Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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February 07, 2017
refugees [2/7]
are from the past
. . .
But the first Gilded Age. . . During this period . .
. protests often crossed lines of ethnicity, religion, gender --
even race -- and embraced whole communities, towns and regions. In
defiance of the traditional American fear of government meddling, they
looked to a revivified democratic state to get their robber
baron overlords under control. . . .
Together they comprised a society-wide reaction
to the damage caused by primitive accumulation.
Foreclosed homesteaders, craftsmen, immigrant peasants, industrial
artisans, subsistence farmers, small businessmen, ex-slaves --
a galaxy of refugees from pre-capitalist ways of life went down
the rabbit hole of proletarianisation. Before they did so they cried
out against an alien future, imagining alternatives to wage labour borrowed
from their diverse pasts or extrapolated from the technological and
organisational breakthroughs of industrial capitalism. Primitive
accumulation, so essential to the strength of the American economic
behemoth, was also the source of enormous oppositional energy.
from
"Thanks
to the Tea Party," Steve Fraser's review of Jefferson
Cowie's Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
(. . . or rather, from a present that's already
happening somewhere else, and that threatens to overtake us next)
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