Industrialism, and what came to be referred to as capitalism, took shape as we all know in a tumultuous era marked by a struggle that encompassed social and intellectual upheavals. During these several centuries the opposition to the dominance of Capital took many forms; in the early period from the aristocracy to the peasants who fought the enclosures and the early mechanization of economic life to the later period the craftspeople and the workers in the new factories.
Various aspects of this opposition continue to resonate into the present. Probably the most significant historic reference re-occurred on May Day, 2009 when every city of any size in the US witnessed the hereto invisible working-class emerge en masse to register their disgust with the troglodytes in Washington and their anti-immigration bills.
For various reasons, mainly related to the total brainwashing of the American public by the pulpit, the politicians and the plutocrats and their media lapdogs, not to mention of course the connivance of so-called educators, the essence of the opposition to Capital has been lost to modern consciousness. That heritage, relegated to the specialists of academia and a few politically motivated activists in this country, offers a treasure trove of relevancy despite the seemingly advanced nature of modern capitalism – advanced mainly in the subtly of exploitation, not in the responsiveness to demands for justice.
The vestiges, maybe pale vestiges, of the great labor struggles in the 19th Century persist into the modern era. The Labor Movement, as emaciated as it is, feeds on that heritage, as does the movement for human rights, which can trace a lineage back to Abolitionism. And while in the United States the cooperative movement seems to recognize little affinity with those struggles, the legacy of grassroots organizing amongst workers and farmers nonetheless remains as historic fact.
The bottom-up history of poor people organizing themselves offers a vast storehouse of relevant and intriguing knowledge, from principles of affiliation and methods of using economic power to systems of communication. One of the more obscure corners few have gleaned for contemporary significance highlights the use of language to express visions of equality and justice. Exploring the most obvious terms for imagining such a world leads us to recognize that an essential element in this quest entailed control of the means of production.
No demand made more sense than to relieve the tiny “parasite class” of its inordinate power, through the threat of violence it must be acknowledged, over the everyday lives of so many to determine who will work and who will starve. As the fight to gain (regain?) dignity advanced from machine wrecking to mass organizations dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism, the practical expression of working-class grew in substance and coherence.
No illusions crossed the minds of the workers about the obvious alignment of power, but as the plutocracy increasingly used violence to enforce its domination, many people attempted to create, within the shell of the old society, the institutions that contained the kernel of the new. Their institutions would model their highest aspirations for human relations and so took the form of cooperatives for retail, insurance, and enterprise. If we seek to understand how they viewed these creations, we see that at bottom the ethical principles of mutuality, of solidarity and of equality. What we must recognize here is that the thought behind these notions as expressed not only in their official pronouncements, but also in everyday conversations of the protagonists formulated concepts that today have all but vanished from our lexicon.