The result has been both grow­ing impov­er­iza­tion of for­mer­ly ​“sta­ble” lay­ers of the work­ing class (an increase in the U.S. min­i­mum wage to $15 an hour would raise the wages of auto work­ers hired since 2008) and the sharpest lev­els of social inequal­i­ty since the Great Depres­sion of the 1930s. Many in the U.S. refer to a sec­ond ​“Gild­ed Age,” draw­ing par­al­lels with the era of rob­ber barons and pre­car­i­ous work­ers in the 1870s and 1880s.

All of us on the Left are all too famil­iar with the cap­i­tal­ist offen­sive of the past forty years. Under the ban­ner of ​“neolib­er­al­ism,” cap­i­tal has rolled back almost every gain work­ing peo­ple across the world have made since the 1930s. All sorts of pub­lic indus­tries, ser­vices and insti­tu­tions have been pri­va­tized, social wel­fare pro­grams that pro­tect­ed work­ers from the worst inse­cu­ri­ties of the labor-mar­ket have been rolled back or sim­ply abol­ished and unions and work­ing class polit­i­cal par­ties that had tra­di­tion­al­ly orga­nized and rep­re­sent­ed work­ing peo­ple have been severe­ly weakened.

How­ev­er, unlike the ​“Gild­ed Age” — or the era before the mid-1970s — there have been rel­a­tive­ly low lev­els of work­ing class resis­tance to cap­i­tal. The 1870s and 1880s saw waves of mass strikes, most unsuc­cess­ful, which laid the basis for the growth of mass work­ing class par­ties and unions in the quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry before the First World War. The ​“Red Years” of 1917 – 1923 gave birth to rev­o­lu­tion­ary Rus­sia, near rev­o­lu­tions in Italy and Ger­many and a mas­sive strike wave across the cap­i­tal­ist world. The late 1930s again pro­duced rev­o­lu­tion­ary upsurges in Spain and France, and fac­to­ry occu­pa­tions in most oth­er indus­tri­al­ized soci­eties. The ​“long 1960s” (1965−1975) was marked not only by mas­sive revolts by peo­ple of colour, women and queer folks, but also, despite pre­dic­tions of the ​“end of the work­ing class,” waves of unof­fi­cial (“wild-cat”) strikes in Japan, West­ern Europe and North America.

In con­trast, the cap­i­tal­ist offen­sive has met lit­tle sus­tained resis­tance since the mid-1970s. Clear­ly, there have been major bat­tles (the British min­ers’ strike of 1984 – 1985, the PAT­CO strike in the US in 1980 – 1981), spo­radic upsurges of protest like the Occu­py move­ment, and some top-down con­trolled one-day gen­er­al strikes in Cana­da and Europe. Most of these strug­gles have either been defeat­ed, and have not sparked the mas­sive strug­gles that those of us on the left have hoped for.

In no oth­er coun­try is the lev­el of resis­tance as low as in the heart­land of mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism, the Unit­ed States. Still the only major cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety with­out an even timid­ly reformist inde­pen­dent work­ers’ par­ty, the work­ing class and the oppressed in the US have mount­ed lit­tle sus­tained oppo­si­tion to the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of their social and eco­nom­ic position.

Resis­tance and acquiescence

Steve Fras­er, a not­ed labor his­to­ri­an, attempts to unrav­el why there has been so lit­tle pop­u­lar resis­tance to the new ​“Gild­ed Age” in the US in his new book The Age of Acqui­es­cence: The Life and Death of Amer­i­can Resis­tance to Orga­nized Wealth and Pow­er. The great strength of the book is its detailed accounts of lev­els of both work­ing class resis­tance and acqui­es­cence to an aggres­sive cap­i­tal­ist class before and after the 1930s and 1940s.

Fraser’s recon­struc­tion of the myr­i­ad forms of oppo­si­tion in the peri­od before the 1930s is a wel­come alter­na­tive to the all too com­mon notion that the U.S. work­ing class lacked a tra­di­tion of class war­fare. Fras­er details waves of strikes, often involv­ing pitched bat­tles with the force of state and pri­vate repres­sion and the seizure of work­places, and pro-work­ing class resis­tance among farm­ers and peo­ple of colour.

Even more impor­tant­ly, he doc­u­ments how anti-cap­i­tal­ist pol­i­tics were the ​“com­mon sense” of a sig­nif­i­cant minor­i­ty of work­ing peo­ple from the 1870s through the 1930s. From the Knights of Labor to the Wob­blies, Social­ists and Com­mu­nists before the Sec­ond World War, Fras­er demon­strates that ​“class war” and the vision of a demo­c­ra­t­ic and col­lec­tivist order beyond cap­i­tal­ism were part and par­cel of the pol­i­tics of a minor­i­ty of work­ers in the U.S.

The con­trast with the post-World War II peri­od — and espe­cial­ly the neolib­er­al era since the 1980s — is marked and painful. For Fras­er, the decline of rad­i­cal­ism and mil­i­tan­cy began dur­ing the 1940s, as the new indus­tri­al union became increas­ing­ly embed­ded in the insti­tu­tion of U.S. cap­i­tal­ist democ­ra­cy. While he rejects any attempt to attribute the de-rad­i­cal­iza­tion of the labor move­ment sim­ply to the machi­na­tions of the labor offi­cial­dom, Fras­er believes that work­ing peo­ple trad­ed any alter­na­tive to cap­i­tal­ism for ​“full cit­i­zen­ship” in the U.S. poli­ty and society.

Not only did this effec­tive­ly ​“tame” labor as a poten­tial chal­lenger to cap­i­tal, but it set lim­its on the poten­tial rad­i­cal­ism of the move­ments of peo­ple of colour, women and LGBT folks in the 1960s and 1970s. In con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca, large seg­ments of work­ing peo­ple embrace ​“fables” that under­mine resis­tance: cap­i­tal­ists as rebels, stock own­er­ship democ­ra­tiz­ing the econ­o­my, and con­tract work as liberation.

Root­ing work­ing class rad­i­cal­ism in non-cap­i­tal­ist relations

While Fraser’s depic­tion of the rise and fall of pop­u­lar oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ism in the U.S. is quite com­pelling, his expla­na­tion of the his­toric shift leaves much to be desired. Buried in the mass of detailed descrip­tion is the claim that anti-cap­i­tal­ist rad­i­cal­ism in the U.S. – and by exten­sion oth­er cap­i­tal­ist soci­eties – is root­ed in the col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence and mem­o­ry of non-cap­i­tal­ist social relations.

The expe­ri­ence of arti­sanal and rur­al house­hold pro­duc­tion, where pro­duc­ers orga­nized their own and their fam­i­lies’ labor inde­pen­dent­ly of cap­i­tal, allowed work­ers in the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry to eas­i­ly imag­ine a world beyond cap­i­tal­ism. This rad­i­cal vision, com­bined with the expe­ri­ence of the suc­cess­ful strug­gle against slav­ery, fueled their belief that ​“anoth­er world” was not only imag­in­able, but pos­si­ble.

As cap­i­tal­ism estab­lished itself through the destruc­tion of inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion, the process of prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion, the abil­i­ty of work­ing peo­ple to envi­sion a dif­fer­ent world declined, leav­ing them open to inte­gra­tion into cap­i­tal­ism through the promise of cit­i­zen­ship and increased consumption.

The notion that work­ing class rad­i­cal­ism is root­ed in the expe­ri­ence of non-cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions and that rad­i­cal­ism nec­es­sar­i­ly declines as cap­i­tal­ism destroys non-cap­i­tal­ist social rela­tions has a long his­to­ry. It is also, his­tor­i­cal­ly inaccurate.

While it is true that the ear­ly work­ers’ move­ments in many indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries appealed to a roman­tic vision of pre-cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety, rad­i­cal and rev­o­lu­tion­ary work­ing class move­ments sur­vived for a con­sid­er­able time after the con­sol­i­da­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. Ger­many, per­haps the most cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety on Con­ti­nen­tal Europe before World War I, pro­duced the largest Marx­ist work­ers’ orga­ni­za­tions — both social-demo­c­ra­t­ic and com­mu­nist — in the world.

In addi­tion, the work­ers who made up the bulk of the mem­ber­ship of rad­i­cal and rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tions in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry were not those who were new to cap­i­tal­ist indus­try. Work­ers who had recent­ly been inde­pen­dent arti­sans or farm­ers tend­ed to be attract­ed to more reformist vari­ants of labor pol­i­tics, while it was sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion indus­tri­al work­ers — in par­tic­u­lar skilled work­ers — who were drawn to rev­o­lu­tion­ary syn­di­cal­ism, left-wing social democ­ra­cy and communism.

Most impor­tant­ly, work­ers in the post-World War II peri­od dis­played the capac­i­ty for mil­i­tan­cy in the face of cap­i­tal. Fras­er tends to give extreme­ly short shrift to the wave of strikes, many of them ​“wild-cats” which shook U.S. indus­try between 1965 and 1975. These were part of a wave of mass strikes, often led by younger, sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion work­ers, which swept the glob­al North. In almost all of these strug­gles, work­ers were able to not only resist speed-up and deskilling of work, but won sub­stan­tial work­place and polit­i­cal con­ces­sions from cap­i­tal, while actu­al­ly threat­en­ing cap­i­tal­ist rule in France in 1968 and Por­tu­gal in 1974 – 1975.

The mil­i­tant minority

Despite Fraser’s mis­tak­en iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a pre-cap­i­tal­ist past with work­ing class anti-cap­i­tal­ism, his claim that the decline of anti-cap­i­tal­ist rad­i­cal­ism is cen­tral to under­stand­ing the decline of work­ing class resis­tance is sub­stan­tial­ly correct.

Con­flicts over strat­e­gy and tac­tics mark every wave of work­ing class strug­gle in the his­to­ry of cap­i­tal­ism. On one side is a lay­er of work­ers who have become the full-time offi­cials of the labor move­ment, the social lay­er that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly pro­motes the lim­i­ta­tion of work­ing class strug­gle and the inte­gra­tion of work­ers orga­ni­za­tions into the cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my and state. On the oth­er is the ​“mil­i­tant minor­i­ty” — the real work­ers’ van­guard — who agi­tat­ed for mil­i­tan­cy against cap­i­tal, for democ­ra­cy and sol­i­dar­i­ty among work­ers and who were the mass audi­ence for rad­i­cal and rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics in the glob­al North before World War II.

The suc­cess of work­ing class strug­gles often hinged on the abil­i­ty of the mil­i­tant minor­i­ty to win work­ers to their vision rather than the offi­cial­dom’s strat­e­gy at cru­cial moments. One could argue that the decline of resis­tance in the past three decades is the result of the weak­en­ing of a sub­stan­tial lay­er of rad­i­cal, anti-cap­i­tal­ist work­ers since the late 1930s.

How­ev­er, this was the result not of the destruc­tion of non-cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions in the glob­al North, but the his­toric shift in the polit­i­cal and social ori­en­ta­tion of the work­ers’ vanguard.

In the wake of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, the bulk of the mil­i­tant minor­i­ty joined the new rev­o­lu­tion­ary Com­mu­nist Par­ties. These par­ties, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, became instru­ments of the for­eign pol­i­cy of the Sovi­et bureau­crat­ic rul­ing class and their polit­i­cal strat­e­gy and tac­tics shift­ed in line with these needs rather than the class strug­gle in their own country.

In the late 1930s, as the Sovi­et rulers sought an endur­ing mil­i­tary alliance with the cap­i­tal­ist democ­ra­cies against fas­cist Ger­many and Italy, the Com­mu­nist par­ties adopt­ed the ​“pop­u­lar front” strat­e­gy, an essen­tial­ly reformist ori­en­ta­tion of long-term alliances with ​‘pro­gres­sive’ union offi­cials, social-demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers and ​“demo­c­ra­t­ic” cap­i­tal­ists. This shift not only ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dis­ori­ent­ed the ranks of the Com­mu­nist Par­ties, but led to their inte­gra­tion into the trade union officialdom.

Put sim­ply, the inde­pen­dent mil­i­tant minor­i­ty that had his­tor­i­cal­ly posed an alter­na­tive to the pol­i­tics of the labor offi­cial­dom at key junc­tures of the class strug­gle was social­ly and polit­i­cal­ly dis­or­ga­nized. The weak­en­ing of the work­ers van­guard — and its almost com­plete dis­ap­pear­ance in the U.S. — accounts for the abil­i­ty of the labor bureau­cra­cy to so eas­i­ly derail work­ing class resis­tance over the past 40 years. In order to revive infra­struc­tures of resis­tance and suc­cess­ful strug­gles against the cur­rent neolib­er­al offen­sive, the Left will need to pri­or­i­tize the rebuild­ing and reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the mil­i­tant minority.

This post first appeared at New Social­ist.