We’re in a New Era of Class Warfare. Is Change Still Possible?

from the NYT

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Class inequality has surged into the view of American politics in recent years, but this isn’t the first bout of class violence this country has seen. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 12-hour working days were common and child labor legal and federal minimum wages nonexistent, neither political party offered meaningful relief, pressing the working class to the wall. Violence — sabotage, dynamite, assassinations — ensued.

But there’s a key difference. In that earlier era, the anarchists and trade unionists who committed acts of violence did so, however rashly, in the hopes of affecting change. What is more, there were labor organizations and political movements committed to bringing about better conditions for working-class people. In time, they achieved at least some of these goals.

Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.

While the extreme concentration of wealth today may echo the dawn of industrial capitalism, the conditions of class confrontation then were profoundly different. Then, the workplace itself was extremely dangerous: Thousands of workers died in industrial accidents annually in the early decades of the 20th century. The police and National Guardsmen came in to break strikes, while companies hired private militias to prevent workers from organizing. 

Radical workers responded with violence of their own, instilling great fear among the elites of the day. In the coal fields of Western Pennsylvania, Irish miners killed at least 14 mine officials over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. When the Western Federation of Miners sought to organize in 1899, union supporters used dynamite to destroy company property. The governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, imprisoned about a thousand workers in response. In 1905, after leaving office, a bomb killed him at his home. Union leader William Haywood was among those charged (a member of the miners’ union had confessed to the crime and implicated union leadership; a jury found Haywood not guilty). President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist who had lost his job during an economic crash. Two union members dynamited the offices of The Los Angeles Times, widely seen as hostile to organized labor, in 1910... 

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