Capitalists and Labor.

The other day I read an article about the violent acts perpetrated by organized labor in the United States during the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th century, when labor was first organizing. The writer of the article, a conservative, portrayed these violent acts as terrorist acts and blamed them on the growing liberal/progressive element of the time. There is a constant theme to the articles written by this author, one of liberal/progressives bashing and that they throughout history have been the ones who have encouraged and cultivated the environment for terrorism and anarchy.

The liberal/progressives he speaks of in this article worked to advance a just and humane society in America. The author considers those liberal/progressives as subversive elements because in trying to create better working conditions for labor they were disrupting the righteous, free flow of capitalism. According to what I read in this article it was all right for capitalists to exploit labor and deny it better working conditions and salaries but it wasn't all right for labor to demand better treatment for its workers from capitalists. The inference I got is that labor should have been grateful to capitalists for creating jobs and to bad about the abuses perpetrated by them. After all, according to what was inferred, the abuse is part of doing business. However, I don't see those early labor agitators as terrorists or anarchists but as perhaps desperate and cornered people who had little or no recourse to address their labor grievances, hence the violence.

Let me make myself perfectly clear. I don't condone violence. Anyone of reason cannot condone such activity. However, sometimes it has been the only means of recourse because the injustices and intransigencies instigated by humanity wouldn’t resolve themselves through reason. Violence, as we know, gets one's attention like nothing else. And unfortunately, sometimes there is no alternative. It is the means of last resort.

I really don't understand why the writer is against the labor movement. But then, he is a conservative; a state that tends not to support labor unions. And as a traditionalist he has a warped sense of how society ought to function, in a particularly structured, 'ruling class' way. He doesn't realize that the labor movement has had as much a part in creating the capitalist/democratic system we live in, which he seems to admire, as capitalism. The conflict between capitalism and those who have struggled against it for better wages and working conditions is what has made America what it is today, a reasonably decent place to live in. Because of what the labor movement has done for America he should be supportive of it rather than denigrate it.

The struggle between labor and management is what has given capitalism and free-market economics its legitimacy. If capitalists ran the whole show without labor’s input, as our writer suggests should have been the way, capitalism would have destroyed itself long ago like Marx observed. Marx believed, and rightly so, that capitalism's contradictions would be the death of it. Contradictions must to be resolved. Labor has challenged capitalism’s contradictions and altered many of them so as to make it fair and accessible to all. I don’t think our writer who is anti-Marxist wants to prove Marx right. So instead he should be supportive of the labor movement.

The way I understand it, our writer believes that from its beginnings capitalism was a fully developed system, like there was some sort of manual/bible out there on how it ultimately should be conducted. No. Capitalism has had to learn itself and its mode of operation from the bottom up just like has every other worthwhile system of human governance. The labor movement and the violence it sometimes provoked were part and parcel of its development. If capitalism had been full of clarity and wisdom from the start about how to properly conduct itself it would have known initially how to treat labor properly and avoid all the violence that has occurred in its name. But it didn't, hence the need for labor's participation to help shape it. It is, after all, a two way street.

Humans have always learned best and more convincingly through experience. An a priori wisdom has never been enough. For instance, just because the Ten Commandments told us how to behave we didn't follow it advice. No, we have learned its wisdom by first breaking its rules. True wisdom has always been gained through experience, practice and transformation. The free market place of ideas and commerce we reside in today was developed this way and unfortunately also through violent clashes, as those between labor and capitalism.

Capitalism on its own, without the labor movement, would have truly created a system of the survival of the fittest, a system to benefit a few, a system that would eventually have destroy itself or brought barbarians to its gates. Our writer’s criticism, though, is legitimate and worthy because such criticism in the larger arena has helped temper some of the outrages committed by the labor movement. As a criticizer of the labor movement he serves the same great purpose as those who criticize capitalism, tempering capitalism's extremes and helping to make it into something everybody can survive and benefit from, not just a few.