I’ve been listening recently to two new podcasts about the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the federation of industrial unions that was founded in 1935, broke with the more conservative craft unions of the American Federation of Labor in 1938, and then merged with the AFL in 1955 to create the AFL-CIO.
The Haymarket podcast is really good. Interesting to consider the intersection between the community of vulnerability and the way that labor organizing was undergirded by social structures like the Masons, which shaped the propensity to organize in secret. I wonder if this undermined the construct of solidarity which allowed for Bacons rebellion and institutionalization of our caste system that was fundamentally shaped by slavery.
Yep. Also interesting to think about Bacon's Rebellion in light of the Fragile Juggernaut folks' explication of Mike Davis's article (which I haven't read, but should look up), which gives a much more materialist explanation of, uh, "race relations" within the U.S. working class based on different histories of proletarianization — e.g., suggests that the white indentured servants who were part of Bacon's Rebellion were an exception (in that they were proletarianized through forced labor, unlike the vast majority of whites), and that the ideology of white supremacy promoted by Southern elites in the wake of the rebellion was perhaps less historically determinative in the long run than the differing material conditions of Black working-class people (with different histories of liberation from chattel slavery in the U.S. and Carribean), white working-class people (with different histories of proletarianization based on dispossession of land and destruction of guild traditions in both the U.S. and Europe), and Indigenous/Mexican/non-white immigrant working-class people (with different histories of colonialism).
The Haymarket podcast is really good. Interesting to consider the intersection between the community of vulnerability and the way that labor organizing was undergirded by social structures like the Masons, which shaped the propensity to organize in secret. I wonder if this undermined the construct of solidarity which allowed for Bacons rebellion and institutionalization of our caste system that was fundamentally shaped by slavery.
Yep. Also interesting to think about Bacon's Rebellion in light of the Fragile Juggernaut folks' explication of Mike Davis's article (which I haven't read, but should look up), which gives a much more materialist explanation of, uh, "race relations" within the U.S. working class based on different histories of proletarianization — e.g., suggests that the white indentured servants who were part of Bacon's Rebellion were an exception (in that they were proletarianized through forced labor, unlike the vast majority of whites), and that the ideology of white supremacy promoted by Southern elites in the wake of the rebellion was perhaps less historically determinative in the long run than the differing material conditions of Black working-class people (with different histories of liberation from chattel slavery in the U.S. and Carribean), white working-class people (with different histories of proletarianization based on dispossession of land and destruction of guild traditions in both the U.S. and Europe), and Indigenous/Mexican/non-white immigrant working-class people (with different histories of colonialism).