PPLE
12-12-2007, 12:50 AM
Excerpted from the article I referenced here (http://www.populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=7914#7914):
Old System Breaking Down
McGuire could see that the trade was changing. Economic developments in the post-Civil War era affected the world of the carpenter. Up until that time, a carpenter's life followed a predictable course. Beginning as an apprentice, the typical carpenter could expect to follow the steps of his employers to journeyman and master carpenter status. Masters, journeymen, and apprentices worked together on projects, divided only by the skill levels that came with age and experience. As the building industry grew, however, the individual master could not keep up with the increased demands of capital and labor. In some cases, speculators from outside the trade stepped in; in others, masters put down their tools and became full-time contractors.
The old system was breaking down. Contractors now coordinated and supervised construction, while the journeymen and apprentices wielded the hammers and saws. By the 1880's, the number of large building employers multiplied, threatening the average carpenter's dreams of becoming an independent master.
The new breed of employers cared little for the quality of building or the pride of the craftsman. "Jerry" builders and "botch" work became the order of the day as the lure of great profits led contractors to drive their workers harder and harder. J.W. Brown, a carpenter from Connecticut, recalled times of old when the employer "felt himself under a moral obligation" to the working carpenter and his steady employment. Under the new arrangements, according to Brown, the carpenter had become "accustomed to look upon himself not only as a wage worker for life, but as an appendage to a monstrous machine for the production and distribution of wealth."
McGuire recognized the effects of this new way of working. The carpenter's position worsened as building employers introduced modern business methods to construction, turning craftsmen into "modern" workers.
This same process of changing social relations and the consequent degradation of the independent artisan within them is described in the book Chants Democratic by Sean Wilentz (*one of several I am in but not done with). Here is a snip of discussion about it::
In Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984), Sean Wilentz discovered the heart of American democracy beating in its union halls, not its party caucuses. The theme of that book was the awakening of class consciousness among the city's skilled craftsmen, a process that Wilentz traced through their social organizations, labor presses, and fledgling trade unions. These, and not political parties, constituted "the truly democratic element in the Jacksonian city" (p. 230). When the authentic radical voice of the wage-earner did break into politics through an insurgent movement like the Working Men of 1829, it was inevitably squelched or coopted by the major parties—especially Andrew Jackson's Democrats, who sometimes talked the talk but never walked the walk. 1
That was then. In this new book, Wilentz offers a magisterial retelling of the American political saga from the Constitution to the Civil War. As Chants Democratic emulated E. P. Thompson, here Wilentz pays homage to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Wilentz's zestful, action-packed narrative expands and amends the plotline of Schlesinger's landmark The Age of Jackson (1945). Like Schlesinger, Wilentz now sees the very lifeblood of democracy, the everyday concerns of ordinary people, coursing through the cacophony of electoral politics: through the endless round of caucuses, conventions, committees, and campaigns that went into determining who governed and how. Eschewing the market revolution paradigm of the 1990s, Wilentz unabashedly accords party politics an autonomous and central role in his epic tale. The great transformation from 1789 to 1860, he argues, was political, not economic: not the commercialization of America, but its democratization.
History Cooperative (http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/br_58.html)
See also this google books excerpt (http://books.google.com/books?id=wdzVOpP71foC&pg=RA3-PA268&lpg=RA3-PA268&dq=chants+democratic+%22spirit+of+76%22&source=web&ots=_NJFYSg4eQ&sig=gACAmbOQ6oPNEiyBps8VtAHU8QE#PRA3-PA268,M1).
This change begetting change is one that of course is part and parcel (if I have my head on straight) to Marxist materialism. As I was reading about McGuire tonight, I could not help but recall the similarities to those craftsmen in early 19th century New York who would riotously (literally) march through the streets of New York crying out "Spirit of '76."
After the chaos of the Revolutionary War, American skilled workmen, including silversmiths, were caught up in the transition to an industrial society. Some urban craftsmen adapted to change. Others sought to extend and adapt older patterns of work; and still others challenged their masters by forming various journeyman associations. The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen was founded in New York City in 1785 by representatives of thirty-one different trades with the slogan, By Hammer and Hand all Arts do Stand, to stress their mutuality of interests. Myers served as chairman of the Gold and Silversmiths Society in 1786, and maintained a shop at 29 Princess Street (now Beaver Street), at the corner of Broad Street in 1789. By 1792, he had relocated to Pearl Street, where he remained until his death in 1795.
An emerging artisan republicanism of urban craftsmen - men like the New York silversmith Myer Myers and other yeomanry of the city, whom Thomas Jefferson called the heirs to the spirit of ’76 - became the legacy for the future.
link (http://www.sackheritagegroup.com/articles/articles.php?articleID=20)
I guess I needta pick that book up again for a bit, but hearkening back to our earlier discussion with Russell in re immigration, I also think this is a worthwhile topic in that it gives historicity not merely to the issue of working men (which we probably all are inclined to reflexively contemplate as being native to the states) but also to the issues of trade unionism and to the long and ongoing entanglement of the issues of labor, trade, and iimmigration. To wit:
Whereas virtual unanimity existed among New York's skilled journeymen in their opposition to the unregulated importation of foreign goods, the presence of foreign workers in the city elicited a more nuanced response. Part of the complexity of the situation—as with the relationship between unionists and all types of other workers—stemmed from the demographic composition of the two groups and their actual lived experiences. Just as many of New York City's organized men moved from the American hinterland, a large and growing proportion of the city's artisans hailed from Europe. Not only were some of the city's labor leaders, such as George Henry Evans and Edward J. Webb, foreign-born, but many of the rank-and-file came from England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1833, Robert Walker recognized the number of Irishmen present during his Fourth of July speech to the Stonecutters' Society, remarking that the Society was too connected to Ireland "ever to forget the Emerald Isle." The Union, the GTU's official newspaper, refused to publish an attack on Irish immigrant workers written by a "Native American Mechanic" because of its policy prohibiting material that exploited religious intolerance. During the Journeymen Tailors' 1836 conspiracy trial, labor critics emphasized that of the twenty men indicted, two had been born in "Ireland, three in Scotland, and four in England."
Some trade union members did join the contemporary Native American Democratic Association, a nativist political party founded in 1835 and supported by the newspaper Spirit of '76, but such activities seemed the exception rather than the rule. Overall, the prevalence of foreign-born working men in trade unions meant that labor organizations maintained a cautious acceptance of immigrant laborers. One British anti-emigration propagandist's contention that working New Yorkers' "prejudice consists in their hatred of the English people" was certainly an overstatement.
However, competition from foreign workers in certain capacities concerned organized men enough to voice their objections to the newly-arrived workers. While most apprenticeships involved young boys and girls in their teens, some recently-arrived adults who could not find work because of suspect qualifications or references sought apprentice contracts. A typical example of a mature apprentice was George Ellis, a house carpenter from Scotland who indentured himself to George Graham for three years starting in May 1836, even though he was already "upwards of 21 years." Ellis' contract, and similar adult apprenticeships, piqued union members' interest because apprentice wage-rates seriously undercut journeymen's earnings. Graham paid Ellis $4 per week for the first year of his contract, $4.50 the second, and $5 the third year. Such wages amounted to just above one-third of the going rate for organized journeymen house carpenters in the mid-1830s, who pressed for $2 or more per day for a six-day work week.
Skilled journeymen also viewed immigrant laborers who competed in trades already saturated by workers from Europe as potential threats. Adam Burt's poetry about the influx of new weavers into the city spoke to the problem:
Ship loads of men are landing here,
To us for work they'll bicker;
And gladly weave for less than you,
Yea, also weave it thicker.
'And all that rudely spurn, we'll drag
Before his honour Riker;
To think or speak you ne'er was form'd,
But just to weave it thicker."
The lines require some unpacking, but the poem is mainly concerned with competition from new immigrant weavers who work for less money and do not give bosses trouble or unionize (union members often wound up in court, charged for conspiracy by prosecutor Richard Riker). Burt's fear stemmed from the fact that such a large percentage of New York's weavers had already arrived from overseas, primarily from Scotland. Most Scottish weavers settled in an area around West Seventeenth Street known as Weaver's Row and any addition to their ranks brought pressure not only to the labor market, but also to the housing market in the close-knit weavers' neighborhood.83 Organized workers felt ambivalence between support for new immigrants and disdain for individuals who might upset the stable, interconnected world of household, neighborhood, and workshop.
Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/greenberg/Chapter4JRG.html)
Anyway, given that these cycles are as common as the cycles in Capitalism (indeed, aren't they just about one in the same?), I am wondering
- what are some of the most recent ones?
- is one upon us now?
- has the pace quickened so much that, like Bush scandals, they all just sorta meld into a continuous revolution of relations?
- what of the effect of labor suppression on the outcomes of these changing relations? Are these changing relations further diminishing the prospects of organized labor or is there no causality?
Old System Breaking Down
McGuire could see that the trade was changing. Economic developments in the post-Civil War era affected the world of the carpenter. Up until that time, a carpenter's life followed a predictable course. Beginning as an apprentice, the typical carpenter could expect to follow the steps of his employers to journeyman and master carpenter status. Masters, journeymen, and apprentices worked together on projects, divided only by the skill levels that came with age and experience. As the building industry grew, however, the individual master could not keep up with the increased demands of capital and labor. In some cases, speculators from outside the trade stepped in; in others, masters put down their tools and became full-time contractors.
The old system was breaking down. Contractors now coordinated and supervised construction, while the journeymen and apprentices wielded the hammers and saws. By the 1880's, the number of large building employers multiplied, threatening the average carpenter's dreams of becoming an independent master.
The new breed of employers cared little for the quality of building or the pride of the craftsman. "Jerry" builders and "botch" work became the order of the day as the lure of great profits led contractors to drive their workers harder and harder. J.W. Brown, a carpenter from Connecticut, recalled times of old when the employer "felt himself under a moral obligation" to the working carpenter and his steady employment. Under the new arrangements, according to Brown, the carpenter had become "accustomed to look upon himself not only as a wage worker for life, but as an appendage to a monstrous machine for the production and distribution of wealth."
McGuire recognized the effects of this new way of working. The carpenter's position worsened as building employers introduced modern business methods to construction, turning craftsmen into "modern" workers.
This same process of changing social relations and the consequent degradation of the independent artisan within them is described in the book Chants Democratic by Sean Wilentz (*one of several I am in but not done with). Here is a snip of discussion about it::
In Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984), Sean Wilentz discovered the heart of American democracy beating in its union halls, not its party caucuses. The theme of that book was the awakening of class consciousness among the city's skilled craftsmen, a process that Wilentz traced through their social organizations, labor presses, and fledgling trade unions. These, and not political parties, constituted "the truly democratic element in the Jacksonian city" (p. 230). When the authentic radical voice of the wage-earner did break into politics through an insurgent movement like the Working Men of 1829, it was inevitably squelched or coopted by the major parties—especially Andrew Jackson's Democrats, who sometimes talked the talk but never walked the walk. 1
That was then. In this new book, Wilentz offers a magisterial retelling of the American political saga from the Constitution to the Civil War. As Chants Democratic emulated E. P. Thompson, here Wilentz pays homage to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Wilentz's zestful, action-packed narrative expands and amends the plotline of Schlesinger's landmark The Age of Jackson (1945). Like Schlesinger, Wilentz now sees the very lifeblood of democracy, the everyday concerns of ordinary people, coursing through the cacophony of electoral politics: through the endless round of caucuses, conventions, committees, and campaigns that went into determining who governed and how. Eschewing the market revolution paradigm of the 1990s, Wilentz unabashedly accords party politics an autonomous and central role in his epic tale. The great transformation from 1789 to 1860, he argues, was political, not economic: not the commercialization of America, but its democratization.
History Cooperative (http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/br_58.html)
See also this google books excerpt (http://books.google.com/books?id=wdzVOpP71foC&pg=RA3-PA268&lpg=RA3-PA268&dq=chants+democratic+%22spirit+of+76%22&source=web&ots=_NJFYSg4eQ&sig=gACAmbOQ6oPNEiyBps8VtAHU8QE#PRA3-PA268,M1).
This change begetting change is one that of course is part and parcel (if I have my head on straight) to Marxist materialism. As I was reading about McGuire tonight, I could not help but recall the similarities to those craftsmen in early 19th century New York who would riotously (literally) march through the streets of New York crying out "Spirit of '76."
After the chaos of the Revolutionary War, American skilled workmen, including silversmiths, were caught up in the transition to an industrial society. Some urban craftsmen adapted to change. Others sought to extend and adapt older patterns of work; and still others challenged their masters by forming various journeyman associations. The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen was founded in New York City in 1785 by representatives of thirty-one different trades with the slogan, By Hammer and Hand all Arts do Stand, to stress their mutuality of interests. Myers served as chairman of the Gold and Silversmiths Society in 1786, and maintained a shop at 29 Princess Street (now Beaver Street), at the corner of Broad Street in 1789. By 1792, he had relocated to Pearl Street, where he remained until his death in 1795.
An emerging artisan republicanism of urban craftsmen - men like the New York silversmith Myer Myers and other yeomanry of the city, whom Thomas Jefferson called the heirs to the spirit of ’76 - became the legacy for the future.
link (http://www.sackheritagegroup.com/articles/articles.php?articleID=20)
I guess I needta pick that book up again for a bit, but hearkening back to our earlier discussion with Russell in re immigration, I also think this is a worthwhile topic in that it gives historicity not merely to the issue of working men (which we probably all are inclined to reflexively contemplate as being native to the states) but also to the issues of trade unionism and to the long and ongoing entanglement of the issues of labor, trade, and iimmigration. To wit:
Whereas virtual unanimity existed among New York's skilled journeymen in their opposition to the unregulated importation of foreign goods, the presence of foreign workers in the city elicited a more nuanced response. Part of the complexity of the situation—as with the relationship between unionists and all types of other workers—stemmed from the demographic composition of the two groups and their actual lived experiences. Just as many of New York City's organized men moved from the American hinterland, a large and growing proportion of the city's artisans hailed from Europe. Not only were some of the city's labor leaders, such as George Henry Evans and Edward J. Webb, foreign-born, but many of the rank-and-file came from England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1833, Robert Walker recognized the number of Irishmen present during his Fourth of July speech to the Stonecutters' Society, remarking that the Society was too connected to Ireland "ever to forget the Emerald Isle." The Union, the GTU's official newspaper, refused to publish an attack on Irish immigrant workers written by a "Native American Mechanic" because of its policy prohibiting material that exploited religious intolerance. During the Journeymen Tailors' 1836 conspiracy trial, labor critics emphasized that of the twenty men indicted, two had been born in "Ireland, three in Scotland, and four in England."
Some trade union members did join the contemporary Native American Democratic Association, a nativist political party founded in 1835 and supported by the newspaper Spirit of '76, but such activities seemed the exception rather than the rule. Overall, the prevalence of foreign-born working men in trade unions meant that labor organizations maintained a cautious acceptance of immigrant laborers. One British anti-emigration propagandist's contention that working New Yorkers' "prejudice consists in their hatred of the English people" was certainly an overstatement.
However, competition from foreign workers in certain capacities concerned organized men enough to voice their objections to the newly-arrived workers. While most apprenticeships involved young boys and girls in their teens, some recently-arrived adults who could not find work because of suspect qualifications or references sought apprentice contracts. A typical example of a mature apprentice was George Ellis, a house carpenter from Scotland who indentured himself to George Graham for three years starting in May 1836, even though he was already "upwards of 21 years." Ellis' contract, and similar adult apprenticeships, piqued union members' interest because apprentice wage-rates seriously undercut journeymen's earnings. Graham paid Ellis $4 per week for the first year of his contract, $4.50 the second, and $5 the third year. Such wages amounted to just above one-third of the going rate for organized journeymen house carpenters in the mid-1830s, who pressed for $2 or more per day for a six-day work week.
Skilled journeymen also viewed immigrant laborers who competed in trades already saturated by workers from Europe as potential threats. Adam Burt's poetry about the influx of new weavers into the city spoke to the problem:
Ship loads of men are landing here,
To us for work they'll bicker;
And gladly weave for less than you,
Yea, also weave it thicker.
'And all that rudely spurn, we'll drag
Before his honour Riker;
To think or speak you ne'er was form'd,
But just to weave it thicker."
The lines require some unpacking, but the poem is mainly concerned with competition from new immigrant weavers who work for less money and do not give bosses trouble or unionize (union members often wound up in court, charged for conspiracy by prosecutor Richard Riker). Burt's fear stemmed from the fact that such a large percentage of New York's weavers had already arrived from overseas, primarily from Scotland. Most Scottish weavers settled in an area around West Seventeenth Street known as Weaver's Row and any addition to their ranks brought pressure not only to the labor market, but also to the housing market in the close-knit weavers' neighborhood.83 Organized workers felt ambivalence between support for new immigrants and disdain for individuals who might upset the stable, interconnected world of household, neighborhood, and workshop.
Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/greenberg/Chapter4JRG.html)
Anyway, given that these cycles are as common as the cycles in Capitalism (indeed, aren't they just about one in the same?), I am wondering
- what are some of the most recent ones?
- is one upon us now?
- has the pace quickened so much that, like Bush scandals, they all just sorta meld into a continuous revolution of relations?
- what of the effect of labor suppression on the outcomes of these changing relations? Are these changing relations further diminishing the prospects of organized labor or is there no causality?