Slaves of the World Unite: pt 5 Populists are Revolting
“The People’s Party was stabbed to the heart.
I dared not even think of all the hopes we used to have
and their bitter ending, so I never vote.”
Luna Kellie, populist firebrand of Nebraska 1896
Along with “white working class”, (later “white supremacists”) the media persisted in calling Donald Trump a “populist” presidential candidate during the 2016 campaign and beyond into Upside Down Land. We can learn from history or repeat it endlessly.
The original Populist movement proved truly radical political and social transformation can sweep the nation when people are progressively educated and organized. In the decades following America’s Civil War, capitalism reigned supreme. Banker, merchant and industrialist classes were rewarded richly, while the masses of people were reduced to chattel labor, white or black, native son or recent immigrant.
The People’s Party in the 1890’s was the movement’s swan song, roasted on a cross of silver. Media pundits called candidate Trump a populist, but not because his policies bore any resemblance to their demands.
Because few delve into labor history, most Americans do not know that workers of all colors and tints were virtual and actual slaves to those with the capital and/or connections. The Gilded Age concentrated capital through the second Industrial Revolution of railroad transportation and wired communication. They connected agricultural and resource control like spider webbing to banking and financial centers. Commodity prices steadily fell while costs rose for everything needed for survival by workers, because of ‘sound money’ based on gold redemption to prevent inflation of labor and resource costs.
Economic conditions for the working masses ranged from firetrap sweatshops to land tenant peonage and prison chain gangs. Millions of landless tenants worked for The Man who owned their farm, loaned their necessities, counted their crops and found them owing more. He might also be their political commissioner, judge, sheriff, or on good terms.
The Populist movement emerged out of poor farmers self help movements of the Grange and Greenback Party in the 1870’s. The Farmer’s Alliance was founded in Texas in 1878 to battle the crop lien system that strangled farmers with usurious debt and higher costs, manufacturers who only sold to middlemen distributors, railroad monopolies that charged exorbitant rates for freight and townsfolk who stolidly supported the system. Alliance membership grew rapidly in the next decades, fueled by stump speakers sent out to preach the new gospel “denouncing credit merchants, railroads, trusts, the money power and capitalists.”
Enormous processions of stirred up farmers would gather outside their county seats on Fourth of July, “Alliance Day” and in Political Pentecost camps. Thou- sands of alliances and sub-alliances of poor people stood together with newly developed collective dignity and political and economic awareness. They educated the masses through thousands of traveling lecturers, tracts, pamphlets and newspapers about the “radiant vision of a new day for the industrial millions.” They reached out to black farmers, emerging unions and urban laborers defying the vicious racist and anti-immigrant popular culture.
They were fiercely denounced by all pundits and politicians. Their “gospel of discontent is sordid and groveling” an editor preached, when “freeing capital and industry from all needless restraints [to] promote the diffusion of a high order of hardy manhood” was needed. In spite of entrenched opposition from the wealthy and powerful, aconservative middle class and their media, they became a national force and not roadkill of history.
Their national conventions approved radical demands for regulation of capital, government ownership of railroads and communication, low interest loans for people with federal greenbacks and silver coinage to increase money supply. After their economic cooperatives were crushed by the united enmity of the commercial classes with no support of the middle class, they turned to politics.
In 1892 they adopted the “Second Declaration of Independence” for their new People’s Party. They planned to ride into power on a wave of reform supported by farmers, labor and poor people from coast to coast and change the system structurally through legislation to enact their vision. That party died on a cross of silver in 1896, crucified by widespread ballot fraud, employer intimidation and vigilante violence. Northern Republican businessmen waved the “bloody shirt” of the Civil War, while southern Democrats warned that white supremacy would topple if voters joined this third party.
Their vision was betrayed by their own Alliance leaders for thirty pieces of the “free silver” plank, who urged abandoning their entire platform of demands to unite around one demand, silver coinage pushed by the silver mine owner’s lobby. They fused their presidential nominee with Democrat candidate William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner” is still famous for the “cross of gold” speech he bellowed across the nation that campaign season.
The infant movement died, but its radical proposals of women’s suffrage, honest elections, graduated income and property taxes, municipally owned utilities, voter determined referendums and initiatives were taken up by middle class reformers of the Progressive Movement over the next two decades, then through strengthened unions and Democratic Liberals of FDR’s enormous majority through the Great Depression.
Reformers in their wake were hobbled by corporate domination of public discourse, limiting it to a narrow bandwidth. They never challenged the liberal notions that buttress “free market” dogma, never proposed redistribution of wealth from capitalists and creditors to the “producing class.” They never envisioned restructuring a financial system that concentrates capital, creating a society ruled by the wealthy and powerful. They never offered the “spirit of egalitarian hope” that infused the Populist Revolt. They were Progressives, but not revolutionaries.
The Taft/Hartley Act of 1947 was called the Slave Labor Act by union opponents because it eviscerated their growing post war power, without restricting the immense powers of corporate employers. Down in old Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, a new legal strategy was seeded in their public university to erode government intervention. Nobel Prize wining economist James Buchanan began crafting his decades long strategy to restrict democratic representation to the oligarchs who funded his work and travel, later called the Virginia School of political economy. His Thomas Jefferson Center intended to shackle the regulatory powers of the local, state and federal government, under the guise of a “free society“, where “individual liberty” could not be taxed to pay for social programs and community benefits, even those which would increase their own wealth and the commonwealth.
Lewis F. Powell, Jr., tobacco lawyer crafted a 1971 memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It was a war plan, an exhortation to rally the troops, one followed by corporate conspiracy over the next fifty years. He was made a Supreme Court Justice for it and furthered those goals with 5–4 decisions. “The American economic system is under broad attack. Sources are varied and diffused. Communists, leftists, other revolutionaries, but most threatening is perfectly respectable elements of society. The pulpit, campus, journals, arts and sciences, politicians. Survival of free enterprise system, strength and prosperity of American and freedom of its people is at stake.” he ranted.
Douglas Fraser UAW president, called them out in 1978 “The leaders of the business community have chosen to wage a one sided class war today in this country, a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and old, and even many in the middle class of our society. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress. The rise of multinational corporations that know neither patriotism nor morality, but only self interest has made accountability almost non-existent.”
Slave labor is not a primitive relic of pre-capitalism, but continues to be the foundation stone of profit. Women’s labor and reproductive capacity generates surplus value for capital. Most domestic work, child and elder caregiving is unpaid. It’s not added into the Gross Domestic Product, although it is an essential, productive resource. Labors of love, duty, honor, responsibility and caring count for nothing, like the critical supports of Nature. Their benefits are enslaved as externalized costs, adding to the bottom line of business profits and the return of dividends to investors.
Marx prematurely predicted that private property would become as absurd as human slavery in a sustainable socio-economic system. He prophesied that monopoly finance capitalism would be an “age of dissolution.” We have dissolved ancient webs of social connections, if nothing else. Five hundred years of industrial capitalism and its less efficient communist cousin has shredded us into a society of selfies.
The Age of Anxiety and the Opioid Epidemic are products of that individual rendering. Socialist societies are not immune from modern alienation. Consumer or Citizen, all are besieged by Materialism and unraveled Nature. Communists have not escaped the pull of the Dark Star. Dream Viruses once reserved for the elite, now have infected all, with few remissions. There is no herd immunity.
The elite have mounted the carousel and grabbed for the gilded ring with greedy claws, while the masses hunger for a ride.Financial capitalism now singlehandedly steers this age of crisis and dissolution. Its commanders seek to overcome all social and ecological limits of expansion and have seized control of the ships of states deckhouses. The existence and reproduction of human beings is at stake, including most species that share our biosphere.
We are at a junction in history like those hardscrabble dirt farmers, uneducated and fiercely independent, when they united to challenge the utter penury and doomed hopes the system imposed on them. The New Monopolists of the third Industrial Revolution cling like spiders around the opiated patients in its web, slumbering virtually in silken chains. Can conscious consumers transform capitalism into a sustainable system through Freedom of Choice, or remain another mine for profits to be extracted from?
Sources
The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt In America, Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press, 1978
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights’s Stealth Plan For America, Nancy MacLean, Penguin Books, 2017