[Marxism] FREE LABOUR, CAPITALISM AND, THE ANTI-SLAVERY ORIGINS OF CHINESE EXCLUSION IN CALIFORNIA, IN THE 1870s
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hat tip to Richard Seymour on this article that shows now the Workingman's Party in California combined anticapitalist and racist ideology. http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/09/18/pastj.gtu030.full.pdf I first encountered the reactionary elements of a workerist interpretation of Marxism in an article I wrote about Timothy Messer-Kruse's The Yankee International: 1848-1876: Dogmatic Marxism's hostility toward non-class demands has been around for a very long time, judging from the evidence of Timothy Messer-Kruse's The Yankee International: 1848-1876. (U. of North Carolina, 1998) Furthermore, you are left with the disturbing conclusion that this problem existed at the very highest levels of the first Communist International, and included Marx himself. The people who launched a section of the Communist International in the USA were veteran radicals, who had fought against slavery and for women's rights for many years. They saw the emerging anti-capitalist struggles in Europe, most especially the Paris Commune of 1871, as consistent with their own. They saw revolutionary socialism as the best way to guarantee the success of the broader democratic movement. What European Marxism would think of them is an entirely different matter. full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/woodhull.htm Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] FREE LABOUR, CAPITALISM AND, THE ANTI-SLAVERY ORIGINS OF CHINESE EXCLUSION IN CALIFORNIA, IN THE 1870s
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I'm having trouble getting access to this piece. However, the Workingmen's Party of California grew from the interests of small Euro-American proprietors resisting the rise of railroads and the forces of industrial capitalism. Like all such operations its appealed to workingmen, but no more so than the major capitalist parties. And, it was prone, like all, to embrace misleading labels. It was hardly anticapitalist in the sense of opposing the capitalist order in general. And it was certainly never Marxist in any way, shape or form. Solidarity, Mark L. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] FREE LABOUR, CAPITALISM AND, THE ANTI-SLAVERY ORIGINS OF CHINESE EXCLUSION IN CALIFORNIA, IN THE 1870s
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == People can access this document via the following link http://scholar.harvard.edu/rudi_batzell/publications/free-labour-capitalism-and-anti-slavery-origins-chinese-exclusion Am 14.10.2014 um 16:48 schrieb Mark Lause via Marxism: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I'm having trouble getting access to this piece. However, the Workingmen's Party of California grew from the interests of small Euro-American proprietors resisting the rise of railroads and the forces of industrial capitalism. Like all such operations its appealed to workingmen, but no more so than the major capitalist parties. And, it was prone, like all, to embrace misleading labels. It was hardly anticapitalist in the sense of opposing the capitalist order in general. And it was certainly never Marxist in any way, shape or form. Solidarity, Mark L. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/aktiv%40rkob.net --- Diese E-Mail ist frei von Viren und Malware, denn der avast! Antivirus Schutz ist aktiv. http://www.avast.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] FREE LABOUR, CAPITALISM AND, THE ANTI-SLAVERY ORIGINS OF CHINESE EXCLUSION IN CALIFORNIA, IN THE 1870s
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 10/14/14 10:48 AM, Mark Lause wrote: I'm having trouble getting access to this piece. However, the Workingmen's Party of California grew from the interests of small Euro-American proprietors resisting the rise of railroads and the forces of industrial capitalism. Like all such operations its appealed to workingmen, but no more so than the major capitalist parties. And, it was prone, like all, to embrace misleading labels. It was hardly anticapitalist in the sense of opposing the capitalist order in general. And it was certainly never Marxist in any way, shape or form. Solidarity, Mark L. Mark is right that the party was not Marxist but it certainly had a working class base. From the article The Workingmen's Party of California by Ralph Kauer in the Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Sep., 1944). I would only add that the generally uncritical view of the party in this 1944 article reflects the nativism that prevailed in both scholarly and progressive movements in the USA at the time: In November Denis Kearney was arrested,as were several of the other leaders who organized meetings to protest against his imprisonment. The authorities erred if they believed that the arrest of Kearney would weaken the movement, for it had a directly opposite effect.The sympathies of laborers throughout the state were aroused and the party was strengthened.Kearney was acquitted,and a few days later more than eight thousand workers marched in a Thanksgiving Day parade in San Francisco which celebrated both the holiday and the release of their leader.The paraders carried placards with such slogans as: Labor shall be King; This is a country for free white labor, not coolie labor; and The ballot before the bullet. In the same month,the party was successful in electing J.E. Clark assemblyman from Santa Clara County.This success was followed in March by victories in the municipal elections of Oakland and Sacramento. At the close of March, the Workingmen's party consisted of at least two branches in each of the twelve wards of the city of San Francisco with a total membership of about fifteen thousand workers.There were also clubs scattered throughout the state, Oakland having the second largest membership with a roll of seventeen hundred laborers. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] FREE LABOUR, CAPITALISM AND, THE ANTI-SLAVERY ORIGINS OF CHINESE EXCLUSION IN CALIFORNIA, IN THE 1870s
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I like the article, in general. It's very informative and I agree in recommending it to anyone interested in the history of the labor movement or the Left. That said, it's terribly difficult to put solid numbers on the party's base. (Rather like taking the size of the SWP a century later based on what it claimed or told the media). Certainly, almost every party with any substance to it is going to have something of a working class base in the cities. That doesn't make New York CIty's Tammany Hall a labor party. So, too, rhetorical appeals mean little. This was also the period in which the Republicans ran U.S. Grant and Henry Wilson as the Workingmen's candidates and had them on a Workingmen's ticket in places. This is a common problem, particularly in U.S. history, where parties and candidates just can't be taken on face value based on what they claim. Its anticapitalist dimension s explained in footnote 23 on the seventh page. It consisted of ‘bounding’ and ‘embedding’ capitalist social relations within a moral and political order. I don't read that as anticapitalist in any sense. Indeed,there's not single capitalist politician of any standing in the U.S. today that couldn't say the same thing. On a related note, I think it was the late 1970s when David Roediger wrote an article on the antislavery origins of the eight-hour movement. In that case, you had abolitionists and antislavery radicals continuing beyond the Civil War to fight for a shorter workday. In the case of the Workingmen's Party of California, many of these characters were just plain thugs and proslavery Democrats who were continuing to sail on that course under other auspices. Yes, I get the common opposition to bond labor, but I just don't trust the rhetoric. More fundamentally, though, if we're going to generalize about the movement's predispositions, etc., we should probably base it on the genuine working class radicals and socialists who were around at the time. Best, Mark L. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
