Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States by Kolin Andrew

Author:Kolin, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Even though capitalism strives to redefine and reshape productive relations in order to further repress and extract capital from labor, the process is incomplete as the limits of capitalism are eventually reached, especially during an economic crisis. Evidence of this limit appears in the form of cooperatives and self-help organizations. Even in good times, but especially when times were tough, the private, self-regulating market cannot satisfy social needs. For a capitalist, a social need is identified only if there is a market-driven profit motive. Outside of this self-regulating market, the cooperatives were producing products based on the peoples’ social needs, such as for goods and services. These organizations looked upon social cooperation as not driven solely by profit motives, such as the Unemployed Citizens League, through which “the fisherman’s union found boats for the unemployed to use cooperatively; local farmer gave unmarketable fruit and vegetables over to their members to pick.”[38] Given the depths of the Great Depression, cooperatives addressed social needs, which translated into supporting people’s basic subsistence needs. One example of subsistence self-help cooperatives appeared as the Berkley Unemployed Association, which “had sections that included sewing, quilting, and weaving, shoe repair, barber services, food canning and conserving, woodyard, kitchen and dining room, commissary, garage, machine shop, wood shop, mattress factory and painter and carpenter teams.”[39]

Given the scale of the Great Depression, there were indications that the U.S. government had reduced the use of overt repression on organized labor. One example was government-sponsored support of cooperative arrangements. With the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of May 1933, setting up the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the federal government attempts planning of agriculture amounting to a concept of farm cooperatives. The AAA provided subsidies to farmers not to develop available farmland. Another cooperative venture government supported was the Rural Electrification Administration in May 1935, which provided loans to create locally based cooperatives to increase the electrification of rural communities. These federal programs were incorporated as a part of larger government programs, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority program, toward promoting various economic cooperatives. These initiatives are examples of state-supported policies generating non-market-based cooperative ventures. That the U.S. government would, in a time of economic crisis, fund cooperative programs is evidence that within a capitalist economy, non-market options can develop. Through the Farm Credit Administration, policymakers were even willing in 1933 to set up banks to fund cooperative enterprises. “Banks for cooperatives became a member-controlled system of financing farmer cooperatives, as well as telephone and electric cooperatives. After having been set up with government seed money, the FCA became self-supporting.”[40] Such policies were undertaken at a time when the economy was in a crisis. For the most part, these programs emphasized the consumption and not the productive side of cooperatives. The question of ownership and the institutional exclusion of labor was entirely overlooked.

As American capitalism began to recover, government support for cooperatives predictably declined; “by 1949, there were very few consumer co-ops anywhere in the U.S. and the 1950s remained a period of decline for non-agricultural cooperatives everywhere in the United States.

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