It Could Happen Here Weekly 253

Robert Evans (0:03)

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Mia Wong (0:29)

We live now in a world defined by the near-total victory of the capitalist class.

Their wildest fantasies are inflicted upon us all. They burn the earth we live on and poison the air we breathe to create their hideous mechanical god. While the human personification of the housing bubble orders wars and ethnic cleansings from his garish golden palace, an age in which the word the genocide cannot unreasonably be answered with the question which one demands an explanation.

Here, I have partial one, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the people who make their money by owning things and stealing the labor of those who work for them have been allowed to rule the world.

To ask how this came to be is to ask another question. How did the greatest enemy of the international workers' movement come to be so totally destroyed?

This is It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and that today is our task to chart, at least in part, the decline and fall of the international workers' movement.

It is easy to forget that the workers' movement once seemed to be the inevitable protagonists of history. As the anthropologist David Graeber remarks, the ruling class in Chicago in the late 1900s were so sure of the coming revolution, they built their mansions on a road to the nearest military base. That revolution obviously never came. So what precisely went so wrong? To answer this question, we follow the unraveling of two threads that together wove the fabric of the workers' movement. The first thread is that of assembly. Before anything could be accomplished, it was necessary to create the image of, and then the organized reality of, the collective worker.

It was necessary to assemble the movement, to gather the working class together from among its thousand nations and thousand tongues, and forge an identity and then a movement that could change the state of things.

This alone was a Herculean task. As the journal Endnotes points out, class was perhaps the least immediate form of collective identification. Sure, class could be argued to exist on an objective sociological level, defined by one's relationship to the means of production.

But it does not cause people to speak the same language. In this way, it was easier to adopt other identities, nationality, race, gender, even more localized ethnic backgrounds than it was to believe oneself to be part of a single, united working class. And so this became a great task of the workers' movement, to create an identity capable of displacing, or at least joining, other forms of identification which would then allow collective action. But once this identity existed, the movement still had to act. And here arose the second problem. What was the workers' movement to do once it actually assembled? And this is no simple question. It is, in fact, one of the questions by which the movement came to be divided against itself. And once that division happened, it became easier to attack the material basis of the formation of the movement itself, to destroy the conditions that made the first phase of assembling the collective worker possible. And that is how they did it. How the ruling class maintained its power even with vast swaths of the world nominally arrayed against them. They first helped the workers' movement divide itself, and began to exterminate each other. And then, in the world that conflict created, they, and the process and unfolding of capitalist history itself, began to unravel the movement at its core, to destroy its ability to form the collective identity necessary to even make those mistakes in the first place. So let us begin then, perhaps counterintuitively, with action, for it was here that the workers' movement first began to unravel. This unraveling began, perhaps paradoxically, in what seemed to be the moment of their great triumph. By the end of the 1800s, the movement had, in certain places, accomplished the seemingly impossible. They had, in fact, managed to assemble, in various forms, the great collective worker. It was an age of confidence, full of the certainty of inevitable historically ordained victory, of a sense that history inexorably unfolded towards the victory of the working class. Even in the wake of its defeat in the crushing of the Paris Commune, it had assembled veritable states within a state in places like Germany, with the great social democratic parties and emerging unions built a massive network of cooperative mutual aid. These institutions seemed to be the shell of the new world being birthed in the ashes of the old. And that world seemed to hold great promise. It was a world in which workers administered the schools and daycares and welfare programs themselves, in which they made decisions collectively and democratically. But the movement quickly faced a series of questions of what fundamentally it was going to be. That question, who should actually control the means of production? And moreover, what does control actually mean? Would haunt the movement for its entire history.