You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is again from Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor.

Paradoxically and simultaneously, industrial unionism–though born of the radicalism of Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco–became a new mode of enforcing the contract. Attempts to seize back the initiative from foremen and time-study experts were met, now, with directives from industrial union leaders to stay in line until a greivance could be properly negotiated. Soon, union dues would be deducted automatically from wages, so that officials no longer needed to bother making personal contact and monthly appeals to the loyalty of members.

Meany, treating industrial unionists at large as enemies, could not for many years grasp that events were bringing the CIO’s elected officials closer to him. He was steeped in a craft tradition to which the very idea of workers united into a single, roughly roughly egalitarian body hinted at revolutionary transformation. But many less conservative sectors were equally surprised by the course of the more democratic CIO unions toward the end of the 1930s. A triangle of government, business, and labor leadership brought about a compact that served mutual interest in stability, though often not in the interests of the workers left out of this power arrangement.

Not until 1937 did business unionism confirm its institutional form, when the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act. Now, a legitimate union (that is to say, a union legitimated by the National Labor Relation Board) with more than 50 percent of the vote in a union election became the sole bargaining agent for all. Unions stood on the brink of a membership gold-rush. The left-led Farm Equipment union could that same year, for instance, win a tremendous victory of five thousand workers at International Harvester in Chicago without a strike, thanks to the NLRB-sanctioned vote. But union leaders also prepared to reciprocate the assistance with a crackdown against membership indiscipline. The United Auto Workers, a case in point, arose out of Wobbly traditions mixed with a 1920s Communist-led Auto Workers Union and an amalgam of radicals’ efforts to work within early CIO formations. The fate of the industry, which fought back furiously against unionization, was set by the famed 1937 sit-down strikes centered in Flint, which seemed for a moment to bring the region close to class and civil war. Only the personal intercession of Michigan’s liberal Governor Murphy, it was widely believed, had prevented a bloodbath of employers’ armed goons retaking the basic means of production and setting off something like a class war. Therein lay a contradiction which the likes of George Meany could appreciate without being able to comprehend fully. The notorious willingness of UAW members to halt production until their greivances were met did not end because the union had employed the good offices of the goveronr (and the appeals of Franklin Roosevelt) to bring union recognition. On the one hand, a vast social movement of the unemployed grew up around the auto workers’ strongholds in Michigan, generating a sustained classwide movement of employed and unemployed, lasting until wartime brought near full employment. On the other hand, union leaders, including UAW leaders, swiftly traded off benefits for discipline in an uneven process complicated by strategic and often-changing conflicts within the political left.

The continuing struggle for more complete democratic participation was often restricted to the local or the particularistic, and thanks to a long-standing tradition of autonomy, sometimes to insular circles of AFL veterans. For instance, in heavily French-Canadian Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a vibrant Independent Textile Union had sprung up out of a history of severe repression and the riotous 1934 general textile strike. The ITU remained outside the CIO and set about organizing workers in many industries across Woonsocket; then, after a conservatizing wartime phase, it died slowly with the postwar shutdown of the mills. To take another example, the All Workers Union of Austin, Minnesota–an IWW-like entity which would reappear in spirit during the 1980s as rebellious Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers–held out for several years in the 1930s against merger. A model par excellence of horizontal, unionism with wide democratic participation and public support, the AWU (urged by Communist regulars and Trotskyists alike) willingly yielded its autonomy, and in so doing also its internal democracy, to the overwhelming influence of the CIO. In yet another case, the Progressive Miners of America, which grew out of a grassroots rebellion against John L. Lewis’s autocratic rule, attempted to place itself in th AFL that Lewis abandoned, on the basis of rank-and-file democracy with a strong dose of anti-foreign and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric. Or again: the AFL Seaman’s Union of the Pacific, reacting ferociously to Communist efforts to discipline the sea lanes, stirred syndicalist energies and like the PMA simultaneously drew upon a racist exclusionary streak far more typical of the AFL than the CIO.

These and many less dramatic experiments died or collapsed into the mainstream by wartime. But for industrial unionism at large, the damage had already been done to the possibilities of resisting creeping bureaucratization. Indeed, only where union delegates themselves decreed safety measures of decentralization, as in the UAW in 1939 (against the advice of Communists and their rivals), did conventions emerge guaranteeing participation from below, to some significant degree.

–Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, 119-121.

(I first heard the news from Dru Blood 2005-10-24.)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks died this evening at her home in Detroit, with her friends at her side, at the age of 92. She was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama; she spent most of her life in Montgomery, Alabama, and then Detroit, Michigan. She was, of course, best known for her critical role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the development of the Freedom Movement in the American South.

There are three things you need to know, and remember, about her life.

First, you should know how she came up, and how she and a handful of other black women set the South afire with the Freedom Movement:

Whatever the truth, [by fall 1955] Jo Ann Robinson, Mary Fair Burks, and the other [Women’s Political Council] members were tired of searching for the perfect symbol for their cause. No longer would they consult with male leaders about whether to stay off the busses. Their plans for a boycott were ready, and, at the very first opportunity, they would be put into effect, no matter what the men said. The black women of Montgomery, Robinson said later, were ready to explode.

The woman who would provide the fuse was a light-skinned, forty-two-year old seamstress who wore rimless glasses and pulled her graying hair back into a neatly braided coil. Quiet, unassuming, polite–the perfect lady, so everyone said who knew her. Soon, she would stun them all, revealing some of the tortured complexity that lay beneath the prim facade. There was so much that was hidden about Rosa Parks. Even her appearance was deceptive. The coil at the nape of her neck, for example, concealed the fact that her hair was long, straight, and silky–a legacy, she said, from her Indian ancestors. When she pulled out the pins at home, her hair spilled down her back in luxuriant waves. I never cut my hair because my husband liked it this way, she told a friend years later.

Just as few people ever saw Rosa McCauley Parks with her hair down, few knew about her Indian and white heritage, her deep racial pride, her smoldering anger, her lifelong rebellion against being pushed around by whites. Three of her four great-grandfathers were white. Her maternal grandfather, in whose home she was raised, was the son of a white plantation owner and light enough to pass for white himself. Sylvester Edwards loved to use his appearance to embarass and upset whites, shaking hands and speaking familiarly with those who didn’t know him, then laughing when they found out the truth. He delighted in calling whites by their first names and made jokes about them behind their backs. When the Ku Klux Klan rampaged through their small community outside Montgomery, Rosa McCauley’s grandfather kept a double-barreled shotgun by his side at all times. I don’t know how long I would last if they came breaking in here, he told her, but I’m getting the first one who comes through the door.

His standing up to whites made a deep impression on his small, slight granddaughter, who received a further dose of racial pride when, at the age of eleven, she enrolled in Miss White’s school in Montgomery. Officially known as the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, Miss White’s was founded by white teachers from New England to teach domestic skills, as well as academic subjects, to black girls. The teachers at Miss White’s were shunned by the rest of the city’s white population, and th school was twice set afire. The white community’s fear that the school’s curriculum included racial equality as well as cooking and sewing was not misplaced. It was no accident that several of the women most active in the Montgomery Bus Boycott had attended Miss White’s. What I learned best at the school, Parks wrote, was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody els just because I was black.

More than once as a child, she put those lessons into practice. When she was ten, a white boy threatened to hit her. She responded by threatening to smash his head in with a brick. Another time, a white boy on roller skates, careening behind her on the sidewalk, tried to push her aside. She turned and pushed back. His mother, standing nearby, told the little girl that she could put me so far in jail that I never would get out again for pushing her child.

…

By the 1940s, the fire in [her husband, and NAACP organizer] Raymond Parks had damped down. He had tried for years to register to vote but had not succeeded. Finally, he just gave up trying. Now, Rosa took up the banner. Raymond Parks had long discouraged her from joining the NAACP–too dangerous for a woman, he said. But in 1943, Rosa found that the local chapter had at least one female member–her old friend from Miss White’s school, Johnnie Carr. Rosa decided to go to the December meeting to see Carr and take a look at the organization for herself. The meeting, which Carr didn’t attend, turned out to be the annual election of officers. The men said they needed a woman to take the minutes, and Parks, the only woman present, agreed. I was too timid to say no, she explained. She paid her membership dues, was elected secretary on the spot, and from that moment on, threw herself into civil rights work with a singular passion.

Despite her modern image as a simple seamstress who just happened to get on a bus one day and ignite a movement, Rosa Parks, together with E. D. Nixon, was the mainstay of the Montgomery NAACP through the 1940s and 1950s. On her lunch hours, in the evenings after work, and on weekends, Parks would be in Nixon’s office, answering phones, handling correspondence, sending out press releases to newspapers, keeping track of the complaints that flooded in concerning racial violence and discrimination. As much as he depended on her, Nixon had litle use for women as activists. One time he told Parks that women don’t need to be nowhere but in the kitchen. She shot back: Well, what about me? Realizing he had painted himself into a corner, Nixon came back with a lame reply: … I need a secretary and you are a good one. She was much more than that. In the early 1940s, she helped organize the local NAACP Youth Council and became its adviser, encouraging its teenage members to try to integrate the local white library. Childless herself, she loved working with youngsters, who, in turn, responded to her warmth and enthusiasm.

–Lynne Olson (2001): Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970, pp. 95-97.

And you should also know why she did what she did that day in December 1955:

On December 1, 1955, less than two months after Mary Louise Smith’s arrest [for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus], Rosa Parks waited for a bus to take her home from work. She was just steps away from the Winter Building, where the order had been given in 1861 to fire on Fort Sumter and ignite the Civil War. Shortly after five o’clock, a bus pulled up to the stop. Absorbed in thought about an NAACP workshop she was planning for that weekend, Mrs. Parks didn’t notice the driver until after she had paid her money and boarded. As she sank into a seat in the black section’s front row, she realized with a jolt that he was the same man who’d thrown her off some twelve years before. The bus lumbered down Montgomery Street and stopped in front of the Empire Theater, where several whites got on and sat down in the first ten rows. One man was left standing. The driver turned to Parks and the other blacks sitting in the next row. Let me have those front seats, he said. When nobody moved, he barked, Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats. The man in the window seat next to Parks stood up and moved back, as did the two women across the aisle. Parks simply moved over to the window seat.

She sat there, remembering how her grandfather kept his shotgun by the fireplace or in his wagon, remembering how he refused to be terrorized by the Klan, even when everyone else was. She remembered, too, how wonderful it had been at [Highlander Folk School] to feel like an equal with whites. At that moment, she decided it was time that other white people started treating me that way. Years later, she would declare: People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or any more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in…. There had to be a stopping place, and this seemed to have been the place for me to stop being pushed around …. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.

The driver asked Parks if she was going to stand up. She looked at him. No, she replied. Well, he said, I’m going to have you arrested. She answered quietly: You may do that. It was a moment of profound personal significance. For most black Southerners, the idea of agreeing to go to jail, of voluntarily submitting themselves to a dreaded legal system that had oppressed and killed so many blacks before them, was unthinkable. But doing the unthinkable, rising above the fear and shame of the jail experience, would turn out to be an exhilarating act of personal liberation–for Rosa Parks and the blacks, young and old, who followed her. Here was an individual, virtually alone, challenging the very citadel of racial bigotry, Pauli Murray said ten years later. Any one of us who has ever been arrested on a Southern bus for refusing to move back knows how terrifying the situation can be, particularly if it happened before the days of organized protest and we had neither anticipated nor prepared beforehand for the challenge. The fear of a lifetime… is intensified by the sudden commotion and the charged atmosphere in the cramped space of the bus interior.

As the driver, James Blake, got off the bus to call the police, Parks sat in her seat, trying hard not to think about what might come next, trying not to worry about being manhandled as Claudette Colvin and countless others had been. A few minutes later, two officers boarded the bus. One of them asked Parks why she didn’t stand up. She replied with a question of her own: Why do you all push us around? I don’t know, he said, but the law is the law, and you’re under arrest. The policeman picked up her purse and shopping bag, escorted her off the bus, and put her in a squad car for the ride to the city jail. At the jailhouse, Parks asked if she could have a drink from the water fountain and was told it was for whites only. She was then fingerprinted, booked, and put in a cell with two other black women, one of whom gave her a drink of water from a dark metal mug.

Meanwhile, word of Parks’s arrest had begun to spread throughout black Montgomery. A neighbor of E. D. Nixon’s saw her being escorted by the policemen off the bus and immediately notified Nixon, who, in turn, called [white civil rights activists] Clifford and Virginia Durr. Nixon and the Durrs rushed down to the jail to bail out Parks. As Parks emerged from her cell, matrons on either side of her, the first person she saw was Virginia Durr. Tears in her eyes, Durr threw her arms around Parks. They hugged and kissed, Parks later recalled, as if they were sisters.

–Olson (2001), pp. 107-109.

And finally, you should know how much she did, and how much we all owe her.

Now that the boycott was over, there was some carping, particularly by whites who opposed it, that the protest, in fact, had accomplished nothing, that the Supreme Court, not the boycott, had ended Jim Crow on the city’s buses. What could they possibly gain from the boycott that they can’t gain from the federal courts? Joe Azbell, city editor of the Advertiser, had grumbled early in the protest. What could they gain? A sense of dignity, self-respect, and power; a feeling of community; a determination to claim basic rights; a loss of fear–victories that were nothing short of revolutionary for blacks in the Deep South in the 1950s. The Ku Klux Klan of Montgomery discovered for itself what blacks had achieved when, on the night after the Supreme Court ruling, some forty cars loaded with white-hooded thugs cruised slowly through black neighborhoods. There was no panic, no dread; instead, blacks jeered and laughed and shook their fists as the Klan drove by. Disconcerted by their failure to terrorize, the Klansmen drove away.

…

Virginia Durr remained close to Rosa Parks, whose own life had also become much more difficult. During the boycott, Parks had devoted herself to the cause, traveling, making speeches, raising money. She served on the [Montgomery Improvement Association]’s executive board, worked as a car pool dispatcher, handed out clothes and food to people who had been fired because of their civil rights involvement. After the boycott was over, she tried to get another job in Montgomery, but no one would hire her. She had little income except the money she made from sewing at home and from funds that Virginia Durr had raised for her in appeals to the Highlander Folk School and to some of the Durr’s more affluent Northern friends. To be a heroine is fine, but it does not pay off, Durr tartly observed.

…

However she may have felt about not being given credit, there is no question that Parks moved to Detroit primarily because she needed a job. Even there, she had difficulty finding work. She finally took a position as a hostess at a guest house at Hampton Institute, a black college in Virginia, but when Hampton reneged on an implied promise to provide an apartment for her, her husband, and her mother, she returned to Detroit, where she first worked for a seamstress friend and then in a clothing factory. Not until 1965, when Representative John Conyers, Jr., hired her as a receptionist in his Detroit office, was she finally able to achieve more than a hand-to-mouth existence.

Her friends, meanwhile, were appalled that she had been allowed to slip into the shadows of civil rights history. Her image, as crafted by King and the other male boycott leaders, was that of a tired seamstress who had been tracked down by the Zeitgeist–the spirit of the times. When Septima Clark saw a documentary about the boycott, she noted that Parks was hardly mentioned. We talked about it, she and I, Clark said. She gave Dr. King the right to practice his nonviolence … It was Rosa Parks who started the whole thing. E. D. Nixon made the same point to a woman sitting next to him on a plane one day. When the woman found out Nixon was from Montgomery, she said she did not know what would have happened to black people if King had not been there to lead the boycott. Nixon replied: If Mrs. Parks had got up and given that white man her seat you’d never aheard of Dr. King.

–Olson (2001), pp. 129-131.

When South African freedom icon Nelson Mandela came to Detroit in 1990, the person he was most honored to meet was Parks. When he got off the plane, a line of dignitaries waited to greet him. Mandela simply stood in awe when he saw Parks. He chanted, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa Parks!. recalled Keith, who had escorted her to the airport to meet Mandela.

He recognized her before he recognized anyone, Keith said.

Mandela later told Keith that Parks was his inspiration while he was jailed and her example inspired South African freedom fighters.

Mandela called Parks the David who challenged Goliath in a 1993 speech at the NAACP convention in Indianapolis.

The best-selling poet and writer Maya Angelou said of her, Mrs. Parks is for me probably what the Statute of Liberty was for immigrants. She stood for the future, and the better future.

Angelou recalled the pleasure of having Parks as a guest at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., several years ago.

She was as tender as a rose and she was as strong as steel.

— Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press 2005-10-24: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

Here is how she wanted you to remember her.

Parks’ health had been declining since the late 1990s. She had stopped giving interviews by then and rarely appeared in public. When she did, she only smiled or spoke short, barely audible responses.

In one of her last lengthy interviews with the Detroit Free Press in 1995, she spoke of what she would like people to say about her after she passed away.

I’d like people to say I’m a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings, she said during an interview from the pastor’s study of St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small congregation she joined upon moving to Detroit in 1957.

— Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press 2005-10-24: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

May she rest in peace.

Further reading:

• WikiPedia: Rosa Parks
• WikiPedia: Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press 2005-10-24: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead
• Detroit Free Press 2005-10-25: Detroit-area residents remember Rosa Parks’ legacy
• Detroit News 2005-10-25: Friends, leaders recall a fighter
• Jannell McGrew, Montgomery Advertiser 2005-10-24: Parks’ quiet courage helped change the world

Today, 31 March 2005, is César Chávez Day–the 78th anniversary of Chávez’s birth near Yuma, Arizona, and a state holiday (I’m told it’s officially celebrated in California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Michigan) commemorating his lifelong work as an union organizer, agitator, and Chicano activist in the Southwestern United States. Chávez, together with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the ground-breaking United Farm Workers, and organized and inspired a generation of organized labor and Chicano community activists. Hugo Schwyzer has some more thoughts on Chávez’s legacy today; and of course you can find plenty to read from the United Farm Workers’ website.

As far as commemorating Chávez goes, they’ve said it better than I could. I’ll be commemorating the day by talking some more about libertarianism, organized labor, and the struggle of farmworkers in southern Florida–the workers organized by Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Taco Bell Boycott they launched and, just a few days ago, won–a campaign that was directly inspired by the UFW grape boycott that Chávez helped craft and win, and a campaign that was thrilled to receive the UFW’s endorsement in August 2001.

A few days ago, I prodded Daniel D’Amico in this space and in commentary on his blog over his criticisms of the Taco Bell boycott. He’s since come back with a reply to my prodding and to some similar concerns raised by other commentators. And since we have a nice convergence between the date and a question that might be of some interest–that is, libertarianism and labor, and the compatibility of principled anti-statism and a fighting labor movement–I figured that now is as good a time as any to offer a response to the response.

Before we begin, though, let’s hop onto a long tangent about terminology. Daniel leads off his argument by saying:

The Austrian school and libertarianism alike are against government control of market transactions, but the CIW appears to be refraining from such tactics, so what’s my problem anyway? Simply put I believe, there are more ways to be anti-capitalist than just using government. Mainly promoting ideas that capitalism is evil or claiming it resorts to rampant market failure are, in my view, anti-capitalist.

Some of Daniel’s other commentators had asked him what he thought made the boycott anti-capitalist, but I didn’t and I’m not going to. I don’t have any strong opinions on whether or not the Taco Bell boycott is anti-capitalist because I haven’t got any strong opinions about what capitalism (or, a fortiori, anti-capitalism) means. It seems to me that has been used to describe at least three different things, two of which are mutually exclusive and one of which is independent of those two. These are:

1. The free market: capitalism has been used, mostly (but not exclusively) by its defenders to just mean a free market, i.e., an economic order that emerges from voluntary exchanges of property and labor without government intervention (or any other form of systemic coercion).

2. The corporate State: capitalism has also been used, sometimes by its opponents and sometimes by the beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporate State–that is, active government support for big businesses through instruments such as subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, development grants and loans, special tax exemptions, funding plants, acquiring land through eminent domain, government union-busting, and so on down the line. Since government intervention is always, by nature, either services funded by expropriated tax dollars or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, it’s worth noting that being capitalist in the sense of a free marketeer requires being anti-capitalist in the sense of opposing the corporate State, and vice versa. The fact that state socialists and the anti-communist Right have spent the past century systematically running these two distinct senses of capitalism together (in order to make it seem that you had to swallow the corporate State if you believed in the free market–which the Marxists used for a modus tollens and the Rightists used for a modus ponens) doesn’t make these two any less distinct, or any less antagonistic.

3. Boss-directed labor: third, capitalism has been used (by for example, Marxians and socialists who are careful about their use of language) to refer to a specific form of labor market–that is, one where the dominant form of economic activity is the production of goods in workplaces that are strictly divided by class. Under capitalism in the third sense, most workers are working for a boss, in return for a wage; they are renting out their labor to someone else, in order to survive, and it is the boss and not the workers who holds the title to the business, the shop, and the tools and facilities that make the business run. (Or, as the Marxists would have it, the means of production.) It’s worth noting that capitalism in this third sense is a category independent of capitalism in either of the first two senses: there are lots of different ways that a free labor market could turn out (it could be organized in traditional employer-employee relationships, or into worker co-ops, or into community workers’ councils, or into a diffuse network of shopkeeps and independent contractors) and someone who is an unflinching free marketeer might plump for any of these, or might be completely indifferent as to which one wins out; whereas an interventionist statist might also favor traditional employer-employee relationships (as in Fascism) or any number of different arrangements (as in various forms of state socialism).

With these distinctions on the table, it’s worth pointing out that many 19th century libertarians–Benjamin Tucker chief among them–who considered themselves both radical free marketeers and radical critics of capitalism; what they meant was that they attacked capitalism in senses (2) and (3)–holding that state intervention on behalf of big business was unjust and at the root of most social evils, including the exploitation and impoverishment of workers which they identified as being part and parcel of capitalism in the third sense. (They also believed that exploitative and impoverishing practices would collapse in a free market; although many of the practices of landlords, bankers, bosses, etc. were not coercive in themselves, Tucker and his circle argued, they were evils that workers would not put up with if it weren’t for a background of systemic coercion and restriction of competition. So they were worth railing against, even if they were not themselves forms of aggression.)

I point all this out because I don’t think there’s actually anything about being a libertarian, or an Austrian about economics, that requires you to plump for capitalism in the second or third senses. Both Austrian economics and libertarian theories of justice require you to be a free marketeer, of course, but whether that makes you capitalist, anti-capitalist, or just doesn’t decide the matter one way or another depends on how you pin down the term capitalism. Part of my worry is that the way that statists have jammed together three completely different concepts under the chimerical term capitalism has tended to blind libertarians, in the 20th century, to some of the insights that their forbearers in the 19th century had. The idea is usually that if something is anti-capitalist, it is therefore anti-libertarian. But that only follows if it’s anti-capitalist in the sense of wanting to use violence to intervene in the free market. My worry is that Daniel has probably got a good argument for showing that CIW’s actions are anti-capitalist in senses two and three, and mistakenly figured that undermining capitalism in those senses tends to undermine capitalism in the first sense, and therefore destructive. In order to try to avoid confusion on the matter, I’m going to be sticking to the term free market when I talk about what Austro-libertarians are committed to defending.

With that out of the way, let’s look at what Daniel objects to in the rhetoric of the Taco Bell boycott and its supporters. Here’s one objection:

Simply put I believe, there are more ways to be anti-capitalist than just using government. Mainly promoting ideas that capitalism is evil or claiming it resorts to rampant market failure are, in my view, anti-capitalist.

There are two things that this might mean.

1. It might mean that you can undermine capitalism in the sense of the bosses’ labor market without going for government intervention. That’s certainly true, but it’s not yet clear that this is a vice. If you think (as I do) that there are serious economic problems with the sort of bureaucratic, boss-controlled, centralized, top-down corporate commerce that rose to dominance in the 20th century, then undermining that–by pointing out, for example, that it typically involves crippling knowledge problems, fosters a culture of petulant entitlement among the decision-makers, exploits the workers and systematically shuts them out of important channels for autonomous and rewarding labor, and so on–then undermining capitalism in that sense can only be counted as a good thing. If you also think that the cultural and material conditions created by boss-directed labor profits from and tends to promote the growth of corporate statism that expropriates wealth in order to support the bosses, then that gives you even stronger libertarian reasons to support anti-capitalist agitation in this sense. And indeed there are good reasons for Austrians and their fellow-travelers to think these charges against boss-centric are solid–the knowledge problems that Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard pointed out in central planning also apply when that central planning is done by bureaucratic corporations; the potential of free market competition ameliorates the problem but doesn’t eliminate it, and if decisions are being made on the margin in a market that is already dominated by centralized interlocking bureau-corps, which are supported not only by their existing market share but also by a network of cultural attitudes towards work and jobs, it looks like it is going to be a long, hard struggle to undermine those structures and make the threat of serious competition into a practicable reality. The sort of long, hard struggle, in fact, that groups like the CIW are, at their best, engaged in.

2. On the other hand, this might mean that there are ways to undermine the free market other than calling down the government. That’s true, I guess, but it’s unclear that the things Daniel cites are examples of it. It’s true that spreading economic fallacies is dangerous, and undermines people’s willingness to stand up for economic freedom even if the person spreading the fallacies isn’t personally calling for government intervention. But whether saying capitalism is evil or that capitalism involves frequent and systemic market failures does that or not depends on whether the critic is using capitalism in the first sense, the second sense, the third sense, or an unstable congerie of different senses. If it’s in the first sense, then clearly it involves an economic fallacies–liberty as such is always an economic (and moral) good, and the Austrians have shown that, while the utopia of neo-classical equilibrium is just that–utopian nonsense–liberty doesn’t create systemic market failures, but rather creates the opportunities and incentives to overcome them. But if capitalism is being used in the sense of the corporate State, then both the condemnation and the accusation of systemic market failure are obviously right. If it’s being used in the sense of boss-directed labor, then the charges involve economic fallacies and undermine the free market only if you think that boss-directed labor is a necessary condition for a free market (which it obviously isn’t), or a necessary condition for a flourishing free market (which is a premise that has not yet been convincingly argued). In fact, I’d say that the history of big business support for stifling Progressive regulation–cf., for example, Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism–the economic record of big corporations over the past century, and the considerations about bureaucratic planning that I mentioned above are all very good reasons for saying that the link doesn’t exist, that if anything boss-directed labor is corrosive to the free market, and that if it takes a fighting union to weaken or supplant it, then that’s as good an argument as any for vibrant, agitating, government-free union organizing.

   Now, it’s true that most labor organizers and labor activists today are hardly consistent libertarians, and it’s likely that their rhetoric is going to jostle back and forth between different meanings as they go along just as much as when anyone else uses the terms. But that’s not a reason to issue a blanket criticism of the action as anti-market; it’s a reason to call for a clarification of the argument, and an attempt to grasp the dominant principle in the particular case–as stated in their talk and as manifest in their actions. Coming back to the CIW and their supporters specifically, it would be a lot easier to convict them of being swayed mainly by anti-market maxims if they were, for example, a State-protected union, or if they were calling for State action against Taco Bell or its contractors, or if they were proposing that the free market in farm work is the problem, rather than the practices of specific farm employers. But they aren’t; they are making a point specifically about the common labor practices of farm employers in southern Florida, as far as I know aren’t attributing their evils to the free market (maybe their supporters in JVC were making this claim; I don’t know), and they did a lot of really quite fascinating and groundbreaking work in doing labor organizing and achieving goals without the suffocating help of the federal labor bureaucracy. All of these facts are well worth noting when we try to piece out what we should think of as the dominant trends in CIW’s campaign.

The other strand of Daniel’s objection I find a lot more puzzling: he objects that their means (boycotting) are not efficient in obtaining their ends (higher real wages and living conditions for the Immokalee workers), that this is so because the boycott strategy ignores the effects that a drop in demand for tacos will have on wages related to the production of tacos, and so that alternative means would be more effective at obtaining the ends of higher wages and living conditions for the Immokalee workers.

It seems to me that the question of obtaining the end has already been settled now that the boycott has been won. Taco Bell established a pass-through program, the workers will be getting more money, and whatever effects the slow-down in Taco Bell sales might have had on the workers have now ended with the boycott. Workers will be getting about $100 more or so per year, and the amount will increase if CIW can leverage their success in the Taco Bell campaign to convince other companies to adopt a similar policy. So I’m especially puzzled by Daniel’s argument that the drop in demand for tacos (and thus tomatoes) hurts the CIW workers rather than helping them. Sure, the boycott may have hurt their income for the three years of the boycott–although my suspicion is that the change on the margin per worker was probably pretty negligible. But people make decisions that will result in less income for the short term in order to get a better result in the long term all the time. Boycotts and strikes are an example; so are school, investment, and quitting your job in order to become an entrepreneur. One thing you have to keep in mind here is that it was the workers themselves who decided that the trade-off of potential present losses for future gains was worth it; that doesn’t guarantee that the decision was a wise one, but it’s certainly not a bizarre sort of decision to make and here, at least, it seems to have begun to pay off.

Daniel’s right to point out that the Taco Bell boycott didn’t encourage consumers to patronize competing tomato-purchasing industries (in order to keep tomato prices steady or raise them by increasing demand for substitute uses of tomatoes, while encouraging Taco Bell to change its ways in order to recapture some of the lost business). But surely here he has misunderstood the strategy behind the boycott. Tomato-pickers aren’t paid directly by the tomato-using industry that consumers buy from; they’re paid by big tomato farmers, who put sell their tomatoes to Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Heinz, Pace, et al. as contractors. Since none of those competing tomato-users has a pass-through system either, there’s no reason why the boycott should want to funnel business to them; that would merely be shifting business from one sharp dealer to another; and while it might give Taco Bell an incentive to change its ways, it would reward other tomato-using companies for engaging in exactly the same practices as Taco Bell.

Further, Daniel’s too uncharitable to the CIW when he suggests the following as an alternative, higher-valued use of resources that the CIW could have employed:

Any form of productivity. Allegedly the housing prices in the Immokalee area are exorbitant, and contribute to the poverty conditions of those who live there. So this is an entrepreneurial area that could host the energy of riled activists that is instead being diverted by this boycott. If these activists were instead producing houses, clothes, and consumable goods to be exchanged with the Immokalee workers they would be more successful in improving their quality of life.

But look, these are things that the CIW is already working on. They have already established, among other things a (tremendously successful) grocery store in Immokalee (run on a co-op model, providing goods at near-wholesale prices) and a multilingual community radio station (which helps keep workers communicating and up-to-date on community news). CIW isn’t just a fighting labor organization–although it is that; it’s a community organization and they’ve put a lot of resources into improving living conditions in Imokalee on the ground. They’ve done this in a lot of ways: by putting money into producing community resources, by organizing general strikes and boycotts to negotiate higher wages, by exposing slavery rings, fraud, and violence in the fields (sometimes through the government, sometimes through the press, and sometimes through direct action by workers). The workers have made their decisions about when and how to apply their resources by developing strategies over time to prioritize their needs, and when they launched the Taco Bell boycott it was because they decided it would be worth it to use some resources in the boycott in order to gain better pay and conditions later using a public education and pressure campaign. Now, the mere fact that they decided that this would be best doesn’t mean that they were right; but it’s important to see that their decision wasn’t different in kind from any number of other decisions in the free market, such as: quitting your job, going back to school, starting your own business, investing your money in what you think will be a winning stock, buying a tool, etc. There are plenty of cases where each of these decisions would be wise and plenty where each would be foolish; that depends a lot on the specifics of the case at hand. In this particular case, it looks like the boycott has paid off nicely for the workers–both in direct results and in precedent for future campaigns–and unless you can come up with some pretty specific plans and give some pretty strong reasons in favor of thinking that they would have been a better way to improve farmworkers’ quality of life, I think the presumption is going to be in favor of chalking this campaign up as a good move for the workers.

Of course, you might instead argue that it benefitted the workers, but only at the expense of either Taco Bell, or consumers, or both. That’s a separate argument, but it’s one worth worrying about when we talk about campaigns in which part of the outcome is raising the price of a consumer good. But of course here we need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, the marginal increase in price of the tomatos for Taco Bell is $0.01 per pound of tomatos; in total it will cost Taco Bell about $100,000 / year more than they spent before. If Taco Bell eats that cost it will hardly be noticed, and if the fraction of that cost on the margin is passed on to Taco Bell patrons, it will hardly make a difference. But also, second, that even if the change were likely to make a difference on the margin, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the change in price comes at the expense of the people buying the tacos. One way to look at CIW’s strategy in the Taco Bell boycott is that they were working to earn more money for themselves by changing consumer preferences; what they aimed to do, and succeeded in doing enough to win the boycott, was to educate Taco Bell consumers and get them to recognize the worth of a decent standard of living for farmworkers, and to take that value into account when they deliberate over purchasing a taco. Of course, once they take that into account, they will be willing to pay more for the taco in order to secure the decent standard of living for farmworkers. But it’s not at all clear that this is an loss to them. Sure, it means more money going out, but it’s money being exchanged for something they now value. You could argue that they only ought to value the pleasure of eating the taco, and drop the sentimental concerns about farmworkers; but Jesus, why would you argue that? The market isn’t an arena for machines to maximize their store of precious metals or for hedonic calculators to maximize their bodily pleasures; it’s a process that emerges from the deliberations that free human beings make about what they want and how they can achieve it. People have every right to value tasty food, of course, but they have just as much right to value solidarity with fellow workers, concern for fellow human beings, charity for people suffering, and a lot of other things that come into play when we think about the labor practices of the people we do business with.

Finally, Daniel is again too uncharitable when he worries that the CIW’s practices and demands aren’t as free of government meddling as I’ve made them out to be. Let me be clear–as far as I know, CIW aren’t principled anarchists; while I’m excited about the model of organizing that they’ve developed, and I think their successes have a lot to do with the fact that they are free from both the worm of government union protections and the hook of government union controls, I don’t claim that they’re any kind of infallible resource. My point here has been to draw out the aspects of them that have something to teach libertarians. But it’s not fair to accuse them of grabbing for government backing based on this line from their press release:

The Company indicated that it believes other restaurant chains and supermarkets, along with the Florida Tomato Committee, should join in seeking legislative reform, because human rights are universal and we hope others will follow our company’s lead.

It’s not fair because (1) the statement about seeking legislative reform came from Taco Bell, not from the CIW; and because (2) it’s not specified what sort of legislative reform they mean. There are two different things that CIW has objected to in southern Florida: (1) the prevalent low wages and harsh working conditions; and (2) the use of fraud, coercion, and outright slavery against immigrant farm workers. Both of the complaints were part of the Taco Bell boycott campaign, and if the legislative reform is aimed at dealing with enslavement of farmworkers or making local law enforcement more responsive to issues of slavery and trafficking, then there’s no reason at all why an anarchist should object. If Taco Bell is proposing some kind of bureaucratic labor regulation by the Florida legislature, then yes, we’ll have to oppose that when the time comes. But that suggestion came from Taco Bell, not CIW, and if CIW were to come out in support of it, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked, but it would represent a substantial break from the strategy and tactics behind all of their successful organizing and activism so far.

So enjoy César Chávez Day, and wish the Coalition of Immokalee Workers well on their recent victory. It’s OK. In fact, if you care about workers bettering their lives without coercion and in organizations autonomous from the State, it’s pretty exciting. Even if you’re a libertarian. Really. I promise.

The latest news from the Traditional Values front comes to us from Roseville, Michigan, where we find that the defenders of public decency are marshalling their forces to preserve our precious culture and heritage–by launching a legal assault against a local artist for his reproduction of part of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling for the Sistine Chapel:

In Ed (Gonzo) Stross’ eyes, his variation on Michelangelo’s Creation of Man mural is art.

In 39A District Judge Marco Santia’s eyes, it’s a crime.

Santia ordered jail time, a fine and probation — a sentence that sounds a little harsh to a state senator, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and fellow artists.

Santia ordered Stross, 43, to serve 30 days in jail, do two years’ probation and pay a $500 fine for violating a city sign ordinance. Roseville officials said letters were prohibited on the mural and Eve’s exposed chest is indecent.

Besides jail time and the fee, Stross is to tastefully cover Eve’s breasts before reporting to the Macomb County Jail on Monday morning, and to paint over love by May 1.

— Detroit Free Press 2005-02-18: Muralist’s vision has jail staring him in face

(Link thanks to Copyfight 2005-02-23 and No Treason 2005-02-22.)

Of course, a bare-breasted Eve wasn’t too much for Pope Julius II; he not only approved of its public display, but was glad to have it on the ceiling of the most important church in all of Western Christendom. You might have thought that some of our traditional values include glorifying God and Creation through beautiful art, or at least respect for the achievements of our forebearers. But when it comes to the community standards of our day–which are, after all, mostly set by reference to the sensitivities of the most obnoxiously vocal and litigious segments of the Religious Right–it appears that all of these pale in comparison to the importance of ensuring that no child see boobies, ever. Anyway, since when have traditional values had anything to do with history?

This, it seems, is the modern Religious Right: a horde of know-nothing busybodies, apparently hell-bent on making Mencken’s definition of puritanism look plausible, and going to the mat to enforce the values of a past that–fortunately for the achievements of Western civilization–never existed.

Further reading

• GT 2004-03-10: Traditional marriage

Just a reminder: all that sound and fury from the anti-abortion movement on behalf of Unborn Victims of Violence; all that sentimental law-making allegedly in the name of Laci Peterson and her yet-to-be-born son Connor; all that’s not really about protecting pregnant women from domestic violence. It’s not about punishing men who batter pregnant women, and it’s not about protecting children, either.

What it’s about is laying legal groundwork for punishing young women who seek abortions.

Test case: in Macomb County Michigan, prosecutors are now researching whether they can charge a 16 year old girl and her boyfriend with manslaughter for a desperate home-made abortion when she was four months pregnant:

(Link nabbed from excellent commentaries at Mouse Words 2004/11/17 and Pink Feminist Hellcat 2004/11/18.)

Investigators said a pregnant 16-year-old girl allowed her boyfriend to beat her with a miniature baseball bat to cause a miscarriage, which may lead to criminal charges against the teens and one of their parents.

The girl estimated she was four months pregnant, said Macomb County Prosecutor-elect Eric Smith. Police said the boy’s mother helped transport the fetus to her home and bury it in the backyard.

Smith said the beatings were done over a period of three weeks. It was done in an effort to terminate the pregnancy.

How dare they! Don’t they know that abortion is illegal in this country?

This is not a black and white area of the law. It is a gray area, added Smith. It is shocking the lengths these two teens went to terminate the pregnancy.

I am shocked! shocked! to find that a desperate 16 year old would go to such lengths to have an abortion outside of official state-approved channels. Why in God’s name would she do that?

Under Michigan law, people under 18 need one parent’s permission to obtain a legal abortion.

Oh.

Neither family knew about the pregnancy before it was terminated, Smith said.

Well.

A first-trimester abortion without complications costs about $300, Warren said.

Yeah.

If 16-year-olds feel that this is there only option, than we have really missed the boat on educating them about sexual health, Warren said.

Indeed.

This is a culture of life we’re building here, folks. And that means doing everything we can with pro-life laws to stop young women from getting abortions from a safe, medical provider. And throwing them in a pro-life prison when they finally make a desparate attempt to end the pregnancy at home without the aid of a doctor.

Or taking a pro-life gun and shooting them in the neck with a pro-life bullet if they do make it to the clinic:

INDIO, Calif. A California teenager has been convicted of attempted murder for shooting his pregnant girlfriend inside a Riverside County abortion clinic.

The shooting left the 16 year-old victim a quadriplegic.

She testified during the trial that 17-year-old Jeffrey Fitzhenry told her before the shooting that she was depriving him of his unborn child.

The prosecutor told jurors he also threatened, If you take something of mine, I’ll take something of yours.

As Sheelzebub puts it at Pinko Feminist Hellcat:

Apparently, he didn’t like the idea of her getting an abortion. Or rather, he was an abusive sociopath. He reportedly told her: If you take something of mine, I’ll take something of yours.

Except the fetus was in her body not his, and she’d be the one to deal with the health risks and potential complications, not him.

Now, you might think that it’s unfair of me to sit here pinning the actions of one abusive boyfriend on the anti-abortion movement as a whole–but how are Jeffrey Fitzhenry’s actions different in any salient respect from the legal action that pro-life laws are pushing pro-life prosecutors to take in Macomb County? Enforcing laws that stop young women from obtaining medical abortions means stationing armed men who are ready to shoot you in the neck to keep you from getting an abortion. Enforcing laws that punish women for getting an unauthorized abortion means using violence against young women who try to get one through other means. The fact that the abusive sociopath wears a suit and works in Congress does not make it any different. The fact that the shooting is done by men with badges does not make it any different. The fact that any complaints against the men who shoot you will be dismissed by men in black robes does not make it any different. The only difference is that Jeffrey Fitzhenry is only one sociopath, with only one woman as his target. The pro-life state would be a sociopath with armies at its disposal, with all young women as its targets. (For more on the same topic, see GT 2004-03-08: April March.)

Jeffrey Fitzhenry didn’t care about life; he shot his ex-girlfriend in the neck because he wanted control over her body, and he wanted to take revenge when she didn’t comply. He is not pro-life; he is an abusive sociopath. And nothing less is true of the legislators, presidents, or prosecutors who use deceptive bills to enforcing a culture of life at the barrel of a gun.