PAGE NINE; FEATURE SERIAL SIDE BOX

If, over the last half of the last decade, the USA had a prevailing obsession, a recurring nightmare, a spectre that haunted and hunted it, communism has to be it. One, however, has to ask ‘Why?’ Why communism? Was it merely that the States could not abide a repressive society such as existed in Russia? Hardly, since it did a pretty good line in repression itself. Was the States truly in fear of a communist take over or even a Russian invasion? Maybe. Maybe. But America’s irrational fear of communism goes back a good deal further than that. Back to its own labour problems, to the rise of the trade unions within its own fair country, to a time before people even hoped to believe that they had the power.
.....It is perfectly understandable that employers throughout history have felt that it was their market. They were, after all, the ones who were paying the money and it was, they felt, for them to demand good value from those they employed. However, what is seen as good value by the employer is often regarded as exploitation by the workers. And, indeed, it has often been so.
.....It was only in the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s industrial revolution that workers started to band together to use their collective power to force employers to improve working conditions, raise pay to reasonable levels and provide benefits to those in their employ. Although the UK had a long tradition of protectionist organisations based around the trade and craft guilds, they had served the interest of both employers and workers through protecting their skills. There had been no organised institutions exclusively for the workers. As the industrial revolution took off, there was a big move from the countryside to the cities. In just seventy years England made the transition from an arable economy to an industrial one. Life in the cities was a mean and dispiriting experience and work in the factories and manufacturing plants was hard and exhausting. Hours were long, the breaks were few or non-existent, the working conditions were rough at best and hideous at worse, the employer’s rules were many and strict and if broken retribution was swift and punitive. Women and children worked alongside the men in dangerous environments earning a pittance that barely kept body and soul together.
.....The first fraternal organisations for workers came into being in the early 18th century before the industrial revolution had truly got off the ground. Violently opposed by the employers, who wanted to keep their strangle hold on the workforce, and by the Government, who were fearful of a popular revolution such as that which had only recently decimated the French intelligentsia and ruling classes, the trade union movement started as a stirring in the rural communities that were at the heart of the British economy. During 1833 and 4 there was a wave of trade union activity down on the farm as the former peasants started to organise. Still largely an agriculturally-based economy, rural England had remained trapped in the Middle Ages with an exploitative system of tenant farming that had changed little from the days of serfdom. Alarmed by the widespread discontent represented by this popular movement but unable to track down the organisers, the Government sought some way to warn-off the nation’s workers. Their chance came in 1884 in the County of Dorset, on the peninsula that pointed the direction to the New World for erstwhile immigrants. In an feeble and unjust swoop on six farm labourers, the Government created the first working class heroes -- the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
.....Despite the fact that the accused were clearly banding together only to protect their already meagre wages, at a thoroughly botched show trial before a biased judge and a hostile jury, the six labourers were found guilty of swearing an unlawful oath (to a trade union) and were sentenced to transportation to the penal colonies in Australia. The injustice of the trial and the harshness of the sentences produced a widespread popular reaction throughout the whole of the country. In London, where feelings ran particularly high, there were large-scale public demonstrations and protest meetings. In March 1886, the Government relented and commuted the sentences. In the meantime, however, the trade union movement had received a health-giving injection of self-righteous justification as well as enough publicity to generate widespread support. Clearly the working class needed to come together, to unite, to resist the injustices of Government and industrialist alike.
.....There was no looking back. As the workers realised their true power, they were in a position to confront the sources of injustice. In a true Power to the People leap of vision, the trade union movement aligned itself to a political ethos -- socialism -- that offered the prospect of a more even distribution of wealth. As socialism gained a hold on the hearts and minds of the working class as the medium for their salvation from poverty, it made its entree into the political arena in the form of the Labour Party.
.....Meanwhile, in London’s Soho, a Russian emigre by the name of Karl Marx was watching the power shift towards the people as some of the economic imbalances were put right. In his own land (and throughout the whole world), there were such imbalances -- too many poor people, too much wealth in the hands of too few, too little social conscience, too much inequality. Working with his lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, he wrote a book -- Das Kapital -- that enshrined his philosophy for removing the inequalities of the class system that he saw as the monster than ensnared the workers of England. Later they would produce the Communist Manifesto.
.....As the people took over the Government of Russia in a bloody and mindless flurry of killing, burning and sacking, the world looked on in consternation. There had been other popular revolutions (France had been staging them on a regular basis for some time) but nothing quite like this. In an extremely heartless and bloody coup, the entire Russian Royal Family, the Romanovs, were assassinated and buried in a shallow grave in a distant forest. They were followed by most of the aristocracy. Government passed decisively into the hands of the proletariate. Power to the people, right on.
.....Amongst those watching were the Americans. They had been keen observers of social developments in the UK and were waiting for their own labour force to rise. Although they were some way behind the British, they too had been going through a period of economic development and of urbanisation.
.....The first effective US trade union that was more than regional was the Knights of Labor, established in 1869. Although the Knights did their best to improve wages and conditions for workers, like the British trade unionists, they were opposed by both Government and employers. A large railroad strike was broken by Government intervention in late 1870s but action on the workfront was largely a local affair. The Knights reached a peak of influence a .decade later when it orchestrated highly publicised strikes on the Union Pacific, Southwest System, and Wabash railroads that generated considerable public support and achieved a favourable outcome. However, at its peak, the Knights of Labor only counted 700,000 members, a mere fraction of the total US labour force.
....The Knights of Labor and the whole trade union movement hit sticky times after an unfortunate incident in Chicago in 1886 when a protest meeting organised by the Knights was taken over by a group of anarchists who, as their grand finale, blew up and killed seven policemen. Oops. Although it had not been their fault, the public tended to blame the Knights and the entire labour movement for the violence believing that the labour movement and violent insurrectionist activities were synonymous. The labour movement would never, thereafter, gain popular support.
.....Although prior to the years immediately after the Second World War, there is little communist paranoia evident in the States, the labour movement and the trade unions were repressed -- as everywhere -- by both government and industry. It was, however, the same old story. A classic confrontation between the workers and the bosses. And the same old techniques were applied: propaganda, information and disinformation and, of course, the violence. There was lots of that -- violence from the boss’ hired thugs that left bodies battered and bloody at the factory gates, violence from the strikers directed at the blacklegs, lots of violence. But, although many of the trade unions were headed by Marxists and were a breeding ground for communist agitators, there was little fear of communism. At least on the surface.
.....While the unions in the USA had not gone down the political road as had those in the UK, everyone remembered that before they had become preoccupied with pay and conditions, the concern of the labour movement had been with reform of the system with the introduction of a ‘commonwealth’ that offered a fairer and more distribution of the nation’s wealth. Indeed, communism it was.
.....Essentially the seeds of America’s emerging attitude towards communism are to be found in its own repressive attitudes. The USA was a country that had been forged by revolution but was still in the process of defining itself. It was made up of a group of volatile, self-opinionated entities -- the states -- and a largely immigrant population. Although it had a certain social structure, it had no class system to bind society together. Its social structure was one of the things in the making. As, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it watched world events, the USA could hardly miss the social changes that were sweeping across Europe. In seeking to forge a country out of such wayward elements as it had under its command, the US Government realised that it was going against the trend. Indeed, it had to buck the trend to survive. It, therefore, did everything in its power to keep the working classes in check.
.....Sure there were communist agitators in every area of the labour movement but that was not an issue. Yet. And, it only became an issue as a part of one of those wonderfully imaginative bits of scapegoatism that America does so well. A political ruse that is distinctly American, it works like this. Give the public someone or something to blame for the evils in society and they won’t blame the government. At times of national instability, this cunning ruse had been played against the Negroes, the Chinese, the Irish and others. The turn of the communists was coming. But not until after the Second World War. For, as one war finished another one started. It was war, but of a different kind. The Cold War brought it all to head.