The Weight of Dead Generations

By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman

New Labor Forum
Spring 2011 issue
 
http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu

[** The following piece will appear in New Labor Forum's
Spring 2011 issue. To subscribe to New Labor Forum, please
visit http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu or call 212-642-2029.]

Marx was wrong.  He famously declared that "the tradition of
all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains
of the living." But it turns out that, for some, the
remembered past can act like a tonic, an inspirational
elixir, even a promissory note about how what once was might
be again.  Over the course of American history, popular
movements of resistance and rebellion have sometimes
resolutely turned their backs to the future in concerted
efforts to return to some mythic golden age.  Others have
enlisted their collective recollections of the past to
fashion an emancipated new way of life.

As the sesquicentennial of the Civil War begins, we are
reminded of this plasticity of historical memory and the way
it gets deployed to resolve contemporary dilemmas.
Commemorations of the Civil War functioned for generations
in the South, to reinforce commitment to the Confederacy's
"Lost Cause."  "Confederate Balls," reenactments of
Jefferson Davis's inauguration, and the like had a political
purpose in solidifying core beliefs about white supremacy,
states' rights, and loyalty to the region's all-white
Democratic Party. Around the turn of the twentieth century,
when the hot- blooded emotions of the war had finally cooled
enough, the "Lost Cause" got nationalized and found a home
in the North as well.  There it served to turn a conflict
over freedom and slavery into a shared national tragedy that
hid the country's ugly racial pathology.

In the South, that distinctive recall of the past at the
same time worked to replenish the soil of social
subservience, leaving the Southern oligarchy of landlords,
merchants, and their political facilitators in charge.
Still, for legions of true believers in the "Lost Cause" it
was empowering, firing resistance to Reconstruction and all
subsequent attempts to end American apartheid.  For a long
century, most white Southerners reveled in their peculiar
version of the past, used it to define their moral
imagination, and mobilized politically on its behalf; but
they were imprisoned by it, unable to envision a future that
would liberate them from hierarchies of the South's caste-
based political economy.  Already, the sesquicentennial has
shown us there's life still left in that old dog: Haley
Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, recalls that life in
1960s Yazoo City wasn't all that bad as the White Citizens
Council kept the Klan at bay, and Virginia's governor
"forgot" to mention slavery in his sesquicentennial
proclamation. Dream and nightmare!

Using and being used by the past is hardly unique to
partisans of the Old South.  Take the Tea Party. Memories of
its revolutionary-era forefathers-no matter how fantastical
the images of that revered past may be- incite among Tea
Party partisans an enthusiasm to restore an idealized world
of self-reliant heroism. Government-whether it's King
George's or Barack Obama's-is the great enemy; dependency
its toxic seduction. No one actually contemplates donning
knee breeches and pinafores, however.  Rather, for Tea Party
followers the nearest historic exemplar of what they want to
see restored is a kind of Disneyland version of small
town/suburban yesteryear:  nuclear families, conventional
marriage, home ownership, Christian morals, cultural and
racial homogeneity, and economic self-sufficiency.  One
might call this the twenty-first century version of a
romanticized family capitalism; profoundly sentimental
insofar as it ignores how utterly dependent that suburban
arcadia was on an intricate network of federal, state, and
local government programs and bureaucracies.

Like those who once rallied to "The South Shall Rise Again,"
the Tea Party rises in righteous resistance to reclaim the
way we never were.  It draws its energy from an imaginary
past.  But that same fantasy disarms it.  After all, what
helped set off the uproar a year or so ago were government
bailouts of Wall Street fat cats.  Tea Party militants,
however, have reset their sights not on big business and
finance-such anti- capitalism cuts to close to home-but on
the leviathan state, in particular what's left of its
social-welfare apparatus.  Back to the future may tickle the
fancy and win votes but, without a real alternative to
corporate capitalism and the welfare state, "don't tread on
me" is an idle boast.

Can we say something similar today about the labor movement
and the broader "Left" with which it is loosely identified?
Traditionally, the Left was (by definition) future-oriented,
a main branch on the tree of Forward Progress.  No more!
From the day it assumed power (and even before then), the
Obama administration has been relentlessly compared to FDR's
New Deal administration.  Some people think it has fallen
short, even way short, others think it has come closer or as
close as is feasible.  No matter the particular assessment,
the far horizon of possibility for those in the progressive
community seems to remain the restoration of the New Deal
order in one updated form or another.  This is our "lost
cause," a seventy-five- year-old movement invented to put
back together a bygone form of capitalism, resurrected now
but without even the more radical forms of egalitarian anti-
capitalism that were once part of the New Deal heritage.  Is
there no life after capitalism?  Who, then, is a prisoner of
the past?  Are we the true conservatives?

Living too much in the past is not, then, strictly a right-
wing pathology.  However, it would also be wrong to conclude
that social movements rooted in the past are inevitably
poisoned at the source.  On the contrary, many of our
country's most notable insurgencies have looked both
backward and forward as they struggled to free themselves
from systems of exploitation and oppression.

Take the early-nineteenth-century labor movement. Artisans
enmeshed in handicraft production were threatened by the
emergence of the factory system and the farming out of work
to the countryside by merchant capitalists (the original
form of outsourcing).  They mounted a fierce resistance.  On
the one hand, these apprentice and journeymen craftsmen
looked to the past. They demanded that the customary
practice of "just" wages and prices that, for generations,
had defined the "moral economy"-long before the advent of
the free market and "free" wage labor-should continue to
insure their social identity and social well-being.  At the
same time, they broke free of the hierarchical and
patriarchal structures of handicraft work and the household
economy, welcomed the opportunities for social and economic
mobility opened up by the new capitalism (this was back when
capitalism truly functioned as a leveling force, breaking
apart the traditional deferential order of things), and
became champions of democratic political reform in the age
of Andrew Jackson.

A half-century later, the country was alive with social
upheavals powered by this same dynamic.  Populist rhetoric,
for example, regularly conjured up images of Jeffersonian
freeholder agriculture, a mythic romance of self-sufficient
farm communities, proud of their independence and rough
equality.  This yeoman farmer idyll was their "lost cause,"
a pastoral collective memory marshaled against the predatory
forces of global capitalism: Eastern and British banks, the
railroads, farm-machinery oligopolies, grain-elevator
operators, and commodity speculators.

But what gave the movement true grit, what freed it of
sentimental fantasizing and won it legions of committed
crusaders, was its breakthrough vision of the future,
something Populists called the "cooperative commonwealth."
This was to be a world of modern, mechanized agriculture, to
be sure, but one freed of the ravages of the free market.
Cooperative enterprises in purchasing, credit, marketing,
distribution, and storage of farm commodities would
intercept the "invisible hand" at every point along what
today we might call the "supply chain," stopping it from
driving independent farmers off the land. Putting aside
their inherited Jeffersonian suspicion of big government,
Populists also called for the nationalization of the
railroads.  And they proposed that the federal treasury
stamp out wild oscillations in the prices of agricultural
goods and the massively destructive role of commodity
speculators by a timed withholding and releasing of crops
into the global marketplace so as to insure stable prices
that would keep farming a viable way of life.

These were feats of great social and moral imagination which
managed to transcend the past without obliterating it.  They
could crop up in the most homely surroundings, familiar
enough to today's Tea Party activists.  During the Gilded
Age and, well past the turn of the new century, middling
classes in towns and cities across the country mobilized to
battle the Trusts, those corporate behemoths that had come
to dominate core sectors of the economy.  One might casually
assume this anti-trust movement expressed the resentments of
smaller businessmen threatened with extinction, and that it
sought to return to some ideal state of petty
entrepreneurship.  And in some ways it did.  But the
movement included and expressed much more than that.
Consumers angered by the price-fixing and rate
discrimination practiced by many trusts, employees of trusts
abused and exploited at work, and a wide variety of urban
middle-class professionals and white- collar workers worried
about the inordinate power of the trusts assembled together.
Naturally, they demanded that the trusts be restrained,
regulated, or broken up so as to preserve the
entrepreneurial opportunity and family capitalism they
cherished from the past.  But in many locales they advocated
as well that they be replaced by publicly-owned enterprises.
And in many cases they were.  In town and cities across the
country, public transportation and public utilities
supplanted privately-owned ones.  Edward Bellamy's famous
utopian novel of 1888-Looking Backward, with its futuristic
portrait of a National Trust that would encompass the whole
of society-was the rather bizarre articulation of a social
movement that alchemized its past into some hypothesized
non-capitalist future.  For a while, it captured the
imagination of millions.

Arguably the whole history of the labor movement during what
might be called the "long century of strikes," from 1870 to
1970, exemplified this same pas de deux between the past and
the future.  Rebellions against the predations of industrial
capitalism remembered the just price and the just wage,
reasserted traditional control of the shop floor against the
usurpations of management, tried to reclaim old-time
customary breaks in toil from the relentless rhythms of the
factory time clock, defended the age-old dignity of skilled
labor, and drew on Catholic condemnations of usury and
parasitism (and the Church's sanctification of childhood and
the maternal role and all those pre- capitalist ways of life
which resisted the transformation of human beings into
abstract wage labor).  However, nourished by their varied
pasts, these labor insurgencies aspired to new forms of
emancipation - cooperatives, socialism, syndicalism, and
anarcho-syndicalism - finally culminating, during the New
Deal years, in a system of industrial democracy to replace
the industrial autocracy of the old regime.

In this opening year of the Civil War's sesquicentennial
it's worth remembering that the civil rights movement also
was infused with this same paradoxical logic.  Rising up
against generations of systematic exploitation, degradation,
exclusion, and a kind of racialized quasi-serfdom, African-
Americans were inspired by a quest for a universal equality
of individual rights that is the antithesis of apartheid.
For a despised caste, so long denied that elementary
condition of modern American life, that was the future which
beckoned.  But it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine
that extraordinary act of courageous resistance and social
invention without reckoning with Christianity; or, more
precisely, with the Afro- Christian past of generations of
slaves and freedmen. This folk Christianity supplied much of
the lingua franca of the movement and often made up its
institutional and emotional understructure. Spirituals,
their lyrics sometimes appropriately secularized, were more
than the movement's music; they were its house of being.
Marx got it right: "Religious suffering is at one and the
same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest
against real suffering."

William Faulkner, who perhaps not coincidentally hailed from
the South, once famously noted that, "The past is not dead.
It's not even past."  Whether we remain its captives or not
depends on our capacity to use it without being used by it.

[Steve Fraser is editor-at-large of New Labor Forum, a
writer, and a historian. His latest book is Wall Street:
America's Dream Palace.

Joshua B. Freeman teaches history at the City University of
New York and is a consulting editor for New Labor Forum. He
is currently completing a history of the United States since
World War II as part of the Penguin History of the U.S.]

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