@thestatebetweenus.bsky.social

@thestatebetweenus.bsky.social

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Though he had tried so hard to be a "good worker" for the old GMA, Gompers and his AFL were now the prime targets of National Association of Manufacturers, ensuring that his corporatist efforts at compromise would become what they were always destined to be, a floormat for Capital. NAM advocated for the federal government to deal with labor the same way they had dealt with indigenous resistance in the past, stomping them out, destroying their places of community, and 'civilizing them' through technical schools. All the while, they were building the new 'Science of Management' to break down existing relationships of skill-transmission and rob talented workers of their shop-floor authority. Over time, the NAM learned to cool its fire and brimstone rhetoric, at least in its more public facing circles, and farm-out their gospel by backing the theo-fascist Spiritual Mobilizers of Reverend Fifield in the 1930s, the conspira-brained Capitalist Jesus of Robert Welch’s John Birch Society in the 1950s, and then finally in the infamous Moral Majority co-founded by Tim LaHaye as the '70s bled into the '80s.
The National Association of Manufactures was aware that, even though the General Association of Managers had won the battle in 1886, they struggled to hold popular opinion on their side. The brutality of the GMA ultimately worked against them, creating new generations of workers who saw their bosses and owners for what they were, tyrants. NAM president, David M. Parry put it like this: "Organized labor owes its present power mainly to the support of public opinion. A propaganda for evil is to be neutralized only by a propaganda for good...We have been intimidated by a handful of anarchists and so-called labor leaders, it is now time to settle this issue once and for all!" From its high-rise HQ overlooking Broadway in Manhattan, NAM began working priests, media people, teachers, and so-called 'citizens alliances'. They created a new theological object, "The Great Manufacturer", and refit Christianity for its Americanist future. They pioneered mass mailing, opinion polling, and even held what they called "revival meetings" that blended religiosity and capitalism into holistic sense of "Americanism". By 1906, NAM dwarfed the old GMA, controlling upwards of $22 billion in collective capital.
The counter-revolutionary reaction of Rail Magnates to the 1886 strike wave took the form of The General Managers Association. 24 rail firms centered in Chicago controlling $2 billion dollars in capital, 50k shareholders, and 220 laborers pooled their resources, hiring strikebreakers, violent thugs, and producing massive blacklists of agitators which would model the Ruling Class's reaction to our misbehavior even to this day. This cartel literally gave orders to federal troops from their Chicago Office space as they stomped out the '86 uprising. The success of the General Managers Association working in concert with the State to crush the 1886 uprising called for a new, more expansive base for Class Rule. The Rail and Steel Magnates held undeniable power in moments of war, but how to win the peace? In 1895, hundreds of younger and often less WASP-y industrialists met in Cincinnati, OH with the express purpose of forming a "National Organization" of capital to prevent the next great class war from even starting. This became the National Association of Manufacturers.
Pullman Town failed to "civilize" the working class, who were not fooled nor cowed by its patrimonialism, and the great strike wave of 1886 which led to the Haymarket Affair - also covered in CrimethInc.'s write-up - exposed the fraud of the 'Capitalist Daddy' idea, and Pullman stepped back in the 1890s to allow the great Railway Magnates to wield collective authority over his workers. This signaled an important defeat of the 'utopian' cellular model of control - though it wouldn't die for some time - and the rise of a more overt self-conception of a Ruling Class wielding force in a State of War. Unable to entirely accept the class struggle model without admitting that they were basically vampires, capitalist propaganda committed strongly to a good-worker/bad-worker narrative. "Yes there was class struggle, ok fine we admit it, but only because 'bad workers' corrupted by commies and whatnot fired the first shots." The capitalist was ready for war, but had to prove to the public and probably themselves that it was the 'subversives' who started it and that only the coordination and collective management of industrialists working in concert could defeat it. As the CrimethInc. write-up points out, they could find enough allies in the likes of Samuel Gompers and the AFL to feed this delusion, even though even they would come to see AFL's compromise corporatist 'tri-partite' model of labor/state/capital as a dangerous amount of power for the working man. Collaborators are there to be betrayed, make no mistake about it.
May Day contradicted the *idea of corporatism* that underpinned the new model capitalist's claim to rule; the idea that classes were not realized in the struggle of opposing interests, but rather were functional parts of a whole that would come to be called "Americanism". Some 50 years after the Pullman Strike, we still hear this echoed in the proclamations by the American Legion in the inter-war period that the organization stood opposed to "both the masses and the classes". Pullman's final efforts to prove that Industrial Capitalism was not a warzone but instead a complicated family with misbehaving children took the form of Pullman Town, a cross between a classic company town and a pre-Fordist experiment in social control. Its construction was simultaneously an instruction, it's layout naturalized the hierarchy between labor and capital by its cellular structure, where privileges and obligations translated, for the workers, into parceled access to places of manicured culture and pressures to mimic 'their betters' through planned and socially enforced consumption habits. A state official claimed, completely unironically, "If the workman at Pullman lives in a ‘gilded cage,’ we must congratulate him on its being so handsomely gilded; the average workman does not have his cage gilded…". Sound familiar?