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(So if we are living in a new Gilded Age, why aren't workers fighting
back like the Wobblies et al? Fraser said it was because those workers
had a memory of precapitalist existence, the family farm typically. But
I think the real explanation is the sheer brutality of 19th and early
20th century working conditions when job protection was nonexistent and
pay was barely sufficient to cover the rent in a rat-infested tenement.
For some workers that is still the case but for the average railroad
worker, for example, life is much different than it was when Eugene V.
Debs was their spokesman.)
NY Times SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW, Mar. 22 2015
‘The Age of Acquiescence,’ by Steve Fraser
By NAOMI KLEIN
THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE
The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power
By Steve Fraser
470 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.
For two years running, Oxfam International has traveled to the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to make a request: Could the
superrich kindly cease devouring the world’s wealth? And while they’re
at it, could they quit using “their financial might to influence public
policies that favor the rich at the expense of everyone else”?
In 2014, when Oxfam arrived in Davos, it came bearing the (then)
shocking news that just 85 individuals controlled as much wealth as half
of the world’s population combined. This January, that number went down
to 80 individuals.
Dropping this news in Davos is a great publicity stunt, but as a
political strategy, it’s somewhat baffling. Why would the victors of a
class war choose to surrender simply because the news is out that they
have well and truly won? Oxfam’s answer is that the rich must battle
inequality or they will find themselves in a stagnant economy with no
one to buy their products. (Davos thought bubble: “Isn’t that what cheap
credit is for?”)
Still, even if some of the elite hand-wringing about inequality is
genuine, are reports really the most powerful weapons out there to fight
for a more just distribution of wealth? Where are the sit-down strikes?
The mass boycotts? The calls for expropriation? Where, in short, are the
angry masses?
Oxfam’s Davos guilt trip doesn’t appear in Steve Fraser’s “The Age of
Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized
Wealth and Power,” but these are the questions at the heart of this
fascinating if at times meandering book. Fraser, a labor historian,
argues that deepening economic hardship for the many, combined with
“insatiable lust for excess” for the few, qualifies our era as a second
Gilded Age. But while contemporary wealth stratification shares much
with the age of the robber barons, the popular response does not.
As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age — which he
defines loosely as the years between the end of the Civil War and the
market crash of 1929 — American elites were threatened with more than
embarrassing statistics. Rather, a “broad and multifaceted resistance”
fought for and won substantially higher wages, better workplace
conditions, progressive taxation and, ultimately, the modern welfare
state (even as they dreamed of much more).
To solve the mystery of why sustained resistance to wealth inequality
has gone missing in the United States, Fraser devotes the first half of
the book to documenting the cut and thrust of the first Gilded Age: the
mass strikes that shut down cities and enjoyed the support of much of
the population; the Eight Hour Leagues that dramatically cut the length
of the workday, fighting for the universal right to leisure and time
“for what we will”; the vision of a “ ‘cooperative commonwealth’ in
place of the Hobbesian nightmare that Progress had become.”
He reminds readers that although “class war” is considered un-American
today, bracing populist rhetoric was once the lingua franca of the
nation. American presidents bashed “moneycrats” and “economic
royalists,” and immigrant garment workers demanded not just “bread and
roses” but threatened “bread or blood.” Among many such arresting
anecdotes is one featuring the railway tycoon George Pullman. When he
died in 1897, Fraser writes, “his family was so afraid that his corpse
would be desecrated by enraged workers, they had it buried at night . .
. in a pit eight feet deep, encased in floors and walls of
steel-reinforced concrete in a lead-lined casket covered in layers of
asphalt and steel rails.”
Of course violence went both ways. Protests and strikes consistently
faced bloody attacks from both state forces and hired guns, prompting
the formation of various armed worker militias. Populists and socialists
were attacked as everything from “ungrateful hyenas” to “mad dogs,”
while conservative newspapers openly called on the state to
“exterminate” the “mob.” The class war, in other words, was no mere
metaphor.
Fraser offers several explanations for the boldness of the post-Civil
War wave of labor resistance, including, interestingly, the intellectual
legacy of the abolition movement. The fight against slavery had loosened
the tongues of capitalism’s critics, forging a radical critique of the
market’s capacity for barbarism. With bonded labor now illegal, the
target pivoted to factory “wage slavery.” This comparison sounds strange
to contemporary ears, but as Fraser reminds us, for European peasants
and artisans, as well as American homesteaders, the idea of selling
one’s labor for money was profoundly alien.
This is key to Fraser’s thesis. What fueled the resistance to the first
Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent
memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or
back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively
fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that
was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal
businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known
something different from their grim present, they were capable of
imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future.
It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded
Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again in the latter half
of the book. The latest inequality chasm has opened up at a time when
there is no popular memory — in the United States, at least — of another
kind of economic system. Whereas the activists and agitators of the
first Gilded Age straddled two worlds, we find ourselves fully within
capitalism’s matrix. So while we can demand slight improvements to our
current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in
something else entirely.
Fraser devotes several chapters to outlining the key “fables” which, he
argues, have served as particularly effective resistance-avoidance
tools. These range from the billionaire as rebel to the supposedly
democratizing impact of mass stock ownership to the idea that contract
work is a form of liberation. He also explores various forces that have
a “self-policing” impact — from mass indebtedness to mass
incarceration; from the fear of having your job deported to the fear of
having yourself deported.
With scarce use of story or development of characters, this catalog of
disempowerment often feels more like an overlong list than an argument.
And after reading hundreds of pages detailing depressing facts, Fraser’s
concluding note — that “a new era of rebellion and transformation” might
yet be possible — rings distinctly hollow.
This need not have been the case. Fraser spares only a few short
paragraphs for those movements that are attempting to overcome the
obstacles he documents — student-debt resisters, fast-food and Walmart
workers fighting for a living wage, regional campaigns to raise the
minimum wage to $15 an hour or the various creative attempts to organize
vulnerable immigrant workers. We hear absolutely nothing directly from
the leaders of these contemporary movements, all of whom are struggling
daily with the questions at the heart of this book.
That’s too bad. Because if hope is to be credible, we need to hear not
just from yesterday’s dreamers but from today’s as well.
Naomi Klein’s latest book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the
Climate,” will be out in paperback in August.
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