Lessons for Our Struggle by Frances Fox Piven

Author:Frances Fox Piven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, Current Affairs
ISBN: 978-1-60846-229-2
Publisher: Haymarket Books

The Lean Years

WITH THE ONSET of the Great Recession of 2008, many observers began to look back to the era of the Great Depression for the lessons that period could offer about our ongoing economic and social troubles. And there is no better way to begin the search for lessons than in a reading or rereading of Irving Bernstein’s two-volume masterful history of the 1920s and 1930s.

Bernstein’s project in these volumes is to write nothing less than a comprehensive history of American workers during the climactic decades that transformed the country. He approaches his task with a zeal for the facts that we associate with the best of investigative reporters, following each lead wherever the trail goes, and I think it is this radical empiricism that makes his work so valuable and so enduring. He wants to know everything that bears on the experience of working people, and he draws his sense of what is significant broadly from the social sciences. So we learn a lot, about the changing demography of the working class, shifting patterns of settlement as European migration slowed and internal migration from farm to city increased; about changes in wages and hours and overall employment, the new developments in production, and the organization of work; about speedup and the often suffocating influence of small-town churches in league with employers; about company towns organized like plantations and factories seeded with employer spies and goons; and about the paralysis of the unions and the voting patterns of workers. These are all relatively conventional “variables” in descriptions of the working class. However, Bernstein’s zealous empiricism leads him to go beyond the usual material to provide a detailed and wide-ranging survey of worker resistance that took unconventional form in mob actions, demonstrations, self-help efforts, and strikes.

Of course, no one can simply be an empiricist, a compiler of the facts and nothing but the facts. Obviously, judgments have to be made about which evidence is to be gathered, where to search for it, how to assess its reliability, and how to order, present, and interpret it. Inevitably, the researcher, whether investigative reporter or historian, approaches his or her subject with a philosophy and at least the rudiments of a theory. Bernstein did have a philosophy and a theory. Broadly, he belonged to the school of historians we call progressives, meaning simply that he thinks there is a forward direction to our history, that we are getting better and wiser, and as we do, we improve and reform our social institutions.

In particular, Bernstein believed that with intelligence and good will, we would reform our industrial and capitalist system. He worked at the University of California’s Institute of Industrial Relations and imbibed deeply the gospel of labor experts associated with the reform labor policies of the New Deal. One pillar of the faith had to do with government protection of workers from the instabilities of markets and the contingencies of biological frailty. The social policies that were advocated included unemployment benefits, old age

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