary that can be).

You can google the wiki pages for these folks, and the references will lead you to volumes of info.

Sometime in the early 1900's the communists (I use that word knowing it means wildly different things in time and to different people), got the idea of creating Unemployed Councils in this country to further their revolutionary aims. They started something in 1921, but in 1930 they spread these across the country and started teaching class consciousness to hungry people, organizing them in marches for relief, both unemployment and food.

There were lines of hungry people marching across the country for a couple of years, past the White House in 1931 (communist organized, they came from all over the country, self-policing against violence all along the way, very well planned,) between lines of police and soldiers with machine guns stuck in people's minds. They couldn't talk to Congress, then went past AFL HQ, and the Mr Green from the earlier post chastised these hungry people.

(My wife's mom, born 1921 on a farm in Oklahoma, said Hoover was the worst President ever. "Oh, he was terrible".)

I think the labor struggles taught people when withholding their labor and public protest could push public opinion, and there are a lot of lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. The people involved in those struggles were the ones that helped organize public pressure for the New Deal programs.

Given where tens of millions of people are today economically, after watching what compromise and collaboration with the wealthy got us for the past hundred years or so, maybe this is a good time to revive some of those IU philosophies, and learn from the communists (probably will need a marketing makeover on that one). I can't imagine that workers owning the production of capital could do any worse, eh? Probably won't sell their jobs overseas, or their souls to a private equity junk bond firm. That might even be more important than concentrating on regulation that might be written to fight income inequality.

We are going into an uncertain future where labor is going to mean something far different. (Maybe a neighborhood owning the robot factory?).

Regardless, we will do better organized than not, and those who determine our future will be those who own the means of production.

Does that help?