Usufruct

 from Commune Life

Here’s an unusual and yet useful word.  Usufruct means (according to vocabulary.com ) “using someone else’s property as long as you don’t harm it.”  Merriam-Webster adds, “Usufruct has been used as a noun for the legal right to use something since the mid-1600s.”  It’s apparently a legal term for sharing–as long as whoever is using what’s being shared in a non-destructive way.

I’ve talked about library socialism.  The Library Socialism website says “Usufruct is the key to library socialism – and how it can radically change the nature of a capitalist society into one that works for the people of that society instead of just a few.”  They say, “In the simplest terms, the right of usufruct means you can use things, but you cannot deny them to others when you’re not using them, and you do not have the right to destroy them to prevent others from using them.”  They go on to compare this to taking out a book from the library.  You have a right to borrow it and use it, temporarily, as long as you don’t harm it.

Imagine if we extend this to all manner of things.  In fact, many public libraries these days offer a “Library of Things”, offering stuff like tools, toys, seeds, kitchenware, etc.  I know of at least one library that offered to loan out e-bikes.  This is true resource sharing.  How can we extend this?

Twin Oaks (and other of the communes) often practice radical sharing, including clothes and bikes–sometimes using what I call public/private options  A group that I’m getting involved with now, the Design Studio for Social Intervention, .created what they called a “Public Kitchen”–a place where people could cook and eat.

Imagine a world full of radical sharing, practicing usufruct, so that everyone had access to what they needed.  It would be the opposite of this capitalist society where people hoard what they have, sometimes out of greed and sometimes out of fear that they won’t have what they need if they share what they have.  It would be a world of abundance rather than scarcity.  I think the communes are pointing the way, but there are dozens and dozens of ways to share.

We just need to start doing it.

 

Networked Possibilities

 

from Commune Life

I talked in my post on Social Change for What? about a future of diversity, a future with many, many possibilities, communes/income-sharing communities among them.  I talked about a future where many folks lived in communities but many others didn’t.

I also talked about what communes had to offer folks in other types of communities.  In this post I want to talk about things that the communes have to offer folks who might not live in a community and how we can network all these things together to create a different and diverse society.

Income-sharing communities are all about sharing.  Not just income, but most things.  Twin Oaks, for example, has lots of things members share.  Two that I often point out are clothes and bicycles which at Twin Oaks come in what I refer to as Public/Private Options.  Taking the sharing out of the communes might involve creating what has been called “libraries”.  Not just libraries of books, but libraries of other things.  Tools, for example. 

I was already thinking about all this when I read someone’s self description and they mentioned being a “library socialist”.  Intrigued, I looked up library socialism.  While the concept is involved and uses legal terms like “usufruct” and “abusus”, the basic notion is what I wanted to put out about creating libraries for sharing.  “Library socialism … offers another means of distributing goods, both capital and consumer. It provides a way to make us all much more affluent on average, distributing goods and services to where they solve the most needs, not just to where they generate the most profits for a few. And by sharing items, it means that fewer items can satisfy the wants of a society completely.”  That’s exactly what the communes are all about.  The only difference that I can see is that these folks aren’t living together.

Beyond sharing libraries, I see a society that uses a lot of barter and/or the gift economy.  I think that things like Freecycle and giveaways and “Really Really Free Markets” are important beginnings for this.

A third way of sharing is sharing time/skills/and other nonmaterial things.  There are already things like time banks and various types of skillshares around where people do this.

Finally, there are mutual aid networks.  Mutual aid networks have been around for a very long time but when the pandemic hit, they became a lot more active.  One definition of mutual aid is “getting people to come together to meet each other’s needs, recognizing that as humans, our survival is dependent on one another.”

My question is, what if we did it all?  What if we replaced our current militarist, white supremacist, patriarchal, corporate capitalist society with something that supported and encouraged communal living but had lots of living alternatives and local networks with many forms of libraries, barter and gift economies, really free markets, lots of time and skill sharing and mutual aid networks, plus worker owned cooperative businesses and small business, all in a variety of cultures, and supportive of a great variety of beliefs and lifestyles.  Something that benefited everyone rather than a privileged few.

It would be a mess, right? But what a rich, vibrant mess.  I see it all as being (to use adrienne maree brown’s phrase) ‘Interdependent and Decentralized’, that is, there is no centralized government or corporation (or community), but this is not a world that is individualized either.  Rather, we would depend on each other.  To this I would add that it would be cooperative (of course) and networked, but also modular, diverse, and redundant.

I think these last three are important to create a resilient society.  Modular means that the pieces can come apart.  If something happens to one community, place, or family, they can leave the network without everything else falling apart.  Diverse means many things that I talked about in my Social Change for What? post but it also means that everyone doesn’t need to do everything.  With a diversity of people and skills and many other things, we are stronger.  Finally, redundancy is one of the things that makes us stronger.  When there are several different people, groups, businesses, communities all doing the same thing, again, if something happens to one, there are many more doing whatever is needed.  The phrase “Two is one and one is none” is used in prepper circles and apparently in the military as well.  

A society that is cooperative, diverse, networked, decentralized, interdependent, modular, and redundant would be, I believe, a society built to last.  And if you want to see how it could work, check out the communes for a small scale version of this.

Four Scientific Minds

As I’ve been saying, I have been reading a lot of science over the past few years. Not just soil science and chemistry and biology, but mycology and nutrition and microbiology and social science and, of course, system theory.   While I have learned a lot from a lot of different people, I realized recently that I have had four major influences.  As I said at the end of my last post, they are all women and I don't think that is an accident.

I am not opposed to ‘reductionist science’.  I think there are a lot of things that can be learned from it.  But there is only so far that you can go with it, before you need to connect the dots.  System thinking is essential to understanding the world and system thinking is all about relationships.   And, no surprise, women are a lot better at thinking about relationships than men.

So,here are four women who have strongly influenced my thinking.

And the first, since I’ve been talking about soil science and ended my last post with a quote from her, is Elaine Ingham.

Elaine Ingham is a soil microbiologist who has studied and popularized the interactions of the inhabitants of the soil.   She uses the term ‘soil food web’ to describe these complex relationships that support the health of the soil, the plants living in it, and the food we eat from those plants. While a bunch of it concerns who eats who in this subterranean ecosystem, a lot of it is also about how plants interact with bacteria and fungi, trading with each other and literally feeding each other.   I love how she uses the term ‘soil food web’, rather than ‘food chain’, to point out that it is not a linear process.   It’s about relationships and interactions and, of course, systems. She has gotten many people to rethink how they garden and grow plants and treat the soil.

A second microbiologist who has had an influence on me, is Lynn Margulis. I think of her as a microbiologist because of all of her work with bacteria but, like many important thinkers, she would hardly stay in one category.  She studied genetics and zoology, taught in the Biology department at Boston University, the Botany department at the University of Massachusetts, and the department of Geosciences at Amherst College.  She came up with the theory of endosymbiosis (that mitochondria and chloroplasts were independent organisms that were incorporated into eukaryotic cells), and then spent decades fighting all the opposition to it.  By the 1980s, it was generally accepted science. She (along with James Lovelock) was one of the originators of the Gaia Hypothesis. She was an opponent of Neo-Darwinism, believing that life moved forward by cooperation rather than competition. I love the quote from her and her son, Dorion Sagan, “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”  Sadly, she died in 2011.

My third influence is Donella Meadows,  who I have written about  several times here.  I’ve promised a few times to do a full fledged review of her book, Thinking in Systems, but have never done it.  It’s been an influence on me, nonetheless, especially her chapter on 'Leverage Points'. She was the principal co-author of Limits to Growth which was a major warning that capitalist growth couldn't continue indefinitely.  It seems obvious, but in 1972 it was a shock to many leaders and routinely criticized by people who couldn't believe it.  Now it seems prescient.  She left MIT and their computers and moved to Vermont where she founded the Sustainability Institute along with an ecovillage and an organic farm.  Unfortunately, she has died as well, in 2001.

Finally, I have recently grown to appreciate Elinor Ostrom, a political economist, who, ironically, was rejected from UCLA’s economics department (getting a PhD in political science, instead) and went on to become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.  She directly challenged the idea that a shared commons would always end in tragedy, doing research and field studies that showed examples of societies that successfully managed natural resources together.   She championed multifaceted, grassroots approaches, arguing against any single answer for social and ecological problems.  She outlined the basic principles involved in these sharing systems and you can actually watch her explain how to get beyond the tragedy of the commons.   And, while doing the research for this post, found out that she, too, died, in 2012.

In honor of these wonderful women, all of whom taught the benefits of cooperation and relationships, I would like to request that anyone who reads this, further explore the work of any or all of them.  Their ideas and thinking deserve to be spread. They were true pioneers and I think we can all learn from them.


Quote of the Day: “... communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time.” - Elinor Ostrom  

The Next Society 2: A Patchwork Politic

There are lots of good ideas about what the next society could and perhaps should look like.  There's Parecon (Participatory Economics), which I wrote about way back in a post on Participatory Economics and Economic Theory, (7/8/08).  I just read quite a bit from a book entitled The Next Revolution by Murray Bookchin, where he talks about his theory of Libertarian Municipalism. There are a lot of interesting theories of how society could be organized. These are all lovely, detailed plans for the next society and, because of that, I don't think they're going to happen, at least not in any way that will be like their proponents specify.

I think Starhawk's writings on future economies in her book Webs of Power (which I also talked about in my post on Participatory Economics and Economic Theory) are more resonant with what I'm talking about. She looks at Participatory Economics, Natural Capitalism, the Gift Economy, and the views of bioregionalists, anarchists, and socialists, and concludes that "...in a diverse world we may need a spectrum of systems to fully fit each unique set of circumstances." She points out that "Our visionary political efforts might best be directed not toward putting in place some preconceived system but toward creating the conditions in which that experimentation can begin."

Faithful readers of this blog are probably aware that I consider intentional communities as a prime place to do that experimentation.  My vision of an emerging political/economic/social situation starts with having lots of successful experiments up and running and including not only communes and cohousing, but all sorts of cooperative businesses, a lot of the pieces of what is sometimes called the Solidarity Economy, and even bits of small scale capitalism--small businesses, family run stores, things that I will call true free enterprise.  (When I actually studied what free enterprise is, I realized it wasn't as bad as I thought.  The problems we are having are with corporate capitalism, also known as monopoly capitalism, where the big corporations use small companies as testing grounds for what's profitable and anything that works is either bought out by them or out competed by corporate imitation.  The only other alternative in our present system seems for an innovating business to become a major corporation themselves.  This is the grow or die strategy.  Another name for what we have now is 'growth capitalism'.)

Once we have enough of these small systems up and running, I believe that the next step is in the process could be to network the successful experiments, perhaps using what Bookchin calls a democratic confederation. (But probably not as precisely structured as he details.) So rather than having one overarching system, there are lots of small, local, diverse economic and political systems, connected in a highly decentralized structure.  This is based on the idea that what works in one place probably won't be what works in a very different place.  While there are no guarantees on any of this, I think this might be a workable scenario.

How do we do this?  That's the subject of my next piece: The Process.



Quote of the Day: "What is our vision, our picture of an ideal society and economy? When we say 'Another world is possible,' what kind of world are we talking about?
"The global justice movement is diverse.  It ranges from union leaders who want to secure a fair share of this economy for their members to old line Marxists, to anarchists, to indigenous communities struggling to preserve their traditional lands and cultures.  No one picture of the world can describe all the different viewpoints.  No one vision may actually serve this tremendous diversity.  And how could it? How could the aspirations of an urban office worker be the same as that of a Mayan farmer in Chiapas?  Why should we think that one form of economy or social organization should serve all?" - Starhawk

The Next Society 1: Some Background

I want to return again to the major theme of this blog: social change/social alchemy. 

I've been working on this blog for eight years now.  During that time, I've studied and thought a lot about, not only social transformation, but history, systems thinking, and communities as laboratories for social change.

Lately I've been thinking a bit about what we're working toward.  What would a new society look like?  How would it come about?  How likely is change to really happen?

Over the next few posts, I want to put my ideas out about where we might be heading. As someone once said, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

Nevertheless, I'd like to give it a try.

I think that one of the best ways to look at the future is to look at what's happened in the past.

I'm going to start with politics and economics.  Until very recently in history, these two were intertwined.

Here's my rapid, super condensed, super simplified, idiosyncratic version of world history:

We start with nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes.  As I quoted in my post on Chimps, Bonobos, and Tribes (March 31, 2016),  Iain Couzin and Mark Laidre claim that “More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence..." That began to change with the development of agriculture.  There are a bunch of theories as to how that came about but with agriculture, tribes settled down and inequality grew.

Eventually the tribes grew into the city-states of Sumer, Egypt, Phoencia, Babylonia, Greece, and eventually Rome--and many of these became the seats of empire.   Rome was the biggest empire but it eventually overextended itself and had to deal with internal conflicts and corruption. Rome was finally done in by the tribal groups that they referred to as 'barbarians'. These tribes settled down into fiefdoms, new kingdoms, and new empires. This was the Middle Ages and the system that emerged from this has been called feudalism. 

There had been traders and merchants through much of history, but they were kept in control by the rulers.  In the 1600s and 1700s, the merchants began to gain power as they grew richer.  With industrialization in the 1800s, they took control and capitalism emerged.  All this has been described by David Ricardo, David Hume, and Adam Smith.

My point here is that Ricardo, Hume, and Smith described the growth of capitalism--they did not invent it.  Capitalism, like the city-states, empires, and feudalism, emerged in an organic growth process.

Karl Marx (who even many mainstream capitalist economists view as an important economic theorist) studied this process and attempted to predict the next stage.  He was influenced by Hegel's dialectical method where a thesis meets an antithesis and through their clash a synthesis emerges.  He saw the contradictions of capitalism leading to an emergent dictatorship of the proletariat.  While he encouraged and worked for a revolution, he saw this as an organic process that would occur when the situation was right.  As Wikipedia points out, "Marx accused ... other revolutionaries of being 'adventurists' because of their belief that a revolutionary situation could be created out of thin air by the sheer 'will power' of the revolutionaries without regard to the economic realities of the current situation."  While he did dedicate himself to trying to change the world, he pointed out "Communism is ... not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. ... The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

The person who changed all this was Vladmir Lenin, who came up with the idea of "a revolutionary vanguard party" which would overthrow the capitalist government.  He started with Russia, which would have horrified Marx, since Russia was a largely agricultural society and practically still in the feudal stage.  Rather than socialism emerging through an organic process, Lenin claimed "that capitalism could ultimately only be overthrown with revolution..."  This became the template for all the "Communist" countries, where socialism was imposed from the top rather than grown from the bottom.  We have now seen the results of that.

When people point to these countries as examples of why communism can't work, I point to Twin Oaks where communism has been working for nearly fifty years and is going strong.  The difference is that at Twin Oaks, it grew from the ground up and it's entirely voluntary to be part of it.

So, my first claim about the next society is that it will emerge organically, out of things that have been grown from the ground up, and I predict that it will come from several sources that will be strung together--that is, it will be networked.

Next: A Patchwork Politic


Quote of the Day:  "Life did not take over the globe by conquest, but by networking." - Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Moneyless

My friend Susan has been urging me for a while to read the book The Moneyless Man.  She read it during her year of reading books about living a year of...  In The Moneyless Man, Mark Boyle decides to live for a year without using money.

What got me to read it was when Susan sent me information on Mark Boyle's new book, The Moneyless Manifesto. I immediately checked to see if I could get it through the library system and found that none of the libraries in my area have it.  They did, however, have The Moneyless Man and I requested it and read it.

The first chapter ('Why Moneyless?') outlines the reasons for going without money, including peak oil (see my post on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, for more information about that) and climate change (which is hard to avoid reading about at this point), money encouraging competition rather than cooperation, and 'money replacing community as security'.  This is the theoretical chapter.  He follows this with a chapter on 'The Rule of Engagement' where he outlines the rules he was going to live by over the year.  The rest of the book tells of his life and adventures living without money.

The book ends with the question of whether this is a year-long experiment or whether Mark Boyle will continue living this way indefinitely.  He does talk about his decision and anyone reading the book won't be surprised by it.

One of the things that intrigues me is that the author studied economics and business in college and then managed organic food companies in the United Kingdom for six years.  (Mark Boyle is Irish and the event in the book all take place in Ireland and England.)  It was during a discussion with a friend that he realized that many of the major world issues we all connected by one thread--our disconnection from what we consume--and money is the main tool to fuel that disconnection.  He goes on to point out all the marketing designed to encourage us to use money and consume.

This book encourages what I've been thinking for a while, that money is not a necessity in our lives--in fact, we would be better off without it.  For some of my ideas about what we do need, check out my series on 'Needs' (which I still think is perhaps the most important things I've written in this blog).  The series starts with Looking at Needs, 5/4/09, and ends with Our Needs: One Last Look, 9/19/09.  Perhaps the most important post in there, from the standpoint of living without money is Protection from Poverty, 6/18/09.  I may write more about going beyond economics at some point in the future.

Interestingly enough the whole of the book The Moneyless Manifesto is available to read (for free) online.  It's worth checking out.


Quote of the Day:  "Humans are not fundamentally destructive; I know of very few people who want to cause suffering.  But most of us don't have the faintest idea that our daily shopping habits are so destructive. ...
"... I wanted to find out what enabled this extreme disconnection from what we consume.  The answer was, in the end, quite simple.  The moment the tool we called 'money' came into existence, everything changed." - Mark Boyle

Threshold

I am currently in the middle of a reading jag. Work has been quiet, I am commuting by train rather than bike, and I am currently off from work for the holidays. It means I have a lot of time to read and so I am. I am reading books on ecology, soil science, systems thinking, social transformation, Buddhism, you name it... So expect a lot of book reviews in the upcoming weeks.

Jim is an interesting guy that I am getting to know. He has a scientific background and wide
ranging interests (though a lot of it is focused on grazing and soil), so when I saw him with a
book a while ago, I asked him what he was reading. The book that he showed me was Threshold by Thom Hartmann. I hadn't heard of Thom Hartman, though apparently he's written a lot of books and is a radio personality. When I looked the book up in the library catalog it had a review attached that claimed "What begins as skillful (and scary) prognostications about climate change's impact devolve into an unfocused mishmash..." It made it sound very new agey, but what the heck.

Hartmann begins the book by stating he sees us at three 'thresholds': an ecological crisis, an
economic crisis, and a population crisis. He then claims that what brought us here were four
mistakes: 1) The belief that we are separate from nature, 2) The belief that our economic system is 'divine' and separate from us, 3)The belief that men should run the world and women are their property, and 4) The belief that 'the best way to influence people is through fear rather than through the power of love, compassion, or support.' (So far the only thing I would challenge is belief 3 which I think should be extended to include all cases where a group of people are defined as superior to other people--whites over people of color, heterosexuals over queer folk, Christians over nonChristians, etc, etc, as well as the stratifications of economic inequality.)

The introduction to the book takes place in Darfur where Hartmann discusses Maslow's hierarchy of needs (see my post of 9/2/08) and posits what he calls Maslow's Threshold--before we can move forward we need to at least make sure that everyone's Physiological and Safety Needs are met.

Hartmann then goes into depth discussing each of the three 'thresholds' and four 'mistakes'
outlined two paragraphs above, devoting a chapter to each of these. He sees our industrial system as resembling cancer (an insight I've had) and talks about the need for a 'circular and sustainable way of life'. He states that "those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way... are the ones that have the highest quality of life." He notes "Every culture in the past that experienced the cataclysmic consequences of its dominator... behavior and survived went on to transform itself into a cooperator... culture." And he sites studies that show "...that animals will always choose democracy over despotism..." (In other words, the group, not some individual animal, decides.) He concludes this section by stating: "Those who advocate a dog-eat-dog... approach to economics and governance are advocating, essentially, cancer in our body politic. They are ignoring the surrounding environment, which demands a balanced, homeostatic, and altruistic culture." (Sounds good to me.)

The next section of the book focuses on some alternatives, looking at the Danish state as an example of a place that gets it right; contrasting the Maori culture which, Hartmann claims, used up all its resources on hunting everything to extinction and had descended into cannibalism, with the people of New Caledonia who had 'developed a democratic, egalitarian culture.' (According to Hartmann the difference is that the Maori had been on New Zealand for 700 years and had come to their crisis point, the people of New Caledonia had been there for 3,500 years and had already come through a similar crisis.) And he concludes this section by looking at an ancient Peruvian city that had a peaceful society for a thousand years.

The subtitles from Hartmann's final chapter sum up his ideas for changing things: 'Recovering a Culture of Democracy', 'Reunite Us with Nature', 'Create an Economy Modeled on Biology', 'Balance the Power of Women and Men', and 'Influence People by Helping Them Rather Than Bombing Them'. While the details of his solutions are not radical enough for me (he doesn't really challenge capitalism and nationalism), I would hardly call it New Agey or 'an unfocused mishmash'. (Maybe the reviewer didn't like the fact that Hartmann didn't offer a single solution to all the problems...) Of course, I think that my quartet of Simplicity, Equality, Community, and Sustainability are direct answers to the four 'mistakes'--but if you've been reading this blog a while, I'm sure you knew that. Still, this is a worthwhile book with some good analysis and good ideas on how to change things. I think it's worth a read.


Quote of the Day: "Our goal must be to bring all our own people--and then the rest of the world, in each culture's own way--above Maslow's threshold of safety and security so they can seriously engage in the egalitarian and liberal concepts of democracy and survivability. Whatever country, religion, organization, or culture that does that will then have the minds and hearts of the people, and can drive from the bottom up the kinds of change that will bring stability, freedom, peace, and sustainability to the world....
"Now saving the world is your work, too. Tag--you're it!" - Thom Hartmann

Trade

This is my last piece on the 'Participation and involvement needs'. Along with meaningful work and energy to accomplish it, organization to get the work done, and transportation to get to and from wherever, I ended by listing 'Trade (of some sort)'. Here we are getting back into the subject of economics.

In my post on 'Protection from Poverty' (6/18/09), I mentioned that our economic system isn't the be-all/end-all of ways to deal with our need to get things from each other. As a friend of mine pointed out, if we don't believe that we need to do everything for ourselves (and I hope anyone reading this has figured out I'm not advocating some type of pure self-sufficiency), then we need to figure out how to do some small degree of specialization--recognizing that some people so somethings better than others. And that's economics. You have some thing I want. There are much better ways of getting our needs met than simply taking what we want.

For one thing, as I mentioned in my earlier post, there is the idea of a Gift Economy. We could just give stuff to each other. I also talked about the Solidarity Economy and, in my post on Participatory Economics and Economic Theory (7/8/08), I mention the theory of Participatory Economics as well as Starhawk's 'minimal agreements for a new economic system'.

Another form of 'economics', that some subsume under the Solidarity Economy, is local currency, actual locally printed money, that is only good in a certain area, which helps keep the money in the community. Some of the 'Transition Towns' have encouraged this as an attempt at 'relocalization'. (See my post on Transition Towns (10/16/08) for more on the Transition Initiative.) There are also groups that simply trade time without any actual currency changing hands. (I mentioned this in my Protection from Poverty post.)

And, then there is good old fashion trade or barter. You have something I want, I offer something I think you might want. My point is that there will be a need in the future to be able to exchange goods and services. I'm not sure there will be a need for money.


Resources:
The Gift Economy--A website run by feminist thinker Genevieve Vaughan packed with information on gifting, including links to the entire text of her book For-Giving
Ithaca Hours--One of the largest local currencies in the US
Parecon--ZNet sponsors this website which will tell you all that you want to know about Participatory Economics; among other things it contains the text of four books (Parecon: Life After Capitalism, Looking Forward, Thinking Forward, and Moving Forward) that Michael Albert has written about Participatory Economics
The E. F. Schumacher Society Local Currency Program--Resources for creating local currency as well as information on BerkShares, a currency based in Berkshire County, Massachusetts

See also the Resources in the Protection from Poverty post (6/18/09)

Quote of the Day: "In a very real sense, we are the economy. The economy begins with the work we do... the often unpaid,'informal' productive work--like child care, housecleaning, bartering, and sweat equity--we do." - Susan Meeker-Lowry

Protection from Poverty

This is the big fear that corporate capitalism holds over our heads: if we don't follow the rules, we might become destitute. People actually talk about how many pay checks they are away from poverty.

Betsy Leondar-Wright (in her excellent book, Class Matters) defines people in poverty as: "A subset of working who chronically can't get income sufficient to cover all their basic needs."

She goes on to cite the following as 'signs' of poverty:
* Substandard housing or homelessness
* Long-time use of public benefits, such as welfare, or charity
* Chronic lack of health care, food, or other necessities
* Frequent involuntary moves, chaos, and disruption of life

I hope that this makes it very clear that simple living (see my post of 9/24/09) is not the same as poverty. You can live very simply and not be poor. Poverty is about not being able to meet your basic needs.

In a sense, this whole series is about protection from poverty--that is, being able to meet all our real needs. Money, contrary to what this society teaches, isn't one of those needs. If you are or can meet most or all of the needs I've been listing, you aren't poor.

Unsurprisingly, to anyone who has been following this blog, I think that community is a better protection against poverty than money. The more we share, the less each of us needs, and the more we can support each other.

In an early post (7/8/08) I talked about Participatory Economics, as well as Starhawk's overview of what we would need from a good economic system. As I've read more and participated in more things and surfed the further reaches of the internet, I've found other interesting economic systems. Two that stand out are Solidarity Economics and the 'Gift Economy'. Whatever you think of these approaches, they make it clear that our present economic system is far from the only game in town.

The important point is, that as we think about our needs (about everyone's needs) and how to meet them, we are thinking about how to create a world without poverty, a world where no one will have to worry about poverty.


Resources:
Common Security Clubs--An attempt to create economic security through mutual aid and local action; they begin with facilitated study groups that then can go off on their own
Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin, Your Money Or Your Life--A program for achieving financial independence that deals with the way that consumerism ruins our lives and the earth and advocates nine steps to increase financial security; Vicki Robin is now involved with the transition movement (I blogged about Transition Towns on 10/16/08), I was just at a meeting where she was the guest speaker
Parecon--An extensive website for the Participatory Economics model; see my post of 7/8/08 for more details
Starhawk, Webs of Power--Contains a chapter on "What We Want: Economy and Strategy for the End Times" which has her views on how the economy could create security and abundance
Time Banks--An attempt to get beyond using money as people trade services with each other; this is a growing, world-wide movement

Quote of the Day: "Money was once a tool, not a commodity. We created money to facilitate the exchange of goods, an exchange that could be accomplished any number of ways. Gradually, though, money has become one of our main measures of worth. ...we have traded webs of relationships with communities, places, and the Earth for the transient search for the dollar. ... We have become commodities to be bought and sold. If we lose whatever money we have, we truly are destitute; we have nothing to fall back on.
"But ... if we can relearn our place and purpose, we can begin to assuage our fear and to see new possibilities." - Susan Meeker-Lowry

USH29: Making Sense of It All

So, my original question that started all this history stuff was: how did the sixties turn into the eighties?

Having looked through US history, maybe the bigger question is why did we expect anything different? Many of us thought we were making a lasting change, but we didn't see that the system was set up to resist change.

I want to list what several authors have said about why the change in the sixties didn't last.

Todd Gitlin gives many causes for the death of the sixties: He connects the emergence of the movement to the economic boom that lasted from 1945 - 1973 (see my last post) and saw many people returning to more liberal and conservative views for both the veterans of the movement and the younger generation entering college when stagflation/economic distress/returning scarcity hit; he also claims that having not dealt with its own sexism, the emerging women's movement fractured the New Left, and in its desperation at being so far from revolution, the movement spawned the very violent 'Weathermen'. Gitlin claims that in spite of attacks from the government, what did in the movement was it "imploded". He points out that in some ways the country was as conservative in the sixties as it was in the eighties, but there was a (white) young people's movement inspired by the civil rights and black power movements and spirit of the age that grew and self-destructed and got a lot of media attention. Finally, he claims the movements of the sixties also engendered 'the Right... lashing back'. "The counterrevolution seems to have outorganized the revolution." "Ronald Reagan swept to the White House as the defender of verities against upstarts... astonishing not only radicals but many liberals, all of them drastically underestimating the force of conservative impulses. ... The Right, awash in money, unencumbered by antiauthoritarianism, proved... more successful at coalition-building than the Left, which was not only undisciplined but seemed committed to staying that way. ... Who could have expected a reformation without a counterreformation?"

Lisa Duggin (see my post of 11/25/08) suggests that global competition and falling profits in the '70's got "U.S. corporate interests to mount a counter-movement... Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency and through the 1980s, the overall direction of redistribution of many resources, in the U.S. and throughout the world, has been upward--toward greater concentration among fewer hands at the very top of an increasingly steep pyramid." (Again, this mirrors what was in my last post.) She claims that the "New Deal consensus among business, government, and big unions, built during the 1930s and more or less in place through the Great Society era of the 1960s, was dismantled." Her analysis of how the sixties became the eighties: "During the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation and expansion of progressive-left critiques and social movements constituted a fertile ground for connections ... During the 1980s, as standards of living dropped in the United States and global inequalities expanded, social movements responded to multiple constraints and pressures in part by fragmenting, in part by accommodating to the narrowing horizons of fundraising imperatives, legal constraints, and the vice grip of electoral politics. Identity politics, in the contemporary sense of the rights-claiming focus of balkanized groups organized to pressure the legal and electoral systems for inclusion and redress, appeared out of the field of disintergrating social movements. Single-group or single-issue organizations dedicated to lobbying, litigation, legislation, or public and media education had existed earlier as only one part of larger, shaping social movements. ... But during the 1980s, such organizations ... began to appear as the parts that replaced the wholes."

Lawrence Goodwyn dismisses the whole movement of the sixties in a couple of sentences. He regards the "student radicals of the 1960's" as an prime example of why he thinks the system is so difficult to change, saying "While the students themselves clearly felt they could substantively affect 'inherited patterns of power and privilege', the prevailing judgement of the 1970's, shared by both the radicals and their conservative critics, is that the students were näive to have had such sweeping hopes."

Unfortunately, my survey of US history supports what Goodwyn says. This country was founded by relatively wealthy white men for wealthy white men. The 'Founding Fathers' had an agenda that was quite different from the working folks who came to this country (let alone the native peoples, or the Africans that were brought here as slaves). Our valued Bill of Rights only happened because 'Unruly Americans' fought for it. (See my post of 1/13/09.) From the beginning, the people in charge were interested in building an empire, not taking care of people. (See posts of 1/9/09, 1/17/09, and 2/10/09.) With the advent of the industrial age, some men figured out how they could turn this to their advantage and became 'Robber Barons'. (1/29/09) Eventually, men like Mark Hanna and Edward Bernays figured out how to manipulate the public so real change became unthinkable--today we have Fox News, talk radio, and folks like Karl Rove to keep things in line. (See 4/15/09.)

Nevertheless, rebellions kept occurring, from the early rebels that forced the Bill of Rights (1/13/09), to the farmers who organized co-ops (2/2/09), to turn of the century freethinkers of all kinds (2/14/09), to the lost generation and social rebels of the twenties (2/18/09), to the workers and organizers and unemployed of the thirties (2/26/09), to the beatniks, peaceniks, homophiles, and early civil rights movement of the fifties. (3/6/09) In spite of it all, there has been an undercurrent of questioning and a desire for change (look at the utopian communities of the nineteenth century--profiled in my post of 1/25/09) of which the sixties were only one more manifestation. As Gitlin pointed out, a movement of young white folks that got a lot of media attention. And the rebellions continued through the seventies and eighties and even the nineties. (See posts of 3/30/09, 4/7/09, and 4/11/09.)

Some of the problem is, as Lisa Duggan put it, many of the movements of the sixties and seventies saw how the issues were all connected whereas now (due to repression and economic contraction) the focus is on single issue movements--a much more liberal than radical stance. She mentions how the New Deal consensus between businesses and workers disappeared with the oil crisis of 1973 (again, see posts of 3/22/09 and 4/19/09)--along with the affluence that buoyed much of the movement of the sixties. The change began in the seventies, it was just consolidated with Reagan's election in the eighties. And we are the inheritors of that now. We are in hard times and we are hunkering down. Unfortunately the narrow focus that comes with that seige mentality keeps many from seeing just how interconnected it all is.

The sixties did open some doors (as did all the other rebellions and movements I've talked about) but, as Lawrence Goodwyn put it, we were 'näive' to imagine easy, radical change. And, as Todd Gitlin said, if we were trying to reform things, we should have expected a 'counterreformation'.

And so the work continues...


Quote of the Day: "These rebellions, so far, have been contained. The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. ...
"But most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens. ... History that keeps alive the memory of people's resistance suggests new definitions of power. ...the unexpected victories--even temporary ones--of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful." - Howard Zinn


References:
Lisa Duggin, The Twilight of Equality
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

USH28: Economic History of the 20th Century

The economic history of the United States during the twentieth century can be divided into three parts: the beginning of the century (prior to the Great Depression), from the Great Depression to the Oil Crisis of 1973, and after 1973.

The early part of the century looked a lot like the roller coaster that I described in my post on the 'Economic Currents of the Nineteenth Century' (2/6/09). There was a 'Panic' in 1907 set off by a run on a bank that led to "a severe monetary contraction." And there was a recession following World War I that lasted three years and was followed by an eight year period of prosperity (that being the 'Roaring Twenties'--see my post of 2/18/09).

Then came the Great Depression (see my posts of 2/22/09 and 2/26/09)--as I mentioned in one of my posts, what seems to have gotten us out of it was World War II.

Following WWII were twenty-eight years of relative prosperity (yes, there were minor recessions in 1953, 1957, and 1960, but none of them lasted long or cause major problems). To some it seemed as if it would last forever. The AFL-CIO put it this way: "During the period 1945-1973, when a high percentage of workers had unions, wages kept pace with rising productivity, prosperity was widely shared, and economic growth was strong." French economist Jean Fourastié refers to this period as Trente Glorieuses--the Thirty Glorious (years). Wikipedia says: "The period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s was a golden era of American capitalism."

The Oil Crisis of 1973 and resulting stock market drop changed that (see my post of 3/22/09). Even during the more properous periods of the late eighties and late nineties, Americans no longer felt secure. From Wikipedia: "The 1973 'oil price shock', along with the 1973–1974 stock market crash, have been regarded as the first event since the Great Depression to have a persistent economic effect."

To show some of the changes, during the period from 1947 to 1979, all sectors of the economy grew by at least 85%, and the bottom fifth of earners actual saw their income grow by 116%. During the period between 1979 and 2003, the bottom fifth of earners lost 2%, the next fifth of earners only saw a 8% growth in income, while the top fifth of earners saw their earnings rise by 51% (and the top twentieth gained 75%). The book Economic Apartheid in America (where all the information in this paragraph is from) puts it that from 1947 to 1979 "We Grew Together" and from 1979 to 2003 "We Grew Apart". They claim that there has been a major "Power Shift" since the seventies with a strengthening of corporations, lobbyists, CEOs, and people who own assets, along with a weakening of labor unions, popular political movements, and wage-earners. They cite a growing anti-union climate, global trade treaties, tax cuts for the wealthy, 'corporate welfare', and privatization.

The SEIU put it out clearly: "The recession of 1973-74 marked the start of a sustained assault on workers' ability to form unions and negotiate with employers for shared success."

Along with attacks on unions came outsourcing, offshoring, and globalization. As Wikipedia says: "Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s." (I wrote some about this in my post 'Into the Eighties' on 4/3/09.) The deregulation of businesses began in 1974 under Ford and was continued by Carter, but Reagan's policies accelerated not only deregulation but economic inequality on every level. Essentially, the corporate strategy shifted after the oil crisis and resulting recession, from the idea that taking care of their employees was good business to creating lean, mean multinational corporations. Thomas Palley talks about the period from 1945 to 1973 as a Golden Age 'Main Street Capitalism', and the post-1973 economy as a 'Mean Street Capitalism' which he sees as a throwback to the laissez-faire economy that existed before the Depression. Reagan actually "presented his economic proposals as merely a return to the free-enterprise principles that had been in favor before the Great Depression." (Wikipedia)

Peak Oil believers (see my blogs of 7/18/08 and 7/20/08) would be quick to point out that that the post-war prosperity was fueled (literally) by fossil fuels and that it's not an accident that Oil Crisis of 1973 initiated a major change in the economy. If that's true, it means we will never see the kind of prosperity and abundance we had in the sixties again.



Quote of the Day: "The shift to Mean Street capitalism has manifested itself along four dimensions. First, the economy is growing more slowly than in the past. Second, the economy is running slacker and operating less efficiently than before. Third, there has been a significant worsening of income distribution, with wages of ordinary workers actually declining over the last twenty years. Fourth, workers are economically insecure and subject to greater levels of stress. Slower, slacker, more unequal, and less secure are the hallmarks of the disordered economy. Economic booms may temporarily ameliorate these conditions, but once the boom is over, they reassert themselves." - Thomas Palley

References:
AFL-CIO, "Unions Are Good for Business, Productivity and the Economy"
Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America
Thomas Palley, Plenty of Nothing
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Path to Prosperity
Wikipedia, many articles (including ones on the Economic history of the United States, List of recessions in the United States, Outsourcing, and Jean Fourastié)

USH24: Into the Eighties

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I had high hopes for the eighties. Unfortunately, the decade represented a major change in direction from the sixties and seventies.

It began, I suppose, with the election of Ronald Reagan who brought with him a coalition of rabid conservatives--in particular, those with a bizarre version of economics where you could cut taxes, reduce the deficit, stop inflation, and build up the military--all at the same time. Some of his minions called it 'supply-side' or 'trickle-down' theory. George H Bush (before he became Reagan's vice-president) called it 'voodoo economics' which I think was closer to the truth.

As Wikipedia puts it, the 80s were a backlash against the 60s, "with religion, patriotism and materialism making a comeback." They also point out that "The decade saw social, economic and general upheaval as wealth, production and western culture migrated to new industrializing economies. As economic liberalization increased in the western world, multiple multinational corporations associated with the manufacturing industry relocated into Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, China and new market economies in eastern Europe following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe."

This was the decade that first saw words like 'McJob' and 'outsourcing' to describe work prospects. This was the decade when Walmart grew from 276 stores to well over 1,200. This was the time of corporate raiders, leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers, as business became ruthless. The Laissez-faire approach of people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman was now the economic policy of the country.

And Ronald Reagan was all business--corporate business. His bizarre economic policies became known as 'Reaganomics'. He encouraged deregulation and ignored antitrust laws. He put a businessman in charge of OSHA that hated OSHA (one of his first acts was to destroy the booklets that warned textile workers about the dangers of cotton dust). In fact, most of the people Reagan appointed as agency heads and cabinet members had plans that were nearly opposite to what the agency was supposed to be about--Reagan's ideas about reducing government seemed to mean decimating well-functioning offices. (Think James Watt, Ann Burford, David Stockman...) I joked at one point during that time that if Reagan was consistant he would have put Daniel Berrigan in charge of the Pentagon.

And while the rich got richer under Reagan's administration (and later Bush's, which was more or less a continuation of the Reagan administration), the poor got poorer. Reagan's budget cuts were to welfare, housing, job training, drug treatment, and Social Security (not to mention mass transit and renewable energy). Unemployment soared, inflation soared, and poverty soared. (Another Reagan era joke I heard when I was working in Detroit was that he was the first president that truly loved the poor as they were--poor! In fact, the joke went on, he loved them so much he wanted there to be more of them.)

But for those who had money, this was also the decade (a big part of that trend toward 'materialism') when high technology came into its own. 'Personal computers' (and the first versions of email), compact discs, wireless phones (and early cell phones), answering machines, fax machines, camcorders, VCRs, and even cable television (which had been around since the 1950s but came into its own in the eighties) were everywhere. And it seemed like everybody had to have one (at least) of each.

But this was not all a happy technoconsumer's paradise. The end of the seventies brought Love Canal and Three Mile Island, 1984 brought Union Carbide's toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India, 1986 brought Chernobyl, the nuclear power accident in Ukraine, and 1989 brought the largest oil spill in US history when the ship, the Exxon Valdez went aground off the shore of Alaska. On top of this, in 1986, with hundreds of schoolchildren watching, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded soon after launch.

The one thing that Reagan did build up was the military--and he used it. Reagan sent Marines into Lebanon, and 220 of them were killed in 1983 by a suicide bombing in Beirut. Soon after, the US invaded the tiny island of Grenada after the execution of their Marxist Prime Minister. This was the first major military operation conducted by the U.S. since the Vietnam War. In 1989, at the end of the decade, President Bush ordered the invasion of Panama in order to capture their dictator, Manuel Noriega.

Reagan's administration was also notable for its willingness to talk about and deploy nuclear weapons. Casper Weinberger (Reagan's defense secretary) oversaw dramatic increases in the US nuclear weapons arsenal, production of the B1 bomber, and work on Reagan's favorite military program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars. This was also the time of the development of the MIRVs (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles--missiles with multiple warheads) and long-range 'Cruise Missiles'. Twice in 1983, the US came close to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union--the first time because of a Soviet computer malfunction and the second time, two months later, because the Soviet Union wasn't sure if a NATO wargame that featured a release of weapons was a cover for the real thing. The Soviet nervousness around nuclear weapons was heightened by the Strategic Defense Initiative (which they viewed as an escalation of the arms race into space) and the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.

However, perhaps the most notable thing about the decade of the Eighties its conclusion. 1989 featured the so-called "Revolutions of 1989", when the countries of Eastern Europe broke away from Soviet control--including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Solidarity in Poland, and the 'Velvet Revolution' in Czechoslovakia. Ironically, this was the same time that the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in China. The Cold War was over--and the US declared that it won.


Quote of the Day: "It was the truly wealthy, more than anyone else, who flourished under Reagan. ... The 1980s were the triumph of upper America... the political ascendancy of the rich, and a glorification of capitalism, free markets, and finance." - Kevin Phillips

References:
Kenneth Davis, Don't Know Much About History
Wikipedia, lots and lots of articles (including ones on the 1980s and the Presidency of Ronald Reagan)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

USH21: 1973

Yes, I'm spending an entire post on one year of US history. And not even one of the exciting years of the sixties (like 1966 or 1968), but a year in the early seventies. And why? Since my original question was how we got from the sixties to the eighties, everything that I've seen indicates that 1973 was the pivotal year between the decades. In fact, I think that 1973 may be one of the key years of the 20th century, at least as far as the US goes.

Five very important things happened in 1973, and most of them are still having an effect now.

The first was the end of the Vietnam war. The Paris Peace Accords, officially ending the war, were signed on January 27th. By the end of March all of the US troop were out of Vietnam. To a large degree, this was a victory for the anti-war movement.

Along with this was the continuing revelations about the Nixon administration's involvement in what is usually referred to as the Watergate affair. While the actual break-in and arrests occurred in 1972, the general public was unaware of the ramifications of Watergate at this time and, in fact, Nixon was re-elected in 1972 by a large margin and carried every state in the Union except Massachusetts (which led to a lot of 'Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts' bumperstickers being displayed during 1973). Things began unraveling in January of '73, with the trial and conviction of G Gordon Liddy and E Howard Hunt for planning the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC, as well as the trial of Daniel Ellsberg on charges of leaking the Pentagon papers. (See my post of 3/18/09.) During Ellsberg's trial it came out that his psychiatrist's office was burglarized--by the same folks that were involved with the Watergate break-in, all of whom worked with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (also known as CREEP). Slowly but surely it became apparent that their orders came from the top. As the investigation unfolded, resignations and firings begin occurring at top levels of the government. In June, John Dean told the Watergate investigators that he had talked with Nixon about the cover-up multiple times. In October when Archibald Cox tried to subpeona Nixon, Nixon told Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox--and Richardson resigned rather than do the firing. Nixon then told William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, and Ruckelshaus resigned. Finally Robert Bork did the dirty deed. The firings infuriated Congress and are one of the main things that led to articles of impeachment being brought against Nixon and Nixon's resignation in 1974. Also in 1973 Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned after being charged with money laundering and tax evasion. In 1973 America learned what a corrupt administration was. (And, of course, this was the year that Richard Nixon announced "I am not a crook!") The good news was that the American people also learned that we could get rid of top level politicians who thought they could get away with anything.

More important (for us now anyway) than the end of the Vietnam War or the revelations of Watergate, was the recession of 1973-1974. This was the worst recession in the US since the great depression and it was accompanied by a stock market crash that it took the US twenty years to completely recover from. The roots of the depression were in Nixon's decision to take the US off of the gold standard and the subsequent collapse of the Bretton Woods agreements (which I talked about in my post of 3/18/09) as well as the continuing inflation. As I will detail in future posts, the recession had a significant and expanding effect on the national outlook. I believe this is key in understanding the transition from the 60s to the 80s. It led to a major shift in economic and corporate policies which is still unfolding.

Compounding this was the October Oil Embargo. The embargo came out of the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war between Israel, and Egypt and Syria. Arab nations were upset about US support for Israel and refused to sell oil to the US. This led to the first energy crisis in the US, complete with gasoline rationing and a December truck drivers strike. It also led to a real search for energy alternatives, many of which we are only rediscovering now. But it made the on-going economic situation worse, fueling and lengthening the recession.

A final event, which occurred in September of 1973, was the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. While this had much less impact on most Americans than the stuff above, it had an impact that was most significant in retrospect. The coup, which the US backed, led to a repressive regime being installed. Although there is a documented history of US interference in the governments of Latin American countries, when documents revealing the US involvement in the coup were declassified in the 1990s it was a revelation for many. The US had always claimed that the problem it had with Communism was that it was not the legitimate will of the people; however, when the people actually elected a Communist leader, the US incited his overthrow. There is evidence that Nixon ordered the CIA to make sure Allende was deposed.


Quote of the Day: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." — Henry Kissinger

References:
Many, many Wikipedia articles (including ones on 1973, the Paris Peace Accords, the Watergate Scandal, the 1973–1974 stock market crash, the 1973 Oil Crisis, and the 1973 Chilean coup d'état)

USH15: Organizing the Workers

By 1920, the US government had done major damage to the anarchists, socialists, and the IWW (see my post of 2/14/09 for details). But in 1919, just as the Palmer Raids were getting underway, a new organization emerged, built from the left wing of the Socialist Party and the remains of the IWW, but taking their orders from Russia. I refer, of course, to the Communist Party.

Beginning around 1921, the Communists worked on organizing unemployed workers into "Councils of Action". This work increased in 1929, as the Depression began, and the Communists branched out into union organizing, and began advocating for the rights of African-Americans.

Meanwhile, also in 1929, A J Muste, chairman of the Brookwood Labor College, founded the Conference for Progressive Labor Action to promote industrial unions. At first, the goal was to reform the American Federation of Labor--a rather conservative union. But by 1933, the Conference had been transformed into the American Workers Party, a socialist organization, and began organizing 'Unemployed Leagues'.

Eventually the Socialists, who had been opposed to organizing unemployed workers and felt it was better to work for unemployment insurance, began organizing committees on unemployment. By 1932, they were taking the first steps toward developing a national organization for the unemployed.

In 1935 it all came together. The Communist, Socialist, and Muste-influenced groups all joined together to form the Worker's Alliance of America. Unfortunately, the organization (at least according to Piven and Cloward) put its energy into lobbying and building a bureaucracy. The original demonstrations put on by the various groups of unemployed that caused ruckuses and got concessions from local government were replaced by working within the system, and getting a lot less for it. As a result, millions of the unemployed that might have had relief benefits if they continued agitating for them ended up simply impoverished.

But what of those workers that were employed? I had always heard of the thirties as a time of labor organizing, of strikes and pickets and the growth of the unions.

In fact, major strikes had been going on in the US during the so-called 'prosperous' twenties. In 1922, for example, there were coal mining, railroad, and textile workers strikes. And in 1929, textile strikes spread from Tennessee to North and South Carolina. The National Textile Workers Union (a group with Communist leadership) organized white and black workers throughout the area.

During the thirties, with the economic depression and with hopes raised by the election of Roosevelt and passing of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which included a passage about the right to bargain collectively), strikes began escalating. Between 1932 and 1933 the number of strikes tripled.

Four major strikes occurred in 1934. The first was in Toledo, Ohio, at the Electric Auto-Lite Company where unionizing demands were rebuffed. Workers began picketing the plant and were joined by members of one of Muste's Unemployed Leagues. When the company got a court order against those picketing, the Unemployed Leaguers kept the picket lines up and local Communists got involved as well. The police began arresting the demonstrators but this only got more workers involved and the numbers on the picket lines grew until it became a crowd of almost ten thousand. The crowd broke into battles with the National Guard, but in spite of the deaths of a couple of the workers, things kept building until it reached a point where the company closed the plant and eventually agreed to a wage increase and limited union recognition. A similar battle occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Teamster (a truck driver's union) organizing, led by Socialist Workers Party (Trotskists), built into a strike which practically paralyzed the city. After confrontations with the National Guard (where again workers were killed), collective bargaining was finally agreed to. A longshoremen's strike on the West Coast (led by Communists and other radicals) immobilized the city of San Francisco, as Teamsters and members of both the Communist and AFL unions (AFL being the American Federation of Labor--the mainstream union) joined in. Another confrontation with the National Guard (yes, there is a pattern here) resulted in, once more, a couple of workers being killed. This time, however, the funeral procession engulfed the streets, as perhaps as much as thirty thousand marchers streamed in its wake. A general strike in the city followed as twenty unions went out in sympathy. But the AFL leadership was against the strike and reined their members in, and the longshoremen has to settle for a compromise agreement.

The largest strike of 1934 was a textile workers strike that started in the Southern US and spread to New England. It eventually involved more than four hundred thousand textile workers across the country, and, of course, Guardsmen were called out and as many as fifteen strikers were killed. Eventually Roosevelt stepped in and a board of mediation was set up.

In 1936, a new kind of strike began. It started at the Firestone Tire plant in Akron, Ohio, when wages were cut and workers laid off. Rather than going out on strike, workers sat down in the plant and refused to move. This had definite advantages over the picket lines--it made it difficult to bring in strikebreakers and meant the strikers didn't have to be outside in whatever weather but could stay in the shelter of the building. The sitdown part of the strike was only a minor portion of the process in the Akron, but the workers won concessions and the idea of sitdown strikes spread. A sitdown strike at a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan, precipitated a shutdown of the whole GM system. Sitdown strike followed sitdown strike, many of them leading to partial wins, and one turning into a forty-day community which organized meals, recreation, postal service, and even classes. Eventually the workers forced GM into collective bargaining. Sitdown strikes spread across the country: 48 different strikes in 1936 and 477 in 1937 (including members of the same National Guard unit that had been called out on the Flint GM workers that now struck themselves when they weren't paid).

Unfortunately, as unionizing took hold, the unions themselves (including the CIO, which emerged as a counter to the more conservative AFL) reined in the workers. Piven and Cloward point out that most of the concessions won during the 1930s were won through mass struggle and the efforts of workers on the bottom--even though they worked for unionization, often the union leadership betrayed them. "..the Congress of Industrial Organizations did not create the strike movement of industrial workers; it was the strike movement that created the CIO." And even the Communists, who started off as agitators, eventually supported the union leadership--but the leadership of those unions developed cozy relationships with company management and often turned in the Communists as 'Reds'.

There were other movements in the thirties. As I mentioned a few times, the Communists (and other radicals) organized black workers--at that point these were the only groups that crossed color barriers. There were also self-help movements formed--from a bartering system developed by fishermen in Seattle to unemployed miners in Pennsylvania who dug their own little mines, helped themselves to the coal, and sold it in the cities. Who organized the workers during the depression? In many cases, the workers organized themselves.


Quote of the day: "When they tie the can to a union man, sit down! Sit down!
When they give him the sack, they'll take him back, sit down! Sit down!
When the speed up comes, just twiddle your thumbs, sit down! Sit down!
When the boss won't talk, don't take a walk, sit down! Sit down!
Sit down, just take a seat, sit down and rest your feet, sit down, you've got 'em beat.
Sit down! Sit down!" - Worker's song

References:
Staughton Lynd, Nonviolence in America
Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People's Movements
Wikipedia, various articles (particularly on the Communist Party USA and A J Muste)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

USH14: The Not-so-Great Depression

On October 24, 1929, "Black Thursday", prices at the New York Stock Exchange dropped like a stone. Wall Street bankers tried to halt the price slide by buying shares of companies like US Steel at inflated prices but on October 29th, "Black Tuesday" an even larger sell off occurred and panic set in. As Kenneth Davis put it, "Within days, the 'wealth' of a large part of the country, which had been concentrated in vastly inflated stock prices, simply vanished." The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties was over.

A lot of that prosperity was a speculative bubble and it burst. In one year 1,300 different banks went under; in three years, five thousand banks failed. The savings disappeared, businesses and factories closed, unemployment was rampant, and many were homeless. Mini-towns made of cardboard boxes sprung up in cities and were nicknamed 'Hoovervilles'.

In 1932, thousands of unemployed WWI veterans made their way to Washington, DC, where the camped along the streets and rivers, demanding that Congress pay them the bonuses that they were told they'd get in 1945. The members of the 'Bonus Army' couldn't wait that long and got the House to pass a bill to pay them, but it was defeated in the Senate. Hoover ordered the current army out to evict them. The cavalry and the infantry, under Douglas McArthur with assistance from Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, rode in with tanks and machine guns and tore into the Bonus Army's camps, firing tear gas and burning down the cardboard structures.

By this time, the Republicans were no longer viewed as the party of prosperity. In the 1932 election, Democratic candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt swept into office, winning in forty-two of the forty-eight states. (Why does this sound familiar? After years of Republican rule the country is in major financial trouble and the voters elect a Democratic to put the country back on track...)

Roosevelt was determined to change things. His inaugural address contained the famous line "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself..." (a line he may have taken from Thoreau) but he went on to call it "...nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance

When the Bonus Army returned after Roosevelt was elected, FDR sent his wife, Eleanor, out to meet with them. She served them coffee and led them in songs.

FDR promised the country a "New Deal" and called a special session of Congress which passed legislation at a furious pace, creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennesee Valley Authority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Security Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the National Industrial Recovery Act. It was a scattershot approach--trying a bit of everything to see what would work. Roosevelt later created the National Recovery Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Works Progress Administration, which built roads, hospitals, city halls, schools, and courthouses. But perhaps the most useful thing that Roosevelt did was to institute a series of 'fireside chats' on the radio, where he talked directly with the public and reassured them, speaking in tones of confidence, optimism, and hope. (And, yes, that also sounds familiar--I think Obama has been reading his history.)

Although Roosevelt's talks and reforms had great psychological benefits, and some got people employed, what pulled the US out of the Great Depression was our involvement in World War Two. I'll write about the war soon, but first I want to talk about what was happening with the workers.



Quote of the Day: "Because grief will come in measures, only grief alone will know, And you'll see it on your family, on your own face it will grow, And they'll try to keep you hungry, then they'll tell you to eat snow, You know pride can be a moving thing if we learn the strength of 'NO!'" - Ferron


References:
Kenneth Davis, Don't Know Much About History
Wikipedia, various articles (particularly on the Great Depression in the United States and the Wall Street Crash of 1929)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

USH10: Economic Currents of the Nineteenth Century

Before I push into twentieth century US history, I'd like to get an overall view of the US economy in the nineteenth century. I've talked about the Gilded Age (see my post of 1/29/09) as well as touching on the 'other Civil War' (see my post of 1/21/09) and the revolt of the farmers to their economic situation (in my last post). As I was reading up on these events, I started encountering references to various 'Panics'. I thought it would be worthwhile, as a kind of background to everything, to go over the various financial ups and downs the US economy went through, long before the Great Depression of the 1930s.

One of the earliest depressions in US history started in 1807 after Thomas Jefferson passed the Embargo Act. This led to unemployment and depression in all the states that had a shipping industry (especially the New England states). However the first major financial crisis in American history was the 'Panic of 1819', when the economic expansion that followed the War of 1812 came to a halt. There were bank failures, foreclosures, and unemployment everywhere. (Hey, that sounds like 2008!)

Bank failure as well as land speculation led to the Panic of 1837. Though Andrew Jackson's policies were blamed for the Panic, it happened right after Martin van Buren was elected--so his opponents named him 'Martin van Ruin'. Things improved with the Mexican War (I noticed that economic upturns often went with wars--as they say, 'it's good for business) and the California gold rush, but then fell apart with the Panic of 1857. Again things improved with the Civil War.

Following the Civil War there was a period of economic growth that went with the building of the railroads (see my post of 1/29/09) which was interrupted by the 'Black Friday Stock-Market Panic of 1869' (caused by gold speculation by Jay Gould--again see my post of 1/29/09--and James Fisk).

The Panic of 1873 began one of the worst financial periods in US (and world) history prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s. This depression was known as the 'Long Depression' and lasted over twenty years. Even so, railroad expansion continued and so did speculation ending in the Panic of 1893 when the 'bubble' burst--and at the same time there was a run on the gold market.

With the election of William McKinley (see my last post) and the Klondike gold rush, prosperity returned (as did war--more in my next post), at least until the Panic of 1907.

In other words, the nineteenth century was a financial rollercoaster.


Quote of the Day: "They say some men would be warriors, and some men would be kings,
And some men would be owners of land and other man-made things...
And gold would be our power, and other foolish things..." - Ferron

References:
Kenneth Davis, Don't Know Much About History
Wikipedia, various articles (I particularly used the piece entitled List of recessions in the United States and links from it)

USH8: Robber Barons and the Gilded Age

Kenneth Davis points out that "In thirty-five years, from the Civil War's end to the twentieth century, America moved with astonishing speed from a war-torn nation of farmers to an industrial empire..." Howard Zinn's way of putting this is: "Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron." Much of this was due to the industrial revolution--or more precisely, the 'Second Industrial Revolution', a revolution less of waterwheels and textile mills, and more of petroleum and steel--and the railroads built with petroleum, coal, and steel, as well as the banks filled with the money from petroleum, coal, steel, and especially the railroads. And all this industrialization made a lot of money for a few men who took advantage of all this. The polite term for them is 'Captains of Industry' but because of the unscrupulous dealings these men used to acquire their wealth, they're more commonly known as the Robber Barons.

While the modern railroad was invented and developed in Great Britain, and the first major US line ran through Maryland, the railroad became an important part of US history with the development of the 'Transcontinental Railroad' from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. As I noted in my post of 1/17/09 ('The Nation Grows'), in the early part of the nineteenth century a doctrine known as 'Manifest Destiny' became popular. As the US stretched toward the Pacific Ocean, the desire grew to have a way of getting from coast to coast. Although talk of a cross country railway began in the 1830s, the building of the transcontinental railroad began in earnest during the Civil War. The railroad was completed in 1869. Wikipedia states: "Complete travel from coast to coast was reduced from six or more months to just one week."

The first beneficiary of the railroad was a financier named Thomas Durant, who owned the Union Pacific railroad, as well as a company called Credit Mobilier which was supposed to be responsible for the construction of the track. Credit Mobilier got ninety-four million dollars for the work--but it actually cost them only forty-four million. Durant used the company to pay himself a fortune. Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames was also a director of the Union Pacific and gave shares of Credit Mobilier to other congressmen and various politicians to avoid any investigation. When this became known it caused a major scandal. Ironically, Durant left Union Pacific and financier Jay Gould became the dominant stockholder. Gould had already made money from the Erie Railroad and playing with the price of gold. Along with Union Pacific, he got control over three other western railroads and eventually well over a tenth of the country's rail lines. He also controlled the Western Union telegraph company. In 1886, railroad workers across the southwestern portion of the US struck against the lines he owned. He hired strikebreakers and Pinkerton detectives to break up the strike--with rather violent methods.

One of Gould's rivals was a man who started in the ferry business, Cornelius Vanderbilt. He began working on ferries as a boy and at 16 started his own ferry, between Manhatten and Staten Island, NY. During the war of 1812, he shipped supplies to US forts and in 1818, he got involved in steamboat travel, starting with ferries and eventually offering a travel route to California (cutting through Nicaragua) during the gold rush and competing with trans-Atlantic steamships. He also got involved as a director of the Long Island Railroad and from there began building his railroad empire, eventually leaving steamboats to concentrate on rail travel. He helped build the Grand Central Depot (eventually called Grand Central Terminal) and eventually extended his lines out to Chicago. This led him into conflict with Jay Gould, a conflict he lost. (His son, William would also get into conflict with Jay Gould, this time over who would own Western Union--Vanderbilt won this one, but Gould made the money out of the situation. These 'barons' weren't nice to anyone--including each other.)

But probably the top railroad and financial baron of them all was John Pierpont Morgan. JP Morgan began his career by financing the selling of defective guns during the Civil War. These rifles were bought from an army arsenel for $3.50 apiece (5000 of them), 'remachined', and sold back to the army for $22 each. They often blew off the thumbs of the soldiers firing them. He developed a railroad empire by acquiring lines (he gained control of the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad, taking it away from Jay Gould in 1869) and consolidating companies. By 1900, he owned almost half of the country's tracks. This was all done through the banking firm of J.P. Morgan & Co., one of the largest and most powerful banks in New York, and eventually the world. In 1895, when the US treasury was almost out of gold, Morgan led a syndicate of bankers that traded $65 million in gold for bonds, which they then resold making a profit of $18 million. In 1900, Morgan met Andrew Carnegie at a dinner party. Morgan asked Carnegie how much he would want for his steel company. Carnegie grabbed a piece of paper and wrote '$492,000,000'. The deal was closed without lawyers or a written contract and from that JP Morgan created US Steel.

Andrew Carnegie was a true case of working his way to the top. He was born in Scotland, came to the US at thirteen and immediately went to work at a cotton mill. By the time he was seventeen, he was working for a telegraph company. He became a telegraph operator and worked his way up to superintendent. He began investing in the railroads and related industries and did well with this. He invested in land in Pennsylvania where oil was found. Soon, he was a millionaire. He visited London in 1872 and saw the newly developed Bessemer method of steel production and soon left the railroad business and involved himself in the iron and steel industry. He eventually consolidated everything into the Carnegie Steel Company, which is what he sold to JP Morgan. He is often known as a philantropist today because he gave almost every cent he made away. (Unfortunately, this was sullied by a strike at the Carnegie Steel plant in Homestead, PA, that occurred while Carnegie was away in Scotland. One of his managers, Henry Clay Frick, cut the pay of the workers and demanded they drop their union. When they didn't go along, Frick locked them out and brought in strikebreaking workers. This led to a confrontation between the Pinkerton guards and the union workers. Yes, this is similar to the situation I described above with Jay Gould. This time it ended up in a battle where many of the workers were killed. This infuriated Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who believed violent acts would encourage the workers to revolt. Berkman got into see Frick and shot him three times. The workers, rather than arising, beat Berkman unconscious. Frick survived the shooting and Berkman spent fourteen years in prison. Carnegie, as I said, was in Scotland during the strike but he, as well as Frick, was very much against the union and the violence upon the workers became part of Carnegie's reputation.)

Perhaps the richest of these 'Barons' was John D. Rockefeller who began his career as a bookkeeper. Supposedly, in an early position he was asked to evaluate the monetary potential of oil for an interested company. The story is that he told them that it had no future, and then bought himself a refinery. In 1870 he created Standard Oil of Ohio which he built into an empire. At one point it controlled 80-90% of the US refineries; eventually Standard Oil became a 'trust', an idea cooked up by Rockefeller's lawyers, which made the Standard Oil Trust into 'holding company' that was controlled many other corporations, including the Chase Manhatten Bank. This was a way to get around the anti-monopoly laws that soon was copied by hundreds of others, including JP Morgan (which is how he controlled so much of the US railways). By the turn of the century Rockefeller had gone on to other pursuits (notably philantropy) and he was worth millions. Standard Oil reigned supreme until they were found guilty, in 1911, of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and broken into several smaller companies.

I could go on to detail Andrew Mellon, Henry Ford, Marshall Field, William Randolph Hearst,etc (not to mention the Vanderbilt and Rockerfeller sons), but you get the idea. This was a time referred to as The Gilded Age (taken from the title of a novel co-authored by Mark Twain). It was a time of extreme wealth and opulence and a time when thousands upon thousands of workers died building railroads, mining coal, and mining iron. While the 'Barons' made fortunes, immigrants, working women, and even children toiled in mills and sweatshops. The railroads wiped out the last of the native lands and corruption was the order of the day. It was a time when the tycoons seemed out of control. It made the technology fortunes of the 1980s and 1990s seem minor by comparison.

And where was the government through all this? Kenneth Davis points out that the late nineteenth century hosted a number of the weakest presidents in US history: Andrew Johnson, US Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison. The ones that weren't outright corrupt had little sway over these economic empires.

But there were those who had enough. Next: the farmers revolt!


Quote of the Day: "...upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends--the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and the equally legal right of the millionaire to his millions." - Andrew Carnegie

References:
Kenneth Davis, Don't Know Much About History
Wikipedia, various articles (especially the ones on the First Transcontinental Railroad, Robber baron, Gilded Age , and the various industrialists )
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States