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The Journal of American Culture Volume 26, Number 2 June 2003
Workers’ Control and the Struggles
Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ in the
Gilded Age and After
Mel van Elteren
In nineteenth-century America, visions about
the good life among labor reformers often entailed
the concept of a democratic republic of citizens
dedicated to self-directed work as small producers. Specific strains of the emerging workingclass movement helped to transform this artisan
republican ideology into an anticapitalist critique
of what was called the system of ‘‘wage slavery.’’
Their spokesmen sparked the imaginations of
working people with a vaguely defined but
powerful vision of a ‘‘cooperative commonwealth.’’ This article1 focuses on the reformunionist, populist, socialist, and syndicalist
movements in US labor history that aimed
at enhancing workers’ control and eliminating
‘‘wage slavery’’ in the years between 1870 and
1920. These movements differed from ‘‘breadand-butter’’ trade unionism and progressivism
that pinned all hope on progress, the rise of
prosperity, and redistribution of wealth. For the
sake of brevity, the various forms of anarchism
and utopian communitarianism will be omitted,
since their impact was relatively less significant in
the domain of labor participation. Special attention will be paid to the utopian, millenarian, and
dystopian aspects of the movements concerned,
and to the view, initially expressed by Daniel Bell,
that American socialists were ‘‘other-worldly
chiliasts’’ who neither understood nor cared about
the realities of American life (6-7). While there is
an element of truth in this assertion, on its own it
falls short of adequately explaining why these
attempts at workers’ control resulted in such
dismal failure. The key, as I hope to demonstrate,
lies elsewhere.
Gilded Age Reformers, Christian
Rhetoric, and the Battle Against
‘‘Plutocracy’’
The period between 1873 and 1897 was marked
by steadily falling prices, economic recessions and
depressions, and a working-class movement
dominated by the rise and fall of the Knights of
Labor. The next period, up until 1914, saw rising
prices, corporate consolidation, and the emergence of the industrial, craft-based unionism of
the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its
affiliates challenged by socialist and syndicalist
opponents on the left (Stromquist 544; Dubofsky,
State 2).
The Knights of Labor (1878-1893) was an
industrial union organized at the national level,
headed by a General Assembly. Workers were
eligible to join, at least in theory, regardless of
gender, ‘‘race,’’ or ethnicity. With the exception of
certain professionals, all gainfully employed
individuals (including unskilled workers) could
join, but three-fourths of each assembly had to be
wage earners. This union was part of a broader
reform movement that pressed for a ‘‘producerist’’
Mel van Elteren is associate professor of social sciences at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
republican society, and it supported the eighthour day, boycotts and arbitration (rather than
strikes), various political reforms (including a
graduated income tax), as well as consumers’ and
producers’ cooperatives. The AFL, a self-appointed adversary of the Knights, was founded
in 1886, and accepted individuals and locals from
its rival union. The AFL, however, recognized the
autonomy of each trade, thus limiting itself
chiefly to business unionism and to skilled
workers. Its unions stressed ‘‘job ownership,’’
favored checks on immigration, demanded relief
from technological job displacement, and proposed enactment of labor legislation. As a less
radical strand of labor reform, the AFL also
cooperated with employers, participating in the
National Civic Federation (1900), for example,
to help foster mediation of labor disputes
(Encyclopedia 755-56).
During the first period, particularly between
1886 and 1894, many labor reformers denounced
the ‘‘wage system’’ and envisioned a ‘‘cooperative
commonwealth’’ where productive labor would
reap its full reward. An insecure economy marked
by declining prices made producerism attractive
to heavily indebted small farmers, struggling small
businessmen, artisans experiencing deskilling, and
laborers in ‘‘saturated labor markets’’ (Stromquist
545). What these reformers shared was an
ideology rooted in the colonial era of the
founding fathers, but drawn more directly from
the beliefs and values of artisans and farmers
before the Civil War. In its antebellum form, this
set of ideas was known as ‘‘artisanal’’ or ‘‘radical
republicanism.’’ The populists would later most
often call it ‘‘producerism.’’ It was based on the
simple notion that the producer deserves the fruits
of his or her labor, often expressed in biblical
terms, such as ‘‘the laborer is worthy of his hire’’
(McMath 51).2 From this basic moral premise, it
followed that republican society ought to guarantee equal opportunity to work, abolish privileges based on arbitrary social distinctions, and
ensure workers the benefits of their toil. In
characterizing this tendency, labor historian
David Montgomery refers to a speech by Henry
Demarest Lloyd given at a trade union picnic
189
on July 4, 1889, which neatly summarizes the
message of post-Civil War reformers. ‘‘The labor
movement,’’ Lloyd argued, had ‘‘a definite, clearly
defined mission.’’
That mission on its constructive side is to
extend into industry the brotherhood already recognized in politics and religion, and
to teach men as workers the love and
equality which they profess as citizens and
worshippers. On its other side, the mission
of the labor movement is to free mankind
from the superstitions and sins of the market
and to abolish the poverty which is the fruit
of those sins. (Lloyd 14-15, qtd. in Montgomery, ‘‘Industrial Democracy’’ 22)
Working-class radicalism in the Gilded Age
still held to a unifying concept of work and
culture, that of the homo faber ideal: ‘‘an artisan
conception of activity, a visible, limited, and direct
relationship to nature’’ (Birnbaum, qtd. in Fink 3).
The homo faber ethic found its political embodiment partly in Enlightenment liberalism, from
which it derived a vigorous rationalism, a vision
of human emancipation, the expectation of progress based on reason, and a tendency to take the
needed action to reform society on the basis of
rational principles. (However, nineteenth-century
working-class radicalism also drew from other
sources, and tended not to support ‘‘progressivism,’’ as we shall see later.) In the nineteenth
century, this Enlightenment liberalism became
tied to a historical, exceptionalist understanding
of America’s national identity, supposedly confirmed by both the American Revolution and the
Civil War—which had been fought to preserve
‘‘free labor’’ and ‘‘equal rights’’ against the
machinations of an ‘‘aristocratic’’ slave-holding
power (Kirk 2: 91). Within the nineteenth-century
political mainstream, this tradition became most
articulate in the free labor assault of the radical
republicans against slavery, which meant a break
within the tradition itself (Montgomery, Beyond
Equality).
Radical republicanism embraced two general
ideas: first, since all men and women are morally
responsible for one another’s welfare, labor reform should leaven the new industrial world with
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The Journal of American Culture Volume 26, Number 2 June 2003
a commitment to the commonweal; and second,
Americans had won citizenship as a consequence
of their liberation from Britain.3 This suggested
active participation in determining their collective
identity, as well as loyalty to the nation that
transcended individual interests. However, in
reality, political participation was restricted to
adult white males.4 Proponents of this ideology
esteemed the values of independence, manliness,
and virtue central to the republican tradition, but
rejected the acquisitive individualism of a ‘‘free
labor ideology’’ that others associated with it
(Stromquist 553).
Working-class radicalism in the Gilded Age
embodied commitments to the citizen-as-producer and the producer-as-citizen, and strenuously
opposed ‘‘wage slavery.’’ Labor activists frequently used the producer conception of citizenship as a ‘‘measuring device’’ to assess industrial
society, which they found lacking. The Declaration of Principles approved by trade-union
delegates to the Industrial Congress of 1874
(and adopted by the Knights of Labor four years
later) propounded that:
The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth, which unless
checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the
toiling masses, renders it imperative, if we
desire to enjoy the blessings of the government bequeathed us by the founders of the
Republic, that a check should be placed
upon its power and unjust accumulation, and
a system adopted that will secure to the
laborer the fruits of his toil. (Workingman’s
Advocate, qtd. in Montgomery, ‘‘Industrial
Democracy’’ 23)
Here one can see a clear continuity with the
republican-egalitarian strain in the age of Andrew
Jackson—as inculcated by struggling farmers,
wage laborers, artisans, and apprentices—who
aimed for a more egalitarian version of republican
entrepreneurship than that advocated by leading
politicians and business spokesmen. The latter
increasingly interpreted republicanism as ideological support for a liberal-capitalist political
economy (Shi 100).
Throughout the nineteenth century, evangelical and rationalist tendencies were juxtaposed in
the rhetorics and political practices of the
opponents of the status quo. Itinerant preachers
and union-organizing artisans agreed that oppressive governance by the rich was sinful and
unrepublican. There was a widely shared belief
about the nation’s millennial promise. Many
supported its missionary universalism, acting as
a ‘‘beacon of liberty’’ to the rest of the world
(Kazin, Populist Persuasion 11; Pessen 67-73; de
Tocqueville; Tuveson).
At this time, labor radicals targeted the same
enemies as Jacksonians had previously done,
especially ‘‘money power’’ and ‘‘monopoly,’’
adding the neologism ‘‘plutocrat’’ to the radical
lexicon. They still considered central banks and
investment houses as the main offenders, but also
implicated the large industrial corporations
owned by men such as J. P. Morgan and Andrew
Carnegie. As historian Michael Kazin put it, ‘‘The
‘money power’ now signified a nonproductive,
immeasurably wealthy octopus whose long, slimy
tentacles reached from private firms on both sides
of the Atlantic to grasp every household, business,
and seat of government’’ (Kazin, Populist 31).
Many of the arguments employed by those
who tried to build an oppositional movement
were couched in Christian vocabulary. In their
campaigns, labor activists—even the Painite freethinkers and secular propagandists among them—
borrowed freely from the Christian heritage.
Apparently, they found it expedient to utilize
the prevailing discourse in order to get their
message across to working men (Gutman) amid
the latest surge of Christian revivalism during the
1870s and 1880s, when hundreds of thousands of
Americans attended the great urban revivals of
Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey. Protestant
missionary societies mushroomed, and after
1890—during the Third Great Awakening (18901920) in US religious history (McLoughlin 14178)—the Social Gospel proclaimed by urban
ministers such as Washington Gladden, Walter
Rauschenbusch, and George Herron took the
claim that Christ taught a doctrine of community
and fraternity as its starting point. Socially
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
engaged ministers like M. A. Smith and W. S.
Nobel even supported the democratic socialism of
Eugene V. Debs, who, although inspired by Marx
and Engels, applauded the social teachings of
Jesus. Along with the leaders of the Socialist
Party, they drew on evangelical Protestantism’s
gospel of militance and rituals like the camp
meeting to rouse popular opposition to corporate
capitalism’s devastating impact on industrial
America. Linking postmillennial optimism to
modern notions of ‘‘progress,’’ these crusaders
hoped to build a millennial kingdom on earth to
hasten Christ’s return (Kazin, Populist 33; Countryman 96; McLoughlin 162).
At the same time, premillennialist pessimism
gained ground among activists from various social
backgrounds, including the unchurched. Whereas
postmillennialists believed that the millennium
was unfolding through their efforts to build a
more humane and just society on earth, premillennialists saw society as utterly corrupt and
wicked. Expecting Christ’s return before a millenarian Kingdom could be established, premillenialists focused their efforts on soul-saving
strategies (Schaefer; Weber). Workers who hardly
ever saw the inside of a church, and disrespected
conservative ministers, would still quote the
Bible, appealing to divine justice to condemn
their opponents’ conduct and legitimate their
own. Representatives of the Knights of Labor
called corporate wealth the ‘‘Antichrist’’ that only
a ‘‘new Pentecost’’ could destroy. Of course, such
metaphors were not meant to convert people to
Christianity, but to communicate with ordinary
folk in a discourse they understood, one that
made it easier to speak with emotional depth about
their basic social concerns (Kazin, Populist 33).
The situation was further complicated by the
fact that Gilded Age labor reformers were
ambivalent toward the capitalist market. On the
one hand, they often demanded the abolition of
the wage system; but on the other hand, in line
with the classical economists, they sometimes
referred to the operation of ‘‘natural law’’ in the
marketplace, and even went so far as to acknowledge the need for a ‘‘fair return’’ on invested
capital. These labor activists were not against
191
profit per se, and therefore did not call for
revolution or the overthrow of capitalism (Fink
6-7). Rather, the Knights of Labor and their allies
thought that the primary means to escape wage
slavery was to change the power imbalance with
employers and their allies. They sought to
strengthen their position through education,
organization, cooperation, economic sanction,
and political influence, in order to ‘‘secure to the
workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they
create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their
intellectual, moral and social faculties, all of the
benefits of recreation, and pleasures of association; in a word, to enable them to share in the
gains and honors of advancing civilization’’
(McNeill 486, qtd. in Fink 7) .
Thus, the Knights developed an extensive
‘‘movement culture’’ carried by a dense network
of alternative institutions—local assemblies, reading rooms, bands, parades, sporting clubs, cooperatives, and labor parties. Through these
institutions, the Knights promoted their version
of class solidarity (see below), mutual aid, and
self-organization. The vision of a producers’ selfgoverning Republic was carried out in practice
through the economic independence that workers
obtained in cooperatives, and their powerful
leverage in boycotts and strikes. Although the
national leadership officially denounced strikes,
local and district assemblies nevertheless struck
when deemed necessary (Stromquist 553-54).
The Knights held a rather flexible notion of
class boundaries. Their concept of the producing
classes suggested an ultimate social division,
categorically excluding those associated with
idleness (bankers, speculators), corruption (lawyers, liquor dealers, gamblers), or social parasitism (all of the above). Other social strata, such
as local merchants and manufacturers, were
not automatically labeled as enemies because of
their occupation or social status; instead, they
were judged on an individual basis according
to their actions. A number of shopkeepers and
small manufacturers expressed sympathy and
support for the labor movement, and were therefore respected by the workers. But those who
denigrated the worker or his product laid
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themselves open to righteous retaliation in the
form of boycotts or strikes (Fink 9-10; Kazin,
Populist 34).
From this perspective, local politics evolved
around a moral community of self-governing
citizens under construction rather than a conflict
of economic classes, which did lead to short-lived
displays of social unity against ‘‘monopolistic’’
foes. This became evident, for example, in the
mobilization of entire communities against railroad corporations during the mass strike of 1877,
the mushrooming of independent political parties
in the 1880s, and the regional successes of the
People’s Party in the early 1890s. These events all
showed how powerful a class-inclusive producer
ethic was in evoking fears among local and
national elites (Kazin, Populist 35).
Moral and intellectual development were both
strongly emphasized by these working-class
reformers, even when the conditions of industrial
life made the bourgeois ideal of cultivated selffulfillment hard to achieve. The idealization
of hearth and home, a pillar of familial sentimentality in the Gilded Age, was also much in vogue
within the dominant stream of the labor movement. Reformers were quick to exploit these
conventions to their advantage. Apart from
the idealized ‘‘toiling producer,’’ they used the
ideal of family life as the moral and material
cornerstone of society to attack capitalist industry
(Fink 10-11).
The phrase ‘‘nobility of toil,’’ with its glorification of the worker and the puritan work ethic,
was frequently used in the Knights’ rhetoric and
rituals. Sources of their sanctification of work
were nostalgia for a preindustrial past, opposition
to the degradation of work, and defense of
devalued crafts skills, as well as a utopian vision
of a cooperative industrial future. ‘‘They dreamed
of a day,’’ as Leon Fink so eloquently puts it,
‘‘when even the enterprise of a Cornelius Vanderbilt or Jay Gould might be harnessed to ‘a
different social system,’ which would replace the
possession of ‘wealth’ with ‘industrial and moral
standard[s] of worth’’’ (9).
The producer ethic left out women, however,
despite the fact that a large proportion of the
industrial workforce was female. It was taken for
granted that every male producer would strive for
independence, to support himself and his family
economically through skilled labor and/or the
steady improvement of property. A woman working for wages indicated that her husband, father,
or brother was in dire financial straits. According
to this ethic, an independent people were supposedly dominated by self-reliant men.5 Likewise,
the democratic vision of producerism ordinarily
excluded blacks. Earlier, wage earners had feared
slaves, not only as economic competitors, but also
as symbols of what extreme dependency could
mean. Among populists, there were differing
sentiments about ‘‘race,’’ however. Activists in
the People’s Party and the late nineteenth-century
labor movement sought to build an alliance with
blacks who shared their economic interests. But
even the most tolerant activists tended to downplay America’s race-divided history, treating
blacks as just another segment in a pluralist
society, or categorizing them as ‘‘worker,’’ ‘‘laborer,’’ and/or ‘‘producer,’’ while white images
remained the norm (Kazin, Populist 14-15).
Moreover, many labor reformers were ethnocentrists with superiority complexes in relation to
the newcomers they hoped to organize. As with
African Americans, they doubted whether recent
immigrants were capable of fighting the monopolists in a sustained, ideologically correct way.
Even native-born activists who reached out to
immigrant workers were of the opinion that
political democracy, prideful work habits, and
well-governed, middle-class communities had
been invented by men of Anglo-American descent. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants,
for example, were thought to be ‘‘naturally’’
servile, and could not even count on paternalistic
concern from labor activists (Kazin 35-36).
Populism and SocialismPartly
Intertwined yet Distinct Strands
Initiated by Lawrence Goodwyn, the term ‘‘populism’’ was defined more precisely to distinguish
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
the free-silver movement of the 1890s from the
more radical farmers’ movement that evolved
from experiments with cooperative finance and
marketing. Faced with mounting debts, rising
railroad rates, and a shortage of credit, the
‘‘genuine populists,’’ as Goodwyn calls them (as
opposed to the ‘‘shadow populists’’), organized
cooperatives, which they saw as the only solution
to their problems. Political education intended to
break through the ‘‘conforming modes of
thought’’ and the ‘‘intimidating rules of conduct’’
that discouraged popular initiative. The ‘‘shadow
populists,’’ however, diverted the movement from
reforms designed to develop cooperatives into the
free-silver movement. Expecting overnight electoral success, they steered the People’s Party to
endorse the Democratic presidential candidate
William Jennings Bryan. This ended the populists’
attempts to break the Democratic monopoly in
the South—where they had achieved much
success—and doomed to failure efforts to unite
black and white farmers in a new reform party
(Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, Populist Moment, ‘‘Cooperative Commonwealth’’).
After the 1896 People’s Party debacle, many
populists were demoralized. Some became more
radical and joined Eugene Debs’s Social Democratic Party (founded in 1898), later renamed the
Socialist Party of America (1901).6 Despite their
millennialist rhetoric, most Debsian socialists
were realists and reformers who sought to build
a third party comparable in structure to the two
major political parties, but they lacked a system of
patronage and therefore could not exploit the
spoils system to hold their party together. Instead,
they had to rely on a shared belief in a better,
more moral cooperative society, to be achieved
through the efforts of a united, class-conscious
working class, but were divided about political
strategies (Dubofsky, Industrialism 98-99).
Importantly, the Debsian socialists recruited
some of their strongest grass-roots support in the
Southwest—in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and
Arkansas, former strongholds of populism
(Green, Grass-Roots). According to historian
James Green, the Socialist Party won support by
adapting populist programs and strategies (such as
193
summer training camps for education, agitation,
and mobilization) to the changed social and
political circumstances of the 1900s. The difference between a populist reform movement, which
accepted private property and a competitive
market system, and a more radical socialist
movement, which challenged the American creed
of ‘‘democratic classlessness’’ and ‘‘freedom of
opportunity,’’ was pronounced (Green, ‘‘Populism’’ 8).7 In order to appeal to dispossessed
tenant farmers and workers, these socialists had to
develop a new kind of land program that adopted
the principle of use and occupancy as the only
title to the land. Only a few populists shared this
idea, mostly those influenced by Henry George’s
radical ideas about breaking up land monopoly
with a single tax, or socialism.
The majority of populists remained confined to
corporate capitalist activity, only condemning
absentee ownership by foreign land syndicates
and railroad corporations. Native landlords, even
those who held large lots of land and hired tenants,
were not viewed as capitalists as long as they did
not engage in speculation. (The Knights of Labor,
however, took a tougher stance on land speculation, adopting a land plank in 1889, which declared
that only use and occupancy should give people
title to the land.) In contrast, the socialists
concentrated on the realm of production, not
exchange. They did not assume that an expansion
of credit would lead to a redistribution of land and
wealth, and therefore incorporated the single tax
idea into their program. They also wanted the
commonwealth to own a larger public domain by
taking control of land from large private owners
and making it available to small farmers for use
and occupancy. The Socialist Party intended to use
confiscatory land taxes, state subsidies, and expansion of the public domain to help small farmers
and prevent them from being turned into ‘‘feudal
serfs.’’ Thus the socialists suggested an alternative
to both the agrarian populist position and the
orthodox Marxist demand for complete nationalization of all land (Green, ‘‘Populism’’ 16-18).
Generally speaking, Debsian socialists aimed at
a worker-controlled economy—both industrially
and agriculturally—as a way of ensuring ‘‘direct
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The Journal of American Culture Volume 26, Number 2 June 2003
democracy.’’ This vision distinguished them not
only from the populists whose idea of the
‘‘cooperative commonwealth’’ rested on the premise of a producer democracy; it also separated
them from the rightist social democrats, liberals,
and progressives whose concept of industrial
democracy simply meant worker involvement in
company affairs (34).
Socialism in the Southwest developed as the
frontier closed and land monopolization put the
acquisition of a family farm beyond reach for
most tenants. Many supported the socialists
because they wanted to control their own land,
but others favored cooperative agriculture as a
means to gain access to better quality, stateowned lands and more modern machinery. Due to
the greater availability of land for family farms, at
least theoretically, collectivization was not very
attractive in the United States. This option was
aimed mainly at agricultural laborers who had
been fully dispossessed from the land.8 It was
among these wage earners—next to the growing
group of unskilled workers in the mass production sectors in the industrial heartland—that the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or
‘‘Wobblies,’’ held their organization recruitment
drives (19). Regarded as a home-grown variant of
syndicalism, they arrived on the scene at the same
time that socialism reached its zenith.
The Wobblies: ‘‘Millenarianism’’
Kept in Check
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic,
significant developments took place. At the turn
of the century, syndicalism—especially in France,
and guild socialism in Britain—posed true challenges to the wage system. Guild socialists were
strongly influenced by the arts and crafts movement, and William Morris’s view on work and
craftsmanship in particular. From Morris they
learned that the case for socialism ought to be
based on the right to expect pride and pleasure
from one’s work. Guild socialism considered
workers’ control of production as the cure-all
for apathy and the only solid ground for
democratic citizenship. Its proponents saw wage
labor as a form of slavery, and therefore should be
resisted. They regarded trade unions as embryonic
governments rather than mere channels through
which workers could bargain for higher wages
and better working conditions (Lasch 320-21;
Wright). According to guild socialism’s British
advocate, historian G. D. H. Cole, unions could
become educational institutions, the modern
equivalent of apprenticeship, in which workers
could acquire the technical knowledge that was
necessary to expropriate the capitalists (Cole
1921, 1923). At some point, the unions would
also take on the welfare functions of the state,
and dispense old-age pensions, sick benefits,
accident insurance, and many other provisions
(Hobson 1919).
By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans were becoming avid supporters of William
Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. A true
Morris craze developed, vigorously promoted
by Edward Bok, editor of the widely-read
periodical Ladies’ Home Journal. Importantly,
however, Bok completely ignored Morris’s critique of the factory system and advocacy of a
communal socialism. In fact, he regarded Morris
as important for his aesthetic simplicity, not
for his social radicalism (Shi 190). As historian
David Shi suggests,
These crafts reformers, like Edward Bok and
other progressive moralists, saw in good
taste and simple living the means for the
middle classes to turn away from the
artificialities and decadence of modern civilization, while leaving the basic capitalist
structure intact. Most of the American
followers of Morris never felt comfortable
with the Englishman’s brand of utopian
socialism, nor did many of them have much
sympathy for the unskilled proletariat. (192)
While guild socialism never attracted a substantial following in the United States, syndicalism, although highly fragmented, was more
successful. Basically, syndicalists wanted workers
to govern themselves rather than defer to a
managerial class, regardless of ideological cast.
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
Consequently, syndicalists opposed the democratic socialists, and even the revolutionary
socialists, since neither had any intention of
abolishing conditions that required a class of
supervisors in the workplace. Syndicalists believed that workers’ collective control of their
own work would rekindle the pride in workmanship that was associated in the past with smallscale private ownership. According to Georges
Sorel, its major French advocate, syndicalism was
superior to socialism because of its appreciation of
proprietorship, which Marxists condemned as the
source of a ‘‘petty-bourgeois’’ mentality and
cultural backwardness. Against Marxist denigration of rural life, syndicalists valued the feelings of
attachment inspired in every truly qualified
worker by the productive forces ‘‘entrusted’’ to
him (Lasch 310-11, 315-16).
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
founded in 1905, emerged from the Western
Federation of Miners. The western United States
had social conditions not unlike those that
spawned the syndicalist explosion in Europe,
where industrialism penetrated into economies
still dominated by small workshops. The traditions of the mining and logging camps met
head-on with the grimmest form of corporate
capitalism. These harsh realities stood in stark
relief against the prevailing stereotype of rugged
individualism and independence held up in the
American West, which was associated with the
wandering life of the unattached male, not with
the small proprietor’s control over his household,
land, or shop and tools. Hence, in its newspaper,
Solidarity, the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter,
the ‘‘nomadic worker of the West.’’ This contrasts
sharply with European syndicalism, which was
characterized by a sober ethic of thrift and selfdenial. In the public mind, the Wobblies came to
be associated with an ethic of unlimited selfexpression and defiant irresponsibility, as cultivated par excellence by the bohemian intellectuals
of Greenwich Village. The latter saw the Wobblies
as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits,
rebels against respectability, and therefore soul
mates. They felt a strong affinity between their
own modernist, literary ideal of the emancipated
195
individual, unrestricted by the cultural baggage of
the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers
celebrated by the IWW. In the Greenwich scene,
art and revolution were assimilated; several of
IWW’s leading figures too saw themselves as artists.
This became especially manifest in the Paterson
Strike Pageant of 1913, in which Wobblies and
their middle-class sympathizers jointly took part.
Conceived by Greenwich Village’s salon hostess,
Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to
dramatize the workers’ exploitation by capitalism,
but, as Lasch provocatively contends, it led to a
more ‘‘insidious kind of exploitation by turning
radical politics into entertainment’’ (Lasch 33738). Whereas the syndicalist movement in Europe
(at least in Sorel’s version) combined political
radicalism with cultural conservatism, in America—to the extent to which the IWW embodied
syndicalism—it joined forces with the cultural
avant-garde, and became part of the intellectuals’
revolt against middle-class morality.9
It should be noted, however, that the IWW
never became a large union. At its peak, it had
about 120,000 members, but ordinarily averaged
only 15,000 at a time when the Knights of Labor
counted over 750,000 (Voss 242 n13). With the
exception of the Western Federation of Miners,
the IWW failed to win major union affiliates,
although support within the United Mineworkers
of America and the Brewery Workers was
considerable. During its first two years of
existence, the IWW was riddled with bitter
internal squabbles, leading to its stagnation. Its
revival between 1908 and 1912 was due largely to
the organizational dynamism that it developed
among casual workers in the far west (lumberjacks, agricultural laborers, dock workers, and
hard rock miners), and to its strategic interventions in mass strikes of unskilled new immigrant
workers in eastern manufacturing centers such as
McKees Rocks, Lawrence, Paterson, Akron, and
Detroit. During this period, the IWW gave a
clearer structure to industrial unionism, and
stimulated organizing along industrial lines in
more traditionally craft-oriented unions (Stromquist 564). However, it would be wrong simply
to equate syndicalism with industrial unionism
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(Peterson 65). Hard-line syndicalists were against
attempts to force all workers into industrial
unions under the banner of ‘‘one big union,’’
whereas ‘‘proper syndicalists’’ favored decentralization and local autonomy (Weinstein 13).
As self-proclaimed saviors of society, Wobblies
tried first of all to organize the growing mass of
unskilled and semiskilled workers who had been
ignored by the AFL-affiliated craft unions. Feared
by employers as the most dangerous workers’
organization, the IWW threw down the gauntlet
to American capitalists (Ramirez 195-96). Importantly, while the Wobblies did condemn ‘‘wage
slavery,’’ its leaders merely asserted the worker’s
right to the ‘‘full product of his labor,’’ reducing
social justice to matters of distribution rather than
workers’ control of small-scale production.10 In
this regard, the Wobblies deviated from the
producerist tradition.
In his history of the IWW, Melvyn Dubofsky
concluded that these activists combined a ‘‘primitive millenarianism’’ with modern revolutionary
goals (We 154). As British historian Eric Hobsbawm explains in Primitive Rebels, ‘‘The essence
of millenarianism is the hope of a complete and
radical change in the world which will be reflected
in the millennium, a world shorn of all its present
deficiencies’’ (57). Like ‘‘primitive millenarians,’’
Wobblies demonstrated a strong antipathy to the
existing reality, coupled with a romantic absolutism regarding the creation of a completely new
world here and now. But they rejected the
apocalyptic Judeo-Christian vision in favor of
more secular ideas loosely drawn from Marxist
and syndicalist thinking. However, in contrast to
Marxists, Wobblies had a less clear conception of
the coming revolution. Their leader, Bill Haywood, differed from Socialist Party leaders such
as Berger, Hillquist, or Debs, who thought that
capitalism might endure for quite some time.
Instead, Haywood maintained an apocalyptic
vision of a final conflict between exploiters and
oppressed, believing that Armageddon could
occur at any time, and therefore made no longterm plans (Weinstein 14).
In its heyday, the IWW appealed to social
groups caught up in the rapid transition from
preindustrial to industrial society, largely firstgeneration immigrants from either southern or
eastern Europe, joined by dispossessed Americanborn, internal migrants. Despite the IWW’s belief
in imminent revolution—evidenced in rhetorics
about sabotage and industrial war—the union
constantly sought opportunities to ameliorate the
working lives of its members, agitating for shorter
hours, better wages, and improved workplace
conditions. Ultimately, even the Wobblies do not
fit the view, initially put forward by Daniel Bell,
that American socialists were ‘‘other-worldly
chiliasts.’’ Instead, IWW speakers and publications emphasized two major goals at the time: the
improvement of the living conditions of the
working class (the necessities of food, shelter,
clothing, and amusement), and the creation of an
organization that could run the industries in the
best interests of the workers after capitalism had
been overthrown. Yet, just beneath the surface,
thinly veiled notions of utopia and revolution
remained (Dubofsky, We 149-55).
Unlike ‘‘primitive millenarians,’’ Wobblies did
not expect their revolution to occur by divine
intervention overnight. Nor did they count on an
inevitable Marxist-style class struggle or Darwinian evolutionary march of history to fuel their
revolution. Although inescapable in the end, they
could assist the course of history and help bring
about the revolutionary outcome (156). However,
the Wobblies deviated most markedly from the
prevailing revolutionary spirit in their views
about the general strike and the governance of
their utopia. It never became clear how the IWW
expected to overthrow capitalism, nor did proponents of its syndicalist commonwealth clarify how
the IWW would defend its utopia (once realized)
from counterrevolutionary opposition (166-68).
In this regard, the IWW undoubtedly embraced a
millenarianist impulse.11
Like Wobblies, Debsian socialists envisioned
a cooperative commonwealth in which democratically organized workers would control each
industry, including collectivized areas of agriculture. They were active within the AFL as
well. Leaders of the Machinists’, Ladies Garment
Workers’, and Brewery Workers’ unions, and
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
important United Mine Workers districts joined
the Socialist Party by 1912. Afterwards, the rightwing socialists adopted a more conventional
statist version of social democracy, expelling
Wobblies and other more leftist socialist and
syndicalist radicals who insisted on workers’
control. But in the first decade of the twentieth
century, especially in the West, this brand of
industrial democracy explains much of socialism’s
appeal (Green, ‘‘Populism’’ 19; Montgomery,
‘‘Industrial Democracy’’ 37-39).
The Ambiguous Heritage of the
Producer Ethic
By World War I, the focus on social reform and
reclamations of proprietorship, and the civic
virtues associated with it, had been replaced by
attempts to stimulate economic growth and overseas expansion, achieve a redistribution of income,
equalize opportunity in various ways, and make
the working classes an integral part of a society of
consumers.12 None of these policies aimed at the
kind of society of active, enterprising citizens
envisioned by nineteenth-century radical democrats and labor reformers. A solution to the ‘‘labor
problem’’ through the reorganization of work
itself—whereby the restoration of its characterforming discipline was taken into account—now
seemed obsolete.
The producer ethic was neither liberal nor
petty-bourgeois (as the terms are understood
today); it was anticapitalist (but not statist
socialist)—radical, even revolutionary, and deeply
conservative, all at the same time (Wilentz). The
labor reformers who envisioned a democratic
republic of self-governing communities in which
active, enterprising citizens would be proprietors
through producers’ cooperatives and the like, thus
controlling their own work situation, held dystopian views of the world to come. They did not
like the future they saw. ‘‘Wage slavery’’ precisely
embodied their worst fears: a lack of control over
their work, being ‘‘bossed around’’ by others in
order to make a living, alongside feelings of
197
alienation and powerlessness. These reformers
were highly critical of the unbridled expansionism
and insatiable greed they recognized in the
wheelings and dealings of corporate capitalists,
investment bankers, and speculators who aimed
for hefty profits through unrestricted growth of
business and trade by any means necessary. But
they were also wary of the idea, commonly held
among progressives and liberals, that the needs of
working people could be satisfied through continuous economic growth and the redistribution
of abundance. This view, which the labor formers
rejected, was exemplified perfectly by Edward
Bellamy’s utopian novels. In Looking Backward
(1888), which was widely read, Bellamy envisioned a highly rationalized system of work
consisting of an industrial army as a mechanism
by which labor could become collectivized,
performing with the perfect efficiency made
possible by an elaborate division of tasks. Thus,
labor would be reduced to a few hours per day
and a few years out of every life, unleashing ample
time for leisurely pursuits. For Bellamy, an army
was a gigantic machine in which every job was
reducible to a routine of tasks, and the need for
individual enterprise and imagination effectively
eliminated. Convinced that men and women wish
only to enjoy life with minimal effort, he could
only envision a smooth trajectory toward the
utopian realm of consumerism.
The worldview of these labor radicals was
highly ambivalent and filled with contradictory
tensions. On the one hand, many held a pessimistic view of the future, often expressed in the
evangelist rhetoric of premillennialist thinking.
But on the other hand, their utopian ideas about
the good society were actually rather down-toearth, although to the general public these came
across as naı̈ve or ‘‘other-worldly’’ amidst the
rapidly changing landscape of late nineteenthcentury America, when there was less leeway for
practicing such beliefs. Most of these people were
well aware of the democratic habits of selfreliance, responsibility, initiative, and other civic
virtues they thought were associated with proprietorship, which rested on a broad distribution
of property (without extremes of wealth and
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property) and the self-absorption that comes from
immersion in an all-consuming work task. They
saw the pitfalls associated with material comforts
that threatened a more demanding ideal of the
good life, and recognized the paradox that
happiness depends on the realization that human
beings are not created for happiness. This can be
traced back to the tradition of Christian prophecy
(as reformulated by Calvin and his followers) and
to nineteenth-century moral philosophers and
social critics—notably Thomas Carlyle and Ralph
Waldo Emerson—in whom Puritanism remained
a powerful influence.13 In the prophetic tradition
so central to Judaism, Augustinian Catholicism,
and early Protestantism, Lasch writes, ‘‘the Kingdom of God was conceived neither as the end of
the world nor as an ‘ideal for a future society’ but
as a community of the faithful living under the
judgment inherent in the evanescence of earthly
affairs and more particularly in the ‘doom of
threatened societies’’’(47).
The political morality of producerism condemned every attempt to get something for
nothing. Emerson’s ‘‘unearned increment’’ was
the producers’ version of hubris, which disregards
limits and natural boundaries, and challenges fate,
thereby provoking retribution. What these reformers had in common was a sense of limits, a
structure of feelings that was characteristic of the
populist mentality so dominant among the lower
middle class in particular, which also encompassed its characteristic vices of envy, resentment,
and servility.
These small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen,
small farmers, and workers in threatened sectors
held deep reservations about the progressive
conception of history because they found little
evidence of cumulative improvement of the
quality of life of working people, and more often
suffered—rather than benefited—from ‘‘improvement.’’ Concepts like nemesis, fate, fortune, or
providence seemed to describe their experience
more accurately than that of progress. Their
critique of progress was built on the moral
conservatism of the lower middle class at the
time, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship and competence, its understanding of the
value of loyalty, and its struggle against the moral
temptation of resentment. Theirs was a more
painstaking and morally compelling definition of
the good life than that implied in the progressive
worldview.
Over time, however, when corporate capitalism marginalized small producers, this populist
subculture became ever more defensive. Like
various other groups in America, this subculture
brought forth racism, xenophobia, and antiintellectualism often mentioned by liberal critics,
historians, and social scientists who studied the
populist movements.14 The ideal of a society
composed of small producers was narrow, provincial, and reactionary by their standards. The
progressive mind held a contempt for the populists’ backwardness, irrationality, antimodernity,
respectability, and religiosity. However, I agree
with Lasch that these liberals tended to overlook
what was valuable in this tradition. It embodied
the most serious attempts so far to develop
alternatives for proprietorship and the associated
skills required to be a competent small producer
(including those of a professional ‘‘calling’’) as the
material basis of civic virtue in modern politics.
And this tradition also involved repeated attempts
to organize forms of political action that reckoned
with the need for ‘‘spiritual discipline’’ against
envy and resentment.15 These crucial issues were
never put on the agenda of the progressive
tradition. In a broader sense, this includes both
left and right movements, insofar as they hold the
hubristic vision of endless economic growth and
its denial of moral and material limits on human
power in making history. In my view, the positive
features of the producer ethic contain something
valuable to reconsider today, against the backdrop
of expansive corporate capitalism and its farreaching consequences for labor (Derber; Korten;
Rifkin).
Discussion
Reform unionists, populists, Debsian socialists,
Wobblies, and a few other revolutionary socialist
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
and syndicalist groups have all been active in the
fight against ‘‘wage slavery’’ and supported some
form of ‘‘workers’ control’’ (although this term
was not always used). In hindsight, none of these
efforts was particularly successful. There are a
number of reasons why these attempts virtually
all failed, besides the purported sectarianism
and politically uncompromising behavior of the
proponents involved.
Particularly relevant for our purpose are the
insights of revisionist historians who have examined the ways in which both the state and
employers powerfully shaped the American labor
movement (reflecting attempts in history and the
social sciences to ‘‘bring the state back in’’ to US
history). Historian Larry Gerber, in an overview
of recent comparative literature on American
labor relations and labor politics, reiterated that
employer attitudes and state policy (including the
judiciary system) were the critical factors in
establishing the inhospitable—if not overtly
hostile—environment with which the American
labor movement had to contend during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
most distinctive feature of the American system
of industrial relations has been what Sanford
Jacoby calls the ‘‘exceptionally high degree of
employer hostility’’ toward unions, which coincided with the inherent weakness of government
authorities who sanctioned and supported employer resistance through force. Moreover, the
‘‘independent’’ US judiciary was almost immune
to popular pressures for labor reform exerted by
workers through the electoral system; the courts,
in fact, played a critical role in depoliticizing the
American labor movement (Forbath; Hattam).16
There were hardly any court rulings or governmental actions that were empathetic to labor’s
position during this period (Gerber 262).
Sociologist Kim Voss has persuasively argued
that American employers—backed by the state—
differed significantly from those in England and
France. Yet American workers were more similar
to their European counterparts. According to
Voss, labor’s distinctiveness in the United States
was first of all ‘‘the fruit of class struggle waged in
the 1880s between organized labor and organized
199
capital,’’ and ‘‘[i]ndustrial relations and labor
politics [were] exceptional because in 1886 and
1887 employers won the class struggle’’ (232). The
countermobilization of employers, especially
against skilled craft workers who maintained their
allegiance to the Knights in the hostile years
following the Haymarket bombing in 1886—
coupled with the delegitimization of inclusive
strategies of labor organization—ultimately
brought about the Knights’ decline. Workers’
responses to this employer opposition, and the
lessons drawn from their defeats, helped, in turn,
to discredit working-class republicanism and
inclusive, broad-based unionism, strengthening
the case for ‘‘pure and simple’’ trade unionism in
the United States (Voss 4, 12, 239-49).
It should be recognized, though, that business
firms, while generally hostile, did not form a
monolithic bloc, as Shelton Stromquist pointed
out in his general overview of US labor movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries:
With the return of prosperity in 1897
advocates of ameliorative labor politics were
joined by some of the largest finance
capitalists and industrial trust-makers in the
land. Under the auspices of the Chicago
Civic Federation and, after 1900, the National Civic Federation, Ralph Easley and
his corporate colleagues supported the voluntary arbitration of industrial disputes and
the creation of trade agreements between
unions and employers. This ‘‘era of good
feeling’’ was shattered by the ‘‘open shop’’
movement [aimed at keeping the unions out
of industries] that gained momentum after
1902. (Stromquist 560-61)
Organized labor then became ‘‘a pariah in
virtually all corners of the business world’’ until
World War I, when the AFL gained legitimacy
because its leaders were willing to cooperate with
the US government’s industrial mobilization.17
It was against this backdrop that the American
Federation of Labor obtained the leading role
in the late 1890s (after the Knights of Labor
disintegrated and disbanded in 1893) and the issue
of cooperatives had become marginalized within
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the labor movement. The American labor movement once again became the domain of a small
group of skilled and semiskilled workers,
organized primarily along craft lines. It also
became much more difficult to establish industrial
or general unions because exclusive jurisdiction
was AFL’s guiding principle; only one union
at a time could organize a particular group of
workers. Unionists who tried to challenge
the jurisdiction of another union were refused
admission into the federation. And workers who
were more receptive to sectional organizing
strategies were much more likely to attract
sponsorship from the AFL. Organizers were
usually hired by national craft unions, and therefore recruited only craft locals. Over time, it
became increasingly difficult to create alternative
union structures. As a result, only a few attempts
were made, and these ultimately were much less
successful than those of the Knights of Labor.
This situation also made it virtually impossible to
try to convert craft workers to the IWW and to
new union forms, as Wobblies who advocated the
European strategy of ‘‘boring from within’’ to win
over adherents in the AFL to syndicalism had
done previously.
On the other hand, industrial unionism had its
supporters within the AFL, especially after 1909,
when it was ascendant, despite the official
position of its leadership. Faced with an explicit
‘‘open shop’’ strategy in various industrial sectors,
unskilled immigrant workers and skilled craftsmen went on strike together. These episodes of
worker solidarity resulted from a marriage of
interests between skilled and unskilled workers,
the skilled seeking to arrest the erosion of their
control at the workplace and the unskilled seeking
redress of economic grievances resulting from
unemployment and the impact of inflation (Montgomery, ‘‘New Unionism’’ 564).
In the meantime, the struggle for ‘‘workers’
control’’ continued, but with the exception of
the groupings mentioned earlier (including some
inside the AFL, throughout and immediately
after World War I), this now occurred within
the narrow constraints imposed by an increasingly elaborate division of labor. The concept
of ‘‘industrial democracy’’ became much more
limited in its scope. At the workplace, skilled
workers attempted to enforce union work rules,
retain control over apprenticeship, and prevent
their replacement by unskilled laborers, many
of whom were recent immigrants. The influx
of unskilled workers and the need for more
inclusive forms of unionization ultimately became
a much more significant issue than the defense of
craftsmanship.
Not until the New Deal period, nearly sixty
years after large-scale companies became dominant in American industrial life, did the Congress
of Industrial Organization (CIO) begin to organize America’s mass-production industries (Voss
2, 242). It was only then that lesser-skilled
workers were successfully incorporated into the
labor movement and national unions made
attempts to build political institutions. The long
delay with which successful broad-based unionism developed in the United States had enduring,
negative consequences. By the 1930s, when the
CIO became active,
job structures were already highly differentiated, and, after some initial efforts
to increase the amount of worker discretion
on the job, unions adopted an approach to
collective bargaining that conformed to the
kinds of job structures that had become
institutionalized in America’s mass-production industries. Both unions and employers
soon engaged in a negotiating process in
which each tried to use job definitions
and bureaucratic rules to their own advantage. Over time, this led to ever more
narrowly defined and simplified jobs. (Voss
2, 242)
This may also explain the ‘‘unusual amount of
job simplification and occupational specialization,’’ or the low-trust, low-discretion system that
is characteristic of American industry in comparison to international standards (Voss).
Later in the twentieth century, there have
been some attempts to retake workers’ control.
Rather than challenge actual practices at workplaces, however, these consist of New Leftist
debates about participatory democracy (Workers’
Workers’ Control and the Struggles Against ‘‘Wage Slavery’’ Mel van Elteren
Control), sociological theorizing about the
rationalization of work—especially within the
neo-Marxist labor process approach (compare,
for instance, Littler)—and experimental projects
of ‘‘plain living and high thinking’’ (Shi 175-76).
Notable exceptions have been attempts at ‘‘shopfloor democracy,’’ such as those in the auto
industry during the late 1960s and early 1970s
(Parker; Parker and Slaughter), and more recently,
in the antisweatshop campaigns that are part
of the antiglobalization movement.18 Utopian
dreams have found their outlets in domains other
than work. Today, many Americans seem unwilling or unable to deal with the reemergence of
‘‘producerist’’ democracy in the workplace, preoccupied as they are with more pressing problems
that limit the potential for a basic restructuring of
work life. As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein
succinctly puts it,
The feebleness of the American welfare state
and the massive inequality of the nation’s
wage structure generate a serflike relation
between even well-paid workers and their
employers. When good jobs are scarce,
workers see self-assertion as a threat to those
jobs and to the vital health, vacation, and
pension benefits to which such employment
is linked. Moreover, in even the most stable
capitalist order, individual work sites are
transitory institutions whose very existence
is the product of economic forces far outside
the control of workers or their immediate
managers. (283)
Lichtenstein stresses that ‘‘a new industrial
democracy must recognize this pressing reality
and win some purchase upon the mobility of
capital and the structure of the world economy’’
(283). Given the current circumstances of capitalist globalization dominated by transnational
corporations, the immediate prospects for workers’ control look especially bleak, due in large
measure to eviscerated countervailing power of
trade unions and other agencies defending the
workers’ interests. Nevertheless, in light of the
antiglobalization and antisweatshop movements,
workers’ control holds some promise of more
201
engaged forms of worker participation than prevail
in America today.
Notes
1. I want to thank Dr. Nancy A. Schaefer for her critical remarks
on an earlier version of this article.
2. Matthew 10:10 and Luke 10:7.
3. It should be remembered that artisans in particular had played
an important part in the anticolonial, antimonarchical and antiaristocratic struggle against Britain. They were strongly committed
to the values of the new Republic (‘‘independence,’’ ‘‘virtue,’’
‘‘commonwealth,’’ ‘‘citizenship,’’ and ‘‘equal rights’’), and defined
themselves and other ‘‘producers’’ as the backbone of the nation
(Kirk, 1: 79-80).
4. Although suffrage was extended to black males with the
passage of the 14th amendment (1868) and to women with the 19th
amendment (1920), the reality for many Southern blacks was
otherwise until the Second Reconstruction during the 1950s and
1960s, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965).
5. About working women’s struggles under the hegemony of
male constructions of producerism, see Stansell 130-54.
6. Not to be confused with the Socialist Labor Party, the original
party of the American left, which had become by then ‘‘a narrow sect
of true believers whose doctrines were expounded ex cathedra by the
dogmatic Daniel DeLeon’’ (Dubofsky, Industrialism 98).
7. Elsewhere, Green remarks: ‘‘During this century North
American radicals organized electoral majorities and took power
democratically through the North Dakota Non-Partisan League and
the Saskatchewan Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Both
movements skillfully blended populism and socialism’’ (Green,
‘‘Populism’’ 7). For the latter movement, see Lipset.
8. Many of them shared the vision of worker-controlled
agricultural collectives favored by the anarchistic agricultural
laborers in Spain at the time.
9. For the same reason, the romanticized and mythologized
Wobblies would become popular again among the New Left in the
1960s.
10. In this respect, Haywood’s program was indistinguishable
from left-wing socialism, except for its opposition to political action
(Lasch 333).
11. But a caveat should be made here. As Paul Buhle pointed out,
until the Socialist Party’s attack on the IWW through the prohibition
of the advocacy of sabotage, at the Party’s 1912 convention, there
were clear indications that American ‘‘industrial unionism’’ would
not develop into the ‘‘simple anti-political stances’’ of European
syndicalists. He accuses Melvyn Dubofsky—on whose account we
rely to a great extent—of remaining ‘‘almost wholly oblivious’’ to the
political context in which the Wobblies developed and were crushed,
and fails to deal with the complexity of the interrelationship of the
IWW and the Socialist Party, in his history of the IWW. At least
several thousand were members of both the IWW and the SP (Buhle
53). In this he seems to have a point. Contrary to Dubofsky’s view,
‘‘the Wobblies, in their best days, perceived the necessary connection
of politics to direct action. Even well after De Leon’s expulsion and
the renunciation of the ‘political clause’ in the IWW’s constitution,
most Wobblies understood that politics, while subordinated to
industrial action, provided an indispensable legal protection and a
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The Journal of American Culture Volume 26, Number 2 June 2003
vital means of explaining radical actions to the less immediately
involved sectors of the population’’ (52). Buhle even takes the stance
that the IWW ‘‘seemed most promising as a labor organization
shortly before its suppression—a time when its reputedly antipolitical leader William Haywood had taken over and centralized the
leadership in a most unsyndicalist manner’’ (45-46).
12. For this discussion, I am indebted to the insightful analysis in
Lasch, especially 15-17, 40-47, 224-27, 302-03.
13. Twentieth-century exponents of this Protestant strain include
the neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his account of
the ‘‘spiritual discipline against resentment,’’ and Martin Luther
King, Jr., rooted in the religious culture of black Southern Baptism,
with his practice of nonviolent resistance.
14. Most prominently in the works of Richard Hofstadter, The
Age of Reform (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics
(1965), criticized by a new generation of historians (McMath 11-14),
and more recently revaluated again by historians who, like
Hofstadter, recognize the ambivalent tendencies (including conspiracy and other irrationalist thinking) within populism (Kazin,
‘‘Hofstadter Lives’’). Notwithstanding its merits, Hofstadter’s view
remains problematic in at least four respects, as McMath has made
clear. Other studies have shown that populists were no more inclined
to exhibit xenophobia and racism than Americans in general. Second,
there is almost general consensus among social historians that, rather
than being a disorganized, atomistic ‘‘mass society,’’ rural America
was covered by a dense network of community and family
associations. Third, while the populists tended to look backward to
an earlier rural America, this did not handicap them in dealing with
contemporary societal issues. Their values and beliefs were rooted in
the radical republicanism that was, even in the late nineteenth
century, a vital force among working people in America. Fourth,
Hofstadter’s theoretical perspective, which was derived from Emile
Durkheim’s work, assumed that the natural state of society is one of
harmony among its constituent parts. Conflict and protest were
supposed to occur due to strains in the social structure caused by
rapid social change. Thus the source of protest was located in the
protesters themselves, and seen as an irrational response to change—
which amounts to blaming the victim, according to Hofstadter’s
critics (McMath 13).
15. Lasch 531-32, referring to Reinhold Niebuhr’s view on the
need to break the ‘‘endless cycle’’ of coercion and injustice.
16. For a somewhat different view on the role of the federal state,
see Dubofsky, The State and Labor xvi, 2-60.
17. In this brief exposé, I have only been able to sketch the barest
outline of the explanatory framework involved; other factors, which
have been well-covered elsewhere, include a deep-seated tradition of
individualism, the racial and ethnic diversity of the American work
force, and the structure of American politics and government. For a
recent overview, see Lipset and Marks, although I do not share their
view of American exceptionalism. Despite the wealth of available
studies, there is still a need for further research and theoretical
reflection on this fascinating subject.
18. The antiglobalization movement houses anticapitalist,
environmentalist, feminist, and human rights groups, supporters of
indigenous peoples, trade unionists, and likeminded INGOs (international nongovernmental organizations), religious groups, and
humanitarian aid agencies. The name of this movement is misleading,
of course, because it only resists certain forms of globalization—
foremost the neo-liberal variant of economic globalization and
corporate capitalism—and operates itself on a global scale; in this
sense, it is an example of an ‘‘alternative’’ globalization. The
movement ‘‘with no name’’ has also been referred to by several
other labels, including the Fair Trade Movement and the ProDemocracy Movement. Perhaps a better alternative is, as David
Korten has suggested, ‘‘the global movement for a living democracy’’
or ‘‘the living democracy movement,’’ which actually is borrowed
from India’s million-member Living Democracy Movement (Korten
5, 307-23).
Works Cited
Bell, Daniel. Marxian Socialism in America. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1967.
Bellany, Edward. 1888. Looking Backward, or 2000–1887. New
York: Penguin Books, 1982.
Birnbaum, Norman. The Crisis of Industrial Society. New York:
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