Richard D. Wolff argues that anti-communism was part of a strategy by big business, Republicans and conservatives to single out and destroy the members of the coalition that forced through the New Deal, namely organized labor, socialist and communist parties.
It’s only been 100 years
American Experience | S30: The Bombing of Wall Street: the first terrorist attack (sic) in the U.S., a mostly-forgotten 1920 bombing in the nation’s financial center that left 38 dead – a crime that remains unsolved today. The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another eight died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds.
Jeff Sessions is no A. Mitchell Palmer and Christopher Wray is no J. Edgar Hoover but 1920 could be like 2020, and Warren G. Harding might resemble Dotard J Trump, if for no other reason than salaciousness and willful ignorance of corruption.
Deportation of terrorist immigrants was a result of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, amidst other actions.
Because America First...
The demonizing of immigrants and the role of the State in surveillance and repression should need no reminder in 2018 even as ICE and the Border Patrol are used as a gefälschte Gestapo.
Many lionize Robert Mueller even as domestic political intelligence has no different aims than in the very long heyday of the FBI as the enforcer against anti-capitalist threats as it still is. The MSM treatment of racial difference in domestic terrorist acts is no different than the treatment of postwar anti-communism.
More bizarre has been the exploitation of anti-Communism by gay RW men, but that’s for another diary on RW misogyny and gay KKK members.
More fascinating is the examination of a 1920s cold case that describes the emergent anti-communism, the FBI as fighting crime and communists while also fighting immigrants, and the increased class struggle as bombs and bonds intersect.
If one considers the latter part of the Woodrow Wilson presidency, with its Espionage and Sedition acts of 1917 and 1918, the Wilsonian state was troubled by a variety of post-war developments. The need for anti-communist information gathering became prominent for a post-war domestic law enforcement apparatus that appreciated wartime espionage and counter-intelligence.
In 1919, the AFL tried to make their gains permanent and called a series of major strikes in meat, steel,[51]and many other industries. Management counterattacked, claiming that key strikes were run by Communists intent on destroying capitalism.[52]Nearly all the strikes ultimately failed, forcing unions back to positions similar to those around 1910.[53]
The 1920s marked a period of sharp decline for the labor movement. Union membership and activities fell sharply in the face of economic prosperity, a lack of leadership within the movement, and anti-union sentiments from both employers and the government. The unions were much less able to organize strikes. In 1919, more than 4 million workers (or 21 percent of the labor force) participated in about 3,600 strikes. In contrast, 1929 witnessed about 289,000 workers (or 1.2 percent of the labor force) stage only 900 strikes.[60]
Employers across the nation led a successful campaign against unions known as the "American Plan", which sought to depict unions as "alien" to the nation's individualistic spirit.[67]In addition, some employers, like theNational Association of Manufacturers, usedRed Scaretactics to discredit unionism by linking them to subversive activities.[68]
U.S. courts were less hospitable to union activities during the 1920s than in the past. In this decade, corporations used twice as many court injunctions against strikes than any comparable period. In addition, the practice of forcing employees (by threat of termination) to signyellow-dog contractsthat said they would not join a union was not outlawed until 1932.[68]
Although the labor movement fell in prominence during the 1920s, theGreat Depressionwould ultimately bring it back to life.
What is to be dumb(er). We now seemed resigned to that "brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism" and the realm of poorly constructed street theater stunts inadequate to be termed authoritarian performance art.
Wilson's administration did effectively demobilize the country at the war's end. A plan to form a commission for the purpose was abandoned in the face of Republican control the Senate, which complicated the appointment of commission members. Instead, Wilson favored the prompt dismantling of wartime boards and regulatory agencies.[230] Demobilization was chaotic and violent; four million soldiers were sent home with little planning, little money, few benefits, and other vague promises. A wartime bubble in prices of farmland burst, leaving many farmers deeply in debt after they purchased new land. There were social tensions as veterans tried to find jobs, and existing workers struggled to protect theirs, as well as to gain better wages and conditions. Major strikes in the steel, coal, and meatpacking industries disrupted the economy in 1919.[231] These conditions were catalysts for outbreaks of racial animosity that erupted in serious race riots of ethnic whites against blacks in Chicago, Omaha, and two dozen other major cities in the North; it was called the Red Summer of 1919.[232]
By February 1920, the President's true condition (a stroke) was publicly known. At issue was Wilson's fitness for the presidency at a time when the League fight was reaching a climax, and domestic issues such as strikes, unemployment, inflation and the threat of Communism were ablaze. No one close to him, including his wife, his physician, or personal assistant, was willing to admit he was unable to perform the duties of the presidency.[251]
A combination of the temperance movement, hatred of everything German (including beer and saloons), and activism by churches and women led to ratification of an amendment to achieve Prohibition in the United States
According to historian Adam Tooze, Wilson's presidency came to a calamitous end[262]with an economic depression. Christina Romer that wrote that data from the NBER(National Bureau of Economic Research) shows that the depression lasted 18 months.[263][264]
As Monbiot and others have correctly pointed out, the move to financialise natural resources is not intended to save the world, but to create another source of capital accumulation and thus save an increasingly desperate capitalist system.
The problem is that, despite growing dissatisfaction and criticism of neoliberalism, we don't seem to be able to shift this socio-economic structure in favour of a better one, or even just to a return to a more Keynesian inspired alternative. We seem to be stuck in what Mark Fisher has called a state of 'capitalist realism', somehow, despite our apparent knowledge, coming to accept in practice Margaret Thatcher's insistence that 'there is no alternative', or Francis Fukuyama's idea of capitalism as the 'end of history'.
However, this inability to deal with contemporary neoliberalism in practice is not due to the victory of capitalism, but comes from an under-estimation of how far neoliberalism is a long-term, and very successful, political project with a coherent and shared 'world-view'. This world-view has its origins in a crisis of liberalism in the 1930s, as it faced what it saw as the return of authoritarianism, or 'arbitrary rule'.
[...]
Contrary to popular belief and some academic opinion, 'neoliberalism' is not just a dirty word invented by left-wingers resenting the 'victory' of capitalism in the western world, but a term self-consciously chosen by what Mirowski and others refer to as the international 'thought collective' arising out of the Mont Pèlerin Society. This neoliberal thought collective bade their time, connecting and combining “key spheres and institutions – academia, the media, politics and business”, creating a new knowledge apparatus for the dissemination of propaganda, the “neoliberal partisan think-tank”, and eventually finding power through the victories of the political right in the 1970s, Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US.
[...]
But what linked the attack in The Good Society on economic planning to Lippmann's earlier work on democracy, and also to the work of key neoliberal Friedrich Hayek, was the epistemological rationalisation of both the market as answer to everything and of the restriction of democracy. Both Lippmann and Hayek worked with the assumption that no individual could know society as a whole, and therefore no individual, or even a group of individuals, can have access to the information required to make economic planning work, or to rule society in the name of the 'collective will'. The only rational way to run society, therefore, was through the 'natural logic' of the market.
The tendency to covertly support capitalism whether morally or expediently is common to DK’s editorial policy, but we are grateful in ACM to be tolerated even as the anti-capitalist critique continues to address whether a post-capitalism is a dystopian fantasy. It would be folly to propose a capitalist realism without tempering it with the necessity for a critical realism
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions.
More important is developing a rational critique of neoliberalism.
“We haven't got all the answers yet. But if we have an idea whose time has come, as the neoliberal 'thought-collective' have shown, we can perhaps win the battle in the end, and work it out as we go along.” www.opendemocracy.net/...
Ironically, neoliberalism points to the way forward. The history of neoliberalism has taught us two things: firstly that no matter how unpopular an idea is at the time (and to say that neoliberalism was 'leaning against the wind' during the Great Depression of the 1930s is, to use Mirowski et al's words, an understatement), with enough hard work, determination and above all, organisation, today's outlier can become tomorrow's hegemonic world-view.
Secondly, the public, like the perfect market, does not just spontaneously appear with negative freedom. We can try to engage people in collaborative social inquiry, try to develop their awareness of the conditions that limit participation, to deepen our collective understanding of social and political processes and therefore increase the public's potential for self-rule.
However, without creating the material and social conditions for participation, these efforts at condescension will be rightly met with scorn. Sociologists and social scientists need to be a part of an active process of giving back social inquiry to the public, emancipating this deeply human and social activity first and foremost from the elitism, specialisation and instrumentalism of academia. We may need to reduce the working week even further to enable people to have time for community activities and public research. We certainly need to prevent education from being turned towards a class-based, narrowly vocational process of training people to be profit-making machines.
Breaking: Former Trump Campaign official, Rick Gates, pleading guilty to intentionally conspiring against the United States, and to misleading MuellerâÂÂs FBI investigators. Significant.
Communists have always appropriated the symbols and ideas of anarchists, from the internationale to Sacco and Vanzetti, while modifying them to permit iron fisted hierarchies and mass executions of anarchists. The idea of left unity is ahistorical and absurd.
The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre or Haymarket riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday, May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square[2] in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; scores of others were wounded.
No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today. Although the rally is included in American history textbooks, very few present the event accurately or point out its significance,
The Haymarket Affair is generally considered significant as the origin of internationalMay Dayobservances for workers.[7][8]
A harsh anti-union clampdown followed the Haymarket incident. There was a massive outpouring of community and business support for the police and many thousands of dollars were donated to funds for their medical care and to assist their efforts. The entire labor and immigrant community, particularly Germans and Bohemians, came under suspicion. Police raids were carried out on homes and offices of suspected anarchists. Scores of suspects, many only remotely related to the Haymarket affair, were arrested. Casting legal requirements such as search warrants aside, Chicago police squads subjected the labor activists of Chicago to an eight-week shakedown, ransacking their meeting halls and places of business. The emphasis was on the speakers at the Haymarket rally and the newspaperArbeiter-Zeitung. A small group of anarchists were discovered to have been engaged in making bombs on the same day as the incident, including round ones like the one used in Haymarket Square.[48]
Newspaper reports declared that anarchist agitators were to blame for the "riot", a view adopted by an alarmed public. As time passed, press reports and illustrations of the incident became more elaborate. Coverage was national, then international. Among property owners, the press, and other elements of society, a consensus developed that suppression of anarchist agitation was necessary while for their part, union organizations such as The Knights of Labor and craft unions were quick to disassociate themselves from the anarchist movement and to repudiate violent tactics as self-defeating.[49]Many workers, on the other hand, believed that men of thePinkerton agencywere responsible because of the agency's tactic of secretly infiltrating labor groups and its sometimes violent methods of strike breaking.[50]
Nafeesa Syeed of Bloomberg reported that "[t]he most-tweeted link in the Russian-linked network followed by the researchers was a petition to declare Antifa a terrorist group".[78]
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm becoming increasingly interested in 21st century communism. On any scale — home, city, state, or nation. Top down or bottom up, volunteer or mandatory. It's just another ho-hum economic system, but this time executed in a very modern era.
It certainly has many advantages over capitalism, especially when it comes to big-vision projects that the people support, like saving the planet or ending poverty. Free drinking water would be nice. Nestle says that's not a human right. Anyone know what 21st century crowd-sourced communism would look like?
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—
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
The event you relate, and whose current relevance you support with so much interesting parallel information, is appreciated.
I’m interested in understanding more about critical realism, an interesting philosophy that you reference. It seems from the little I’ve read that it would definitely contribute to "developing a rational critique of neoliberalism", which you rightly feel is so important.
Critical realism, a philosophical approach associated with Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014), combines a general philosophy of science (transcendental realism) with a philosophy of social science (critical naturalism) to describe an interface between the natural and social worlds.
According to critical realist economists, the central aim of economic theory is to provide explanations in terms of hidden generative structures. This position combines transcendental realism with a critique of mainstream economics. It argues that mainstream economics (i) relies excessively on deductivist methodology, (ii) embraces an uncritical enthusiasm for formalism, and (iii) believes in strong conditional predictions in economics despite repeated failures.
That lead me to the Bath School Massacre, 7 years later. Because these types of events are incomprehensible in nature, we need to hear more of the voices of those who have understanding through their knowledge and perception.
"Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience..." That capitalism is a machine that we're all in service to, and we don't realize how it's seeped into almost everything we experience.
You cover a lot of deep ground. I saw this quote by Richard Wolf
“Everything I know about human psychology tells me that many things motivate human efforts to innovate: love, fear, ambition for respect, prestige, money, pride, etc. Only capitalism, seeking to justify its exploitation of workers, would reduce the complexity of motivation to one motivator, money.”
Sometimes I wonder, at least in the US, if it's gone beyond an economic system into a national mental illness.
Comments
They got Gates for things that had nothing whatsoever
to do with 'collusion' or election fraud. From what I can tell, they're going after him for typical porky (capitalist) behavior.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UQCCuJyGHo]
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Who is Mr. Unruhe? Is he located in Berlin?
just asking because he seems to sit in front of background screen of Berlin in Germany and I ask me why he has chosen that background image. My searches of his websites make me feel like ... I am not sure about him.
Jason Unruhe is creating Marxist news and commentary videos and Maoist Rebel News.
How many Wikis do we have these days? I am feeling wiki-mized and patreon-ized.
Jumping on the bandwagon? Or trashing the real marxist left?
[video:https://youtu.be/OjmEQnghKzI]
This makes me really 'unruhig', Mr. Unruhe.
As far as I know he's Canadian.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
This is a story I've wanted to know more about for years,
after first hearing about around the OWS days.
Really looking forward to reading this later. I'm getting ready to leave to play a gig now. Just wanted to say thanks.
Long Live The Socialists & Anarchists!
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Engaging and timely.
At least for me. Thanks, annieli.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm becoming increasingly interested in 21st century communism. On any scale — home, city, state, or nation. Top down or bottom up, volunteer or mandatory. It's just another ho-hum economic system, but this time executed in a very modern era.
It certainly has many advantages over capitalism, especially when it comes to big-vision projects that the people support, like saving the planet or ending poverty. Free drinking water would be nice. Nestle says that's not a human right. Anyone know what 21st century crowd-sourced communism would look like?
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Wonderful post annieli.
The event you relate, and whose current relevance you support with so much interesting parallel information, is appreciated.
I’m interested in understanding more about critical realism, an interesting philosophy that you reference. It seems from the little I’ve read that it would definitely contribute to "developing a rational critique of neoliberalism", which you rightly feel is so important.
From Wikipedia …
That lead me to the Bath School Massacre , 7 years later. Because these types of events are incomprehensible in nature, we need to hear more of the voices of those who have understanding through their knowledge and perception.
Lots more to explore in your essay. Thank you.
That introductory image is fascinating to consider n/t
So much content to absorb in this essay - thank you and
apologies if I can't keep up with reading before just posting a minor thought about Mr. Unruhe's site.
I've been feeling this strongly
"Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience..." That capitalism is a machine that we're all in service to, and we don't realize how it's seeped into almost everything we experience.
Thanks for this
You cover a lot of deep ground. I saw this quote by Richard Wolf
“Everything I know about human psychology tells me that many things motivate human efforts to innovate: love, fear, ambition for respect, prestige, money, pride, etc. Only capitalism, seeking to justify its exploitation of workers, would reduce the complexity of motivation to one motivator, money.”
Sometimes I wonder, at least in the US, if it's gone beyond an economic system into a national mental illness.