The Red Scare Series: From the Guilded Age to Today - Part 1

While everyone is focusing on the elections, we thought we should look at something far more important: The Labor Movement. Because when there is a historically hostile presidency to labor, the only thing that will advance the cause of the working class is a strong labor movement.

I want to take a look at the history of Anticommunism within the US Labor movement from both inside and outside factors with the knowledge this anticommunism often left the United States’ borders and had deep rooted effects that are still present in Labor today.

Slater Mill, located on the Blackstone River, still stands in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. This Mill is famous for being the 1793 birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. I’ve seen this building countless times and my thoughts on it run the gamut. Mills like Slater, ushered in so much progress but also so much pain. In the struggles of that huge contradiction, workers and their families came together to fight for better lives and were torn apart by the propagandist lies and deceptions, sometimes coming from within, to keep only a handful of mostly white men in power.

John Francis Bray, the American labor activist who also spent time in England as a Chairtist, he said

“If the word had been in use with us a few years since, then every anti-slavery man would have been denounced as a Communist.”* (Footnote: Gutman, “Tompkins Square ‘Riot’”)

As Bray implied, sometimes anticommunism isn’t a direct attack on those who push for or call themselves communists. It houses any anti-labor activity and the attacks on the ideologies under the Socialist umbrella including socialism, anarchism and of course communism.

Many people believe capitalism doesn’t work, however, it works well for the very few,k mainly the top one percent of the population. The system is designed to work in a class system divided into  the “haves and have-nots”, and though there have been reforms put in place to create a middle class, these reforms protected the ones who already accumulated a majority of the wealth and created an even larger inequality between the rich and poor.

Capitalism is the perfect system for the white supremacists that require a class system to gain power by funneling the wealth off what the workers, who they exploit, make. Whereas, socialism is a system that puts the workers, the major majority of the population, in power giving them control of means of production that they create themselves. This does not serve those in power and they will do anything to keep themselves in power and continue to profit from the fruits of the workers’ labor. 

In order to do this, they deploy tactics that including intimidation, manipulation, deception, outright lies, and even murder. They claim it is actually the “insert name of group that is going against the capitalist here” doing these things to them.

The slave owning colonists figured out that they needed to pit the enslaved, poor whites, and the indigenous people against one another so those groups wouldn’t turn on them. They offered concessions to the poor whites and put them in positions of “middle management” like being the overseer of enslaved people in a field or offering awards for them to act as a police force that would be used to hunt down escaped slaves which were considered property for the slave owner of course. This was the base and still very much the mindset of our current police force.

In these series of episodes and articles, we will look at the red scare and all the tactics used by them.

Please read the accompanying

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