Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

IV. SETTLER TRADE-
UNIONISM
1. The Rise of White Labor
Settler Amerika got the reinforcements it needed
to advance into Empire from the great European immigration
of the 19th Century. Between 1830-1860 some 4.5
Million Europeans (two-thirds of them Irish and German)
arrived to help the settler beachhead on the Eastern shore
push outward.(l) The impact of these reinforcements on
the tide of battle can be guessed from the fact that they
numbered more than the total settler population of 1800.
At a time when the young settler nation was dangerously
dependent on the rebellious Afrikan colony in the South,
and on the continental battleground greatly outnumbered
by the various Indian, Mexican and Afrikan nations, these
new legions of Europeans played a decisive role.
The fact that this flood of new Europeans also
helped create contradictions within the settler ranks has led
to honest confusions. Some comrades mistakenly believe
that a white proletariat was born, whose trade-union and
socialist activities placed it in the historic position of a
primary force for revolution (and thus our eventual ally).
The key is to see what was dominant in the material life
and political consciousness of this new labor stratum, then
and now.
The earlier settler society of the English colonies
was relatively "fluid" and still unformed in terms of class
structure. After all, the original ruling class of Amerika
was back in England, and even the large Virginia planter
capitalists were seen by the English aristocracy as mere
middle-men between them and the Afrikan proletarians
who actually created the wealth. To them George
Washington was just an overpaid foreman. And while
there were great differences in wealth and power, there was
a shared privilege among settlers. Few were exploited in the
scientific socialist sense of being a wage-slave of capital; in
fact, wage labor for another man was looked down upon
by whites as a mark of failure (and still is by many). Up until
the mid-1800's settler society then was characterized by
the unequal but general opportunities for land ownership
and the extraordinary fluidity of personal fortunes by Old
European standards.
This era of early settlerism rapidly drew to a close
as Amerikan capitalism matured. Good Indian land and
cheap Afrikan slaves became more and more difficult for
ordinary settlers to obtain. In the South the ranks of the
planters began tightening, concentrating as capital itself
was. One historian writes:
slaveowners as so many succeeded in doing ... But the day
of the farmer began to wane rapidly after 1850. If he had
not already obtained good land, it became doubtful he
could ever improve his fortunes. All the fertile soil that was
not under cultivation was generally held by speculators at
mounting prices. "(2)
While in the cities of the North, the small, local
business of the independent master craftsman (shoemaker,
blacksmith, cooper, etc.) was giving way step by step to the
large merchant, with his regional business and his capitalist
workshop/factory. This was the inevitable casualty list of
industrialism. At the beginning of the 1800's it was still
true that every ambitious, young Euro-Amerikan apprentice
worker could expect to eventually become a master,
owning his own little business (and often his own slaves).
There is no exaggeration in saying this. We know, for example,
that in the Philadelphia of the 1820's craft masters
actually outnumbered their jn~lrneymen employees by 3 to
2-and that various tradesmen, masters and professionals
were an absolute majority of the Euro-Amerikan male
population. (3)
But by 1860 the number of journeymen workers
compared to masters had tripled, and a majority of Euro-
Amerikan men were now wage-earners.(4) Working for a
master or merchant was no longer just a temporary
stepping-stone to becoming an independent landowner or
shopkeeper. This new white workforce for the first time
had little prospect of advancing beyond wage-slavery.
Unemployment and wage-slashing were common
phenomena, and an increasing class strife and discontent
entered the world of the settlers.
In this scene the new millions of immigrant European
workers, many with Old European experiences of
class struggle, furnished the final element in the hardening
of a settler class structure. The political development was
very rapid once the nodal point was reached: From artisan
guilds to craft associations to local unions. National
unions and labor journals soon appeared. And in the
workers' movements the championing of various socialist
and even Marxist ideas was widespread and popular, particularly
since these immigrant masses were salted with
radical political exiles (Marx, in the Inaugural Address to
the 1st International in 1864, says: "...crushed by the iron
hand of force, the most advanced sons of labor fled in
despair to the transatlantic Republic.. .")
"During the earlier decades, when the lower South All this was but the outward form of proletarian
was being settled, farmers stood every chance of becoming class consciousness, made all the more convincing because
planters. Until late in the fifties (1850's-ed.) most those white workers subjectively believed that they were
planters or their fathers before them started life as proletarians-"the exploited", "the creators of
yeomen, occasionally with a few slaves, but generally all wealth", "the sons of toil", etc. etc. In actuality this
without any hands except their own. The heyday of these was clearly untrue. While there were many exploited and
poor people lasted as long as land and slaves Gere cheap, poverty-stricken immigrant proletarians, these new Euroenabling
them to realize their ambition to be planters and 24 Arnerikan workers as a whole were a privileged labor