Interesting to read the blurb and comments about Big Trouble. Not an area of history that I know in any detail beyond HS history taken decades ago, and a few articles read since. Clearly illegality was done on both sides of the "conflict". That inflamed passions beyond "labor law ideals". Of course also a new social situation beyond the …
Interesting to read the blurb and comments about Big Trouble. Not an area of history that I know in any detail beyond HS history taken decades ago, and a few articles read since. Clearly illegality was done on both sides of the "conflict". That inflamed passions beyond "labor law ideals". Of course also a new social situation beyond the prior agricultural economic models.
The core question remains: the miners did not have ownership of any mining jobs. In theory they should have left. Or organized in an association that still obeyed the law (in spite of the Pinkerton or "black Army" depredations). Collective action vs. individual action: each has plus and minus considerations for achieving liberty and prosperity.
Mines were "owned" as a result of criminal cartels (oligarchs, plutocrats) and corrupt politicians that sold out to plutocrats that subverted constitutional order.
How conservatives (apologists for plutocrats) hijacked anarcho-libertarian populism:
Curiously absent among many libertarian, conservative, or free-market critiques of interventions by the state into society are the myriad of ways in which government acts to assist, protect, and, indeed, impose outright, an economic order maintained for the benefit of politically connected plutocratic elites. Of course, recognition of this fact has led some on the Left to make much sport of libertarians...
Perhaps the efficacious gift to the present corporate order by the state has been what Kevin Carson calls ["]the subsidy of history,["] a reference to the process by which the indigenous inhabitants and possessors of property in land were originally expropriated during the course of the construction of traditional feudal societies and the subsequent transformation of feudalism into what is now called ["]capitalism["], or the corporatist- plutocratic societies that we have today. Contrary to the myths to which some subscribe, including many libertarians, the evolution of capitalism out of the old feudal order was not one where liberty triumphed over privilege, but one where privilege asserted itself in newer and more sophisticated forms.
There is a bunch of history (in the UK for example) about the process by which the ruling and economic elites forced peasants off of the "commons" and into industrial slums, sometimes with the assistance of the army, usually with the assistance of the police. State violence.
That is the pertinent pattern behind "ownership" and the labor movement, it has little or nothing with utopian blather about the sanctity of property ownership.
Interesting to read the blurb and comments about Big Trouble. Not an area of history that I know in any detail beyond HS history taken decades ago, and a few articles read since. Clearly illegality was done on both sides of the "conflict". That inflamed passions beyond "labor law ideals". Of course also a new social situation beyond the prior agricultural economic models.
The core question remains: the miners did not have ownership of any mining jobs. In theory they should have left. Or organized in an association that still obeyed the law (in spite of the Pinkerton or "black Army" depredations). Collective action vs. individual action: each has plus and minus considerations for achieving liberty and prosperity.
Thank you for admitting your ignorance about the history of labor unionism.
re: "organized in an association that still obeyed the law"
That is exactly what actually happened, Teddy Roosevelt started the process of making labor unions legal and it was completed by FDR.
The (unintended?) side effect was to reduce the radicalism of the labor movement by making it a component of the corporate-state system.
Then the postmodern "left" (feminists, etc.) threw the muscular-radical elements of labor unions under the bus in the 1960s, beginning a long decline.
Mines were "owned" as a result of criminal cartels (oligarchs, plutocrats) and corrupt politicians that sold out to plutocrats that subverted constitutional order.
How conservatives (apologists for plutocrats) hijacked anarcho-libertarian populism:
https://attackthesystem.com/free-enterprise-the-antidote-to-corporate-plutocracy/
excerpts:
...
Curiously absent among many libertarian, conservative, or free-market critiques of interventions by the state into society are the myriad of ways in which government acts to assist, protect, and, indeed, impose outright, an economic order maintained for the benefit of politically connected plutocratic elites. Of course, recognition of this fact has led some on the Left to make much sport of libertarians...
Perhaps the efficacious gift to the present corporate order by the state has been what Kevin Carson calls ["]the subsidy of history,["] a reference to the process by which the indigenous inhabitants and possessors of property in land were originally expropriated during the course of the construction of traditional feudal societies and the subsequent transformation of feudalism into what is now called ["]capitalism["], or the corporatist- plutocratic societies that we have today. Contrary to the myths to which some subscribe, including many libertarians, the evolution of capitalism out of the old feudal order was not one where liberty triumphed over privilege, but one where privilege asserted itself in newer and more sophisticated forms.
...
There is a bunch of history (in the UK for example) about the process by which the ruling and economic elites forced peasants off of the "commons" and into industrial slums, sometimes with the assistance of the army, usually with the assistance of the police. State violence.
That is the pertinent pattern behind "ownership" and the labor movement, it has little or nothing with utopian blather about the sanctity of property ownership.