By John Curl

Today the vast majority of people in America are employees,"wage earners," at least the vast majority of those who can find a job at all. This wasn't always the case. There was a time, not so long ago, when the vast majority were self-employed. Being an employee was considered a form of bondage; one submitted to it due to economic hardship, for as short a time as possible, then became once more "free."

Today the people who run this world speak about "capitalism","freedom" and "democracy" as if they are all synonymous. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The central root of capitalism is the wage system of labor. Although individuals are "free" to take a job or quit it, for the vast majority there is no viable option to taking a job. Others own all the means of survival, so the only way to survive is to get money, and the only legal way to get money is to find a job. Becoming an entrepreneur, starting a business, is not a realistic option for most people. The entire system is designed to make that impossible. The capitalist system needs a constant supply of cheap labor, and the economic system is geared to provide it. The wealth of the nation is distributed just enough to prevent a general uprising of the dispossessed. It is the need to survive that forces people into the "free" labor pool.

The Triumph of Capitalism is blazoned across the banner of this era. And yet, one needs only open one's eyes a crack to see the dismal failure of the capitalist system to provide a decent life for vast numbers of people. It offers illusions and false promises. The only promise it really fulfills is endless wealth for small elites and endless despair for entire populations.

Today there seems to be no challenge to this system. Most people in America are unaware that there ever was a challenge to it, a challenge that involved large numbers of working people, a series of social movements involving cooperatives, inextricably tied to the early labor movement and "third" electoral parties. The development of the "two-party system" in America was specifically designed to exclude parties that might challenge the economic system; the development of "labor laws" was specifically designed to exclude unions that might challenge the economic system.

This book is a chronicle of those social movement that led the challenge. If the reader comes across information here that goes unmentioned in most history books, I can only say that events that pass almost unnoticed in one era are often later seen as of world-shaking importance, while the same era's headlines commonly become footnotes.

For the purposes of this history, work will be called "cooperative" when it is organized democratically and it and its fruits are divided equally and fairly among the working individuals. Work will be called a "collective" when it is done by and for the group as a whole, and not necessarily divided up at all. When the group shares a common household, the term "communal" will be used synonymously with "collective." For example, if a group were digging a ditch cooperatively, they might decide that each would spend two hours at it or that each was responsible for finishing six feet. If they were digging the ditch collectively (or communally, if they lived together), they would just do it and not worry if one did more than another as long as it felt okay.

All three terms imply free voluntary democratic equalitarian situations; the only exception is in the category of "religious" communalism, where theocratic organizations will be discussed in this work as well as truly democratic ones.

In contemporary usage, a "collective" (or a "work collective") is a group of equals making decisions by consensus; in distinction, a "cooperative" uses majority rule (and can sometimes be hierarchically managerial). There are also hybrid structures such as the "collective-cooperative;" these are discussed in the last chapter.

The concept of "class" in this book is close to the perspective of most American workers of earlier centuries. Rather than considering class a simple division into upper-middle-lower according to income and wealth, the determining factor is the person's (or family's) relationship to the mode of work and means of survival. Thus an earlier American working person might have seen two main working classes: "free" and "bond." Free workers were self-employed or cooperatively employed. Those in bondage were slaves, indentured servants, wage-earners and prisoners.

Some of these classes were clearly in bondage: the slaves, servants and prisoners at least; while the self-employed were clearly free. In between was the class of wage-earners. Wage-earners "voluntarily" submitted to a form of work bondage: they were neither obviously bond nor truly free. But the wage-earners knew of course that it was "voluntary" only in a technical sense, since almost all were forced into it by economic need. Wage-earners were commonly considered "wage-slaves," meant in the most literal sense when they were forced to work long hours under oppressive conditions for almost no pay. Although usually not thought of as a separate class, "free" housewives in working families were commonly doomed, then as now, to the bondage of chores; but "woman's work" was not limited to "free" people, and woman servants, slaves and wage-earners usually had to come home at night to this second bond.

In response to this situation, generation after generation of Americans organized visionary social movements to liberate themselves from their bondage, and to abolish bondage. These movements did not limit their sights to just chattel slavery and indentured servantry, but extended to wage-slavery and women's rights.

But how could society abolish all these forms of bondage? The answer was, in a Co-operative Commonwealth.

The first Americans to practice collectivity, cooperation, and communalism were of course Indian. Families typically included a number of related adults in the same household, sharing a common store of provisions and tools; groups of families were organized into larger cooperative units, and the collection of these made up the tribe. The concept of individual private property in land was unknown, and tools were commonly shared within the communal group.

Hunting and food-gathering peoples followed their food sources around with the seasons; food availability and the methods of gathering determined the size of the living group. At certain times of year, usually scattered groups would join into larger units for cooperative production, using methods not possible in smaller units. These gatherings were not only for mutual aid and cooperative work, but for social connection and celebration, and formed an integral part of societal structure. Typical examples of this are Shoshone rabbit hunts using long nets, only possible when scattered families gathered into a large enough band, and Dakota buffalo hunts, only possible when scattered bands gathered into the tribe.

Collectivity and cooperation also formed the backbone of the way of life of sedentary peoples such as the agriculture-based southwestern Pueblos and the fishing-based northwest coast tribes. The latter, such as the Chinook, channeled their entire catch to an elder whose responsibility it was to assure equitable distribution according to need.

Some form of collective democracy was part of almost every native social system north of Mexico. The most highly developed on a large scale was perhaps the Iroquois confederacy, whose central Council of Sachems (male elders from the various tribes appointed by female elders) made decisions only by unanimous collective consensus. Variations of the council-consensus system are the most typical form of native political organization.

Today, despite the ravages of European invasion, collectivity, communalism, and cooperation remain the dominant texture of Indian life, particularly of those tribes able to hold onto their land; many tribes have production cooperatives, organized on partly traditional, partly "modern" lines.

Collectivity and communalism can be said to be as integral a part of native American culture and religion as the tribe and the land.

For their first three years in America, 1620-1623, the Pilgrims farmed and worked communally, putting all the products of their work into a common warehouse and taking their needs from a common store. Plymouth was a commune.

The "Separationist" Puritan sect, of which most were members, had financed the voyage with backing of a corporation in Britain. The corporation claimed the wolf's share of all the fruits of their labor for seven years. It proved to be a tremendous drain, worse so because the corporation was keeping false books and cheating the settlers blind. Plymouth was at first set up as a plantation. While the settlers came in search of freedom, their corporate backers' plan was to use the Separationist sect as a ruling elite over British indentured servants and Indian slaves. More than half the group of about 100 aboard the Mayflower were indentured. But the day before landing, the servants staged an insurrection and declared they were seizing their freedom. The bulk of the Pilgrims, "free" workers, had no interest in siding with the few masters on board. The masters had no choice but to agree. All adult males signed the Mayflower Compact, affirming all were now free, and establishing a government among them where all had equal voice and vote. While the Pilgrims' political system was sexist, it was still a great democratic advance over the military dictatorships of the earlier colonies to the south. Thus the first American colony with even limited democracy was set up at gunpoint of revolutionary servants.

But Plymouth's semi-democratic commune lasted only three years. The corporation and the sect back in England (which was falling more and more under control of certain merchants), reasserted their power over the colony. The corporation became ever more a burden than a help, and many colonists wanted to get out from under it. Land was "plentiful," relations with the local tribes were still friendly and cooperative, and a growing number saw greater freedom and economic success in setting up separately on their own. Masters gained the right to import new shiploads of servants, who would not be declared "free." Finally Plymouth bought out the corporation and dissolved the communal economic system. Soon a theocratic oligarchy was in full control and there were property qualifications for voting.

Still mutual-aid and cooperation remained a basic substance of their way of life. The first major industry in the colony was a fishing cooperative.

The Pilgrims were soon joined by other Puritans who founded the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Under their system, much of New England was communal property. Each village had a large commons like a medieval estate. This land belonged to the community as a whole and was assigned to landless individuals and families to use. The early Puritan system saw it as society's duty to assure that no one was alienated from this most basic means of survival.

Britain was a brutal place at the time, with hundreds of minor offenses punishable by death. Revolutionary sentiment and anger were everywhere among the working population. Just as the monarchical church-state was an integrated religious, economic and political organization, the workers' organizations combined religion, economics and politics, and became cells of organized resistance. The Puritan "non-conformist" sects were based on an ideology of struggle for liberty and equality, with an end of making life on earth "as it is in heaven," which they saw as sharing and cooperating. A "commonwealth" and not an autocracy. They were millenarian, and looked forward to an imminent Second Coming, when the money-changers would be driven from the temple for good, the meek would inherit the earth, the first would be last. They saw the actual Coming only as the final act of the victory over the forces of evil; in the meantime the faithful should model their lives and society on the future "kingdom" as much as possible, even though this meant conflict with the established order. Basically they were part of the "anabaptist" movement.

Anabaptism imitates early "Apostolic" Christianity. "All whose faith had drawn them together held everything in common" (Acts 3:43). The entire Jerusalem Church, of which Jesus' brother James was bishop, lived communally, both clergy and laity, until they were wiped out by the Romans. In this communalism they were following the tradition of Jesus' band, in turn in the tradition of the Essenes and of Israel in the Wilderness. Rome was a slave empire and Christianity took hold as a slave religion; they turned to millennial religion only after decades of great revolutionary activity had ultimately failed. But when Rome fell a new empire was erected on its skeleton, the Catholic Church becoming state religion in the fourth century, with bishops part of the government. The Church of Rome was not communalist. Although the commune was still recognized as "the holy life," it was made the privilege of monks and nuns, and denied to society until the Second Coming, which was no longer imminent but put off to a remote future, the year 1000, which would issue in the "millennium." Until then all were to accept their lots in life: slaves should happily slave. Christianity had been turned around from a slave to a master religion. As the year 1000 approached, much of Christianity awaited the Coming, and when it didn't happen on schedule, they went through a period of shock. The working people were mostly serfs by then, no longer total slaves but tied to a master and a plot of land for life; in most areas there were also "free" small farming peasantries, "free" but still poverty-stricken and oppressed. Among the serfs and peasants "heresies" began to sprout and grow. Almost all the heresies attempted to get back to Apostolic Christianity and saw the Church as the oppressor, the Anti-Christ disguised as the pope. All were met with violence by aristocratic state Catholicism, and most groups organized resistance, some leading extensive armed revolutionary struggles. When these failed, many of the of survivors went off to form separatist communal groups. Thus the Albigneses in the 11th century, renewed by the Waldenses in the 12th, both begun in Southern France; the Moravian (Czech) brethren, founded on the ashes of the Bohemian peasant revolution of 1414; the Brethren proceeded to assimilate the Waldenses, hiding from persecution in mountain colonies for over two hundred years. Later the Reformation loosed anabaptism in opposition both to Rome and to Luther; from the defeat of the German peasantry in the revolutionary war of 1515, arose the Mennonites, Hutterites, Schwenkfelders and Anabaptists (Dunkards). A couple decades later the Russian Dukbors arose, also meeting persecution. All of these communal groups would follow the Pilgrims and Puritans to America.

The Puritans began in secret and practiced economic mutual-aid among members, were met with bloody repression but took deep root and spread. While the Separationist Pilgrims chose to emigrate and set up a "commonwealth" in America, the vast majority of Puritans chose to stay in Britain and try to set up their commonwealth right there.

That is why the British rulers opened up America to the sects, as a safety valve against revolution. It didn't work. Twenty-nine years after the Pilgrims landed, Puritan sects organized a revolutionary army and overthrew the British monarchy, abolishing the office of king and the House of Lords, and declaring the Commonwealth of Britain.

But there was an internal struggle in the revolutionary movement. The "Levelers," fighting for a fair redistribution of the land, were crushed by the merchant-capitalist Cromwellians; Cromwell's version of a "commonwealth" turned out to be rule by a religious-military-capitalist oligarchy. It lasted only a decade, until 1659; then the new money-rich merchants and the old land-rich nobles inter-married and joined fists to bring back the monarchy and the House of Lords.

In New England, land speculators eventually destroyed the Puritan common-land system, using control of the government, which had become in effect a church-state dictatorship, although less than 20% of the population were church members. The Puritan Congregationalist church would not be disestablished in Massachusetts until 1833.

Cooperation permeated the entire way of life in rural colonial America among the "free" population, mostly small and subsistence farmers. Houses and barns were raised, fields were plowed and fences built cooperatively and collectively. Mutual-aid events like corn husking bees, log rolling bees (to clear land), sewing bees, apple paring bees, grain rings (threshing), bull rings (slaughtering) and ship launchings were also social structures and gatherings that served to weld together the fabric of the working community in the same way that similar gatherings did among the Indians. Barter and labor exchange were widely practiced. Money was scarce and often used sporadically. Early country stores were mostly barter centers.

From the beginning worker cooperation in America had two faces, economic and political. The same workers not only joined in labor to survive, but also joined together to defend themselves from the ruling moneyed classes. Small farmers commonly organized "squatters' associations" to fight off the land speculators who were reeking havoc in their rural communities.

In the Southwest, at this time ruled by Spain, the ejido system was in use. Large tracts not being actively used by Indians, were granted to groups of immigrant families, usually twenty or more, mostly in what is now northern New Mexico. These groups held about 90% of their granted land in common, including pasture and forest, for collective use. The common land could not be sold. Beyond that, each owned a house and a farmable plot. The ejidos were self-governing and all males had a vote in biennial elections. Much work was done cooperatively and on occasions the whole village joined in projects for the common good, such as annual repair of irrigation systems and roads. Tools were often collectively owned and used. The ejido system had once been in use in large parts of Spain, and was fully developed in America by 1700.

All the southeastern British colonies had been set up as plantations by the monarchy, earlier than Plymouth, under the dictatorial rule of big corporations untempered by any religious sect. At first they planned to exploit the wealth of America with the labor of Indian slaves and British servants. Indentured servants made up between one-half and two-thirds of the workforce in British America throughout the 17th century. Many thousands signed themselves into servantry in exchange for passage, in ultimate hope of a better life; many other thousands were sentenced to it for "crimes" such as unemployment or debt, or kidnapped into it by labor contractors, "soul drivers," including many children. Only when it became clear that the Indians could not be made into profitable slaves on their ancestral soil, did the corporations switch over to a policy of genocide and begin replacing them with blacks. The first black slaves in British America were dragged to the corporate military plantation of Virginia in 1610, a year before the Mayflower landed.

Mutual-aid and survival cooperation both among slaves and among servants were almost universal. Their cooperative networks, invisible to the masters, eventually became used as channels for organized resistance. There were over 250 recorded slave insurgencies until emancipation, many of the early ones involving servants too.

Escaped slaves set up communal settlements and villages in forests and swamps throughout the colonies. Many were used as bases for guerrilla raids on the slavers. These "maroon" outlaw communes, many with both black and Indian members, appeared wherever slavery spread.

Meanwhile Christianity became for much of the slave population what it had been for the slaves in Roman times and the Puritans in England. At "hush-hush" meetings at night in swamps or forests, elected ministers preached a religion of liberation. These were also mutual-aid gatherings where people attended to each other's survival. Many revolts and escapes were planned at these meetings, and the ministers were often leaders.

So up until the American and French Revolutions, the main western tradition of social revolution was anabaptist, and the tactics vacillated between holy war and separationism. But the failures of the movement, especially of the Puritans during their decade of power in Britain, drove large segments of the people to distrust political movements in religious clothes. When revolution next flared it was a secular movement, based on concepts of the natural rights of all people and no longer on the anabaptist millennium.

In Puritan New England, separationism became a dominant tradition. The discontented in a community would band together and "hive" (like bees) into a new spot deeper in the wilderness. New settlements tended to be collective or communal at first, like Plymouth. When each family staked a separate plot, they still retained their cooperative way of life. Most of these people were former servants who had worked off their indentures, descendants of serfs. Both North and South they filled the mountains and created a culture that was based on community cooperation. They were fierce defenders of liberty and freedom; in the South their descendants eventually formed many of the tracks of the Underground Railway that secreted escaped slaves from the lowland plantations to the North; there were very few slaves anywhere in the mountains.

The Labadists, a commune of Protestant separationists, arrived in New York from Holland in 1683, and set themselves up at Bohemia Manor, where about one hundred lived for fifteen years.

The restored British monarchy opened America to other "non-conformist" sects. In 1683 they put Pennsylvania in the hands of Quakers. The Quakers too had begun in secret, practicing mutual-aid among members, and were mostly from the working classes. They were adamantly anti-slavery and later played an important role in the Abolitionist movement. Like the other sects though, merchants tended to acquire power in their organizations.

The Quakers invited all the various German anabaptist communalists to immigrate. The Mennonites (which include the Amish) started coming in 1684. Then the Moravian Brethren. The Schwenkfelders. A group of millennial Pietists formed the Women in the Wilderness Community in 1694. Two groups of Anabaptists united in America to form the Dunkards. Later a group broke away to found Ephrata colony. Soon there were religious communalists throughout the colonies, involving a sizable portion of the population.

A millennial spirit blazed through the "New Light" Baptist "Great Awakening" that overtook America's frontier communities between 1730 and 1740. Recognizing no authority between an individual or congregation and God, the Awakening was a major force leading to the Revolution. Many "independent" ministers were agitators for liberty, equality and independence.

Robert Owen & Frances Wright

At the time of the Revolution in 1776 independent self-employed workers formed the backbone of the "free" American population. The vast majority of these were small and subsistence farmers. Benjamin Franklin estimated one hundred small farmers to every artisan, mechanic or laborer. But not all Americans were "free." Slaves formed a fourth of the workforce. The largest number by this time were black, but in some areas Indian slavery could still be found. White indentured servants, slaves with a time limit on their bondage, usually four to seven years, had been the main form of labor through most of the colonial period and still made up a large portion of the newer immigrants. Wage-workers --employees--were only a tiny sector of the population. Most were former indentured servants. As long as hand tool production predominated and land was readily available, independence was within the grasp of almost all "free" workers. Wave after wave of immigrant servants worked off their bondage, winding up penniless; the vast majority then took jobs as wage-earners for a few years, just long enough to raise a stake or learn a trade, then either disappeared into the wilderness to become small farmers or remained in more settled areas to become self-employed in some productive way. Working for a boss was viewed as a form of bondage -"voluntary" but still bondage; only due to absolute necessity would anyone submit to it for long.

Close community survival cooperation was the settler way of life in "free" areas, as it was among the Indians. Only through cooperation and sharing were the incessant waves of displaced humanity able to find warmth and shelter on these troubled shores; mutual-aid for survival, not competition, was the dominant chord resounding across the continent among the working population.

The decade before the Revolution was one of hard times for all American workers. The British rulers were trying to place the burden of their first capitalist depression on the colonies as much as possible. Our local rulers passed the burden down onto the backs of the workers.

In 1768 twenty journeymen tailors in New York City walked out because of a reduction in pay. This was the first recorded wage-earners' strike against a boss in America. They had no strike fund. Their impromptu organization was their only union. The first on-going union in America had not yet been organized. To help support themselves during the strike, the tailors set up their own cooperative "house of call" in opposition to their masters. Finding themselves locked out and their jobs filled by scabs, they tried to make a go of their cooperative.

The action of these tailors would be repeated time and again in the following century. Striking workers forming cooperatives was a common pattern in the early labor movement. It was repeated over and over in many places because it was a natural and logical reaction to conditions. Soon workers would no longer wait until striking to from cooperatives, but would organize them in preparation for strikes and ultimately with an eye to never having to strike again.

The wage-earner cooperative, in its turning away from boss-domination and work-bondage, can be seen as separationist, stemming from the same thrust toward freedom that impelled so many colonists to separate from Europe and create cooperative communities throughout America. When this turning-away was blocked ever more thoroughly as the 19th century progressed, increasing numbers of American workers turned back, to social revolution. The strike-to-cooperative transformation of the New York journeymen tailors of 1768 can be seen as a microcosm of the strategy of the national general strike to cooperative commonwealth of one wing of the mass movement that followed.

Wage-earners had few rights. "Free" meant that one was not forced to submit to work-bondage, unless forced by need. The bondage was technically voluntary. "Free" workers could choose their bosses and quit their jobs. Their bondage was only between specified hours and for agreed-upon pay.

In the trades the boss-system was not yet fully developed. Journeymen and apprentices worked for and with masters, not "bosses." The master was a worker too. As long as tools were simple it was within almost any worker's grasp to become a master. Not until the 19th century did most masters take a step more removed and become "bosses," no longer workers but simply businessmen exploiting workers' labor.

For the entire decade before the Revolution, revolt was growing everywhere, among all productive workers: "free" small and subsistence farmers, artisans, mechanics and laborers, wage-earners as well as servants and slaves, men and women. In both cities and frontier communities the working people were being pressed hard by a social system ruled by and favoring the rich. Even where "free people had won some degree of local self-government as in New England, the vast majority were still excluded from voting and holding office due to property and sex qualifications. The general uprising that culminated in the American Revolutionary war was not only against British domination, but against domination by the local landed and merchant-capitalist ruling cliques who were everywhere in control. Large numbers of these wound up fleeing to Canada. It was the rank-and-file laborers, artisans, mechanics, small farmers and traders, members of the Sons of Liberty and other groups, who formed the main support of the Revolutionary movement and insisted on the more radical demands. They could not be kept down, and their constant demonstrations, boycotts, riots and sabotage led to the eventual break.

The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, provided a rallying point that unified many struggles already going on against Britain and the ruling Tories. Its ideas were the grandchildren of those behind the Puritan revolution. While Locke, the Puritan ideologist, had proposed that all "men" had the natural right to life, liberty and property, Jefferson struck out "property" and added the brash claim of a natural equality among all at birth. Nor did he think that equality should stop the minute after birth or be limited to legal formalities. He advocated society adopting whatever "devices for subdividing property" as were necessary to "prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families." "Whenever there are in a country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate the natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on." "I sincerely believe, with you," he wrote to a friend, "that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." He advocated a constitutional convention every twenty years when each new generation could agree to a new social contract. His original draft of the Declaration condemned the slave trade, but this was stricken out by representatives of the slavocracy.

Thomas Paine, journeyman printer whose pamphlet Common Sense rallied the working people to the revolutionary cause and was the clearest voice to call for a democratic republic to replace the old tyranny, called for equalization of the wealth in Agrarian Justice, suggesting how this could be done through inheritance taxes.

"In what does real power consist?" Noah Webster wrote, examining the newly-proposed Constitution. "The answer is plain and short -in property. A general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom...An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic. While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form."

The Revolutionary victory brought the working people few immediate advantages. In the place of ruling Tory merchant-capitalists, land speculators and plantation owners, were ruling "patriot" merchant-capitalists, land speculators and plantation owners. The propertyless were still totally disenfranchised; there were enormous gulfs between wealth and poverty; workers still labored under the various forms of bondage. Servantry was still widespread among the immigrant population, now mostly Irish and German. Democratic gains soldiers thought they had won in battle were being whittled away. Alarmed at the situation, the Boston Committee became active again and flooded their area with leaflets urging "all believers in natural law" to form committees guarding against further encroachments on their liberties. Strikes, riots and revolts began to flare again. In western Massachusetts small farmers rose to halt foreclosures and oppression of debtors; with the leadership of Daniel Shays they staged an armed insurrection, seizing the centers of merchant power in the eastern seaboard for a short time. It was these revolts that finally won the Bill of Rights. Nonetheless slavery was written into the Constitution and permitted to spread to the Southwest Territory. Speculators and slavers were permitted to seize almost all the western lands. Unions were still persecuted as "conspiracies in constraint of trade." There were still property qualifications for voting.

All the participants at the Continental Congress were white men of property: slave owners, land speculators, creditors, manufacturers, merchants and lawyers. There were no small farmers, artisans or laborers, and no women. They wrote a constitution with the working people considered only to the minimum degree necessary to gain their acceptance of it. The Revolution had not fulfilled its promises of equality, democracy, or even liberty for all.

Both Jefferson and Paine were out of the country during the Congress and upon return were both shocked at how deeply the forces of money were in control, with the Southern plantation owners on top.

In 1791, two years after the U. S. Constitution was ratified, a year before the first full-fledged trade union in America was organized, a group of journeymen carpenters in Philadelphia walked out. To help support themselves during their strike, they formed a cooperative and tried to undercut their boss by charging 25% less, announcing that they were eliminating his profit. They were striking for the ten hour day and gave it to themselves, a great advance over the prevailing sun-to-sun system, the 75 hour week. But the cooperative was planned to last only as long as the strike.

In 1792 the first on-going union in America was formed. The early unions grew out of mutual-aid societies being organized in almost every trade in the coastal cities, and at first usually specialized in sickness and death benefits. In 1794, journeymen shoemakers in Baltimore also organized the first cooperative factory in the U.S.

Meanwhile the French revolution see-sawed from "left" to "right," and waves of French refugees poured onto American shores, setting up cooperative structures among them. In 1798 the United Irishmen rose and met defeat, many also seeking refuge in America. They joined the French in the seaboard cities and similarly gained a toehold through mutual-aid and cooperation, as would all the waves of immigrants who followed.

Soon "Democratic societies" modeled after the Sons of Liberty began forming in all the major centers. These came together in a movement to put Jefferson in the presidency, an uprising of small farmers and urban workers. But the aristocratic Federalists met them by staging America's first "red scare." They charged that the Democratic societies were part of a vast secret international conspiracy called "The Illuminati," financed by "Paris gold" with the aim of "subverting the government and wiping out religion."

Nevertheless in 1800 Jefferson's Democratic-Republican (later just Democratic) Party swept into power. During his presidency democracy was extended, the African slave trade outlawed, and the Louisiana territory partly opened to homesteaders. Still the plantation slavocracy retained basic control of the federal government. Although a slave-owner himself, Jefferson advocated emancipation on a social scale; he led the fight to stop the spread of slavery into the west; his aim and vision was to create a true democratic republic with a general equality in land through free homesteads.

In 1806 Philadelphia journeymen shoemakers, with the leadership of Peter Polin and Undriel Backes, unionized and struck for higher wages. The boss had them arrested for conspiracy. The judge instructed the jury to find them guilty, which they proceeded to do. Beaten but unbowed, the shoemakers refused to slink back to a boss and organized a cooperative boot and shoe factory instead.

In the early 19th century productive work was still done almost entirely with hand tools. During this period workers ordinarily collectivized skills, shop space, resources (including credit to obtain raw materials), and distribution facilities. It was not until the 1840s that the factory system and expensive machinery made hand tool production almost universally obsolete; it was only then that cooperative workers collectivized most of their major tools.

Wage-earners were not the only ones forming cooperatives. Individual self-employed producers were caught between the banks and the merchants, and were being squeezed dry. Artisans could not get raw materials at prices they could pay, and the banks would not give them credit. On the other end, the wholesalers and store owners took the biggest bites of the selling prices.

These individual producers, facing impoverishment, organized cooperative "warehouses" to get raw materials at reasonable cost and to distribute their products without middlemen. There was a thriving cooperative warehouse in Baltimore as early as 1809. The Pittsburgh and Vicinity Manufacturing Association opened a warehouse in 1818, doing much barter of industrial products for farm produce. The New England Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts organized several in Massachusetts beginning in 1825.

Thus the two classes of wage-earners and independent workers both formed cooperatives. One class was struggling to raise themselves out of wage-bondage, the other to keep from falling down into it. These two classes met in the cooperatives and became one. Worker cooperatives were ladders across a class boundary, between dependence and independence, bondage and real freedom.

The nineteenth century brought industrialization. While the vast productive power unleashed by these technological advances promised real freedom and plenty for all, industrialization under the capitalist system forced an ever-growing number of workers to become wage-earners permanently. Hand tool production was soon obsolete and the new machines and processes were both prohibitively expensive and could be operated only by ever-larger numbers of coordinated workers. Workers could no longer make a living using the old tools, and had no choice but to find bosses and "voluntarily" submit to wage-slavery. Meanwhile land costs skyrocketed: the road to independence as a small farmer was quickly being closed. Vast new areas were continually annexed to the U. S. (by "purchase," genocide and imperialist war), but instead of that enormous wealth going for the equal enrichment of all the people, it went mostly for the further enrichment of a small number of land speculators, ultimately the same financiers who were behind the factories in the North and the plantations in the South.

While good land was plentiful and tools simple, individual ownership of these means of production meant a real freedom for the "free" American working people; this was the greatest attraction of America to European workers. The land of course was plentiful only at the price of genocide of the Native peoples. As hand tools gave way to machinery and all farmable land was fenced off, individual ownership of these means of production effectually came to mean virtual slavery for ever-greater numbers. Control of all means of survival was being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while the population expanded many times over. America was being transformed from a land where almost all "free" workers had control of their basic means of survival, to one where the great majority was alienated from and denied these means, and exploited and controlled by those who had them. Meanwhile the money-power, in control of the government, proceeded to transform the wealth of the American continent into private profits, permitting only a bare minimum to flow back into the pockets of the workers who were indispensable in creating it, for the capitalist bosses needed a labor pool, a sufficient number of people who were scarcely making it and who therefore would "voluntarily" submit to wage-slavery.

The cycles of depression and boom were very high and low all through the nineteenth century. The first major depression began in 1819; others followed in 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893; besides these there were smaller breakdowns in between. Fully half the years between the Civil War and the turn of the century were depression, interspersed with years of recovery. There were five breakdowns between 1902 and '21, and then of course the big one in '29. The economy bottomed out in '33 when the New Deal took over, but collapsed again four years later and only really pulled out of its slump when the country geared for World War II. Every war brought on a boom followed in peacetime by recession and depression. Unionization and radical worker and farmer movements, usually involving cooperatives, followed these cycles. Some cooperative movements would be destroyed by the collapses, driven to bankruptcy, others by the booms, no longer utterly essential to their members.

As the classes of servant and slave became legally abolished in 1832 and 1865, due mainly to the continual uprisings and abolitionist movements of the bonded workers and their "free" compatriots, the former enslaved classes rose a notch to "free" status, mostly becoming "free" wage-slaves (or unemployed) in the cities and "free" tenant farmers in the countryside. Only the very smallest number made it up to independence and self-employment.

In 1800 just a few percent of the workforce were employees. By 1860, 30%. At the turn of the century 52% of the American workforce were employees. This figure rose slowly but steadily until in 1940 it reached 60%. Then it escalated sharply until by 1970 over 85% of all American workers were employees. Today this figure is probably well over 90%. Correspondingly, the percentage of workers in control of their means of production - of their jobs - diminished.

The class of wage-earners, like those of chattel slaves and indentured servants, did not accept their bondage docilely. To carry out their struggle they created a variety of organizations, most of which can be categorized as unions, parties and cooperatives. Many were all three. Cooperatives were established along with the first unions, as a way for workers to cross the class boundary between employee and self-employed The greatest labor associations of most of the 19th century - the National Trades' Union, the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor - strove not only to better their members' income and working conditions, but were also abolitionist organizations, and strove to raise their members out of wage-slavery entirely and to abolish the wage-slave class. To achieve this, each of these in turn organized and supported movements of worker cooperatives of their members. Their hope was that these cooperatives would grow and spread in every industry across America, until they eventually exerted workers' democratic control over the entire economic system. Their plan was to destroy the capitalist money-power and transform the country into what they called a "cooperative commonwealth, in which the promises of our founding documents, promises of equality, liberty, freedom and democracy, could at last become living reality.

Time and again the money-power attacked the cooperators with economic and physical violence.

But the union cooperators were not alone. Small farmers had become captives to the railroads, middlemen and bankers, with most of the land in mortgage. To fight back they too organized into cooperatives, through the National Orange and then the Farmers' Alliance, but they too were wrecked.

Beginning in the late 1860s the farmer and union cooperators began to unite into "farmer-labor" parties to try to take state power and clear the way for their embattled cooperative movements.

The intense suffering of the depression that began in 1819 led to America's first visionary radical movements. The ground was laid by four thinkers: Cornelius Blatchly, Langdon Byllesby, Thomas Skidmore, and George Henry Evans.

Blatchly, a New York physician, published An Essay on Common Wealth in 1822, in which he asserted society's right to withdraw its "gift" of private property and restore to people their "natural equality." To bring this about he advocated "pure communities" where collective good and cooperation would replace selfishness and competition; these could be formed from small beginnings, eventually spread and take in the whole population; while the repressive and obsolete old society faded away, out of these communities a new America would rise. The Essay and the Society for Propagating Communities, which he founded two years earlier, laid the foundations for the Socialist communal movement that followed beginning with Robert Owen's New Harmony in 1825.

Byllesby, a Philadelphian printer, criticized the Blatchly-Owen idea as unrealistic in application and, in Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth (1826), advocated instead that wage-earners withdraw their labor from the capitalist system and join into cooperatives in every industry and trade, which could then federate, grow large enough to draw in the entire working population, and so create a new economic system in America free of poverty and inequality. This laid the base for the National Trades' Union's cooperative movement of the mid-1830s, and for the union cooperative movements that were to follow.

Skidmore and Evans both advocated political action, and their ideas led to America's first independent Workers' Parties in the late 1820s, which were instrumental in helping win the Jacksonian extension of democracy. Skidmore, a machinist, in The Rights of Man to Property! (1829) called for a new constitutional convention to decree that all property belonged to the nation, to abolish inheritance and cancel all debts; the state would assign each citizen a fair and equal share upon maturity. Evans published the Working Man's Advocate, a New York newspaper, beginning in the mid-'20s, in which he advocated free homesteads, "abolition of chattel slavery and wages slavery," and "equal rights for women and men in all respects."

These movements were all connected, as were the later movements they spawned, which would carry on through the entire century. All considered themselves Jeffersonians, and considered that their ideas simply represented the fulfillment of the promise of America; they formed the roots of the native socialistic and at semi-socialistic movements that loomed increasingly large as the century progressed, all intimately connected with cooperatives and worker cooperation.

After the United States won independence, offshoots of Quakerism renewed the movement, now among the American-born.

First came Jerusalem Community, begun in 1788 in upper New York State, organized after a vision of Jemima Williamson, a Quaker. They had 250 members a decade later and lasted over thirty years.

In 1793 the first Shaker commune was formed, by the New Light followers of Ann Lee, an immigrant English factory worker and a Quaker. At their height 50 years later there would be eighteen Shaker communes dotting the north-east and mid-west, with around 8,000 members. The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, as they called themselves, attained almost complete self-sufficiency and practiced decision-making equality between the sexes. While most anabaptist groups based themselves in the biological family, the Shakers were celibate and had to constantly take in new members, which was a factor in their eventual decline.

*

The German separationists kept coming: the Rappites in 1805, founding Harmony, Indiana; the Separatists from Wurttemberg forming the village of Zoar, Ohio, in 1817; the Hutterites; the True Inspirationists. Each set up a colony or colonies mostly scattered across the northern states. In the early 1840s a communal colony of German Catholics, St. Naziaz Community, was founded in Wisconsin; German Protestants formed Amana in upper New York in 1842 (later moving to six connected villages in Iowa), Bethel in Missouri, and Aurora in Oregon in '44; Bishop's Hill was organized by Swedish anabaptists in Illinois in '46. Even though they all generally kept to themselves and made no attempt to recruit new members from outside, they still had tremendous influence on the areas they lived in. Most eventually dispersed or gave up communalism, becoming cooperative; the Amana Inspirationists and the Hutterites are still flourishing. Some centered around charismatic leaders who tended to run their groups autocratically, like "Father" Rapp; others, like the Hutterites, have been at least semi-democratic. There are about fifty Hutterite communal colonies in the U. S. today, mostly in South Dakota and Montana, organized on a patriarchal consensus system.

Between 1825 and '30 was the first concerted attempt of urban workers to escape deteriorating city conditions and wage-slavery through acquiring land cooperatively and setting up cooperative communities and communes, primarily based in agriculture. Skyrocketing land prices were putting the traditional transition from wage-worker to small farmer out of the reach of ever-growing numbers. Since land is the basic means of production for farmers, this development mirrored the skyrocketing cost of means of production in manufacturing, which made the transition from wage-earner to independent worker out of reach of ever-growing numbers too. Workers turned to both production cooperatives and rural cooperative communities for the same reasons. The transition to community was the more difficult one, as it also necessitated a change in locale, usually from city to country, and usually also a change of jobs. Even then many city workers knew little about farming; they tried to make it by pooling their knowledge, skills and resources.

The movement was sparked by America's first full homegrown depression, which ravaged the working class communities in the eastern cities. Its ideological base was laid by Blatchly's Society for Propagating Communities and his Essay, which contained long excerpts from a work by Robert Owen, a Britisher, A New View of Society, in which Owen originated the idea that the capitalist system of worker poverty and wage-slavery could be destroyed by the creation of cooperative communities everywhere, part agricultural and part industrial, on which all the unemployed could settle along with all wage-slaves who wanted their freedom, all producing for each others' needs and for exchange with the outside world. These cooperative villages would grow, spread and federate "in circles of tens, hundreds and thousands," eventually transforming the whole of society around the world. From inside the shell of "the old immoral world" a "new moral world" would arise, where all were free and equal and true democracy ruled. He called this "Socialism," adding a new word to the languages of the world, and founded the Association of All Classes of All Nations to try to bring it about through peaceful means.

Blatchly and his group began preparations to found their first communities, meanwhile getting in touch with Owen. Owen had been a wage-earner starting at the age of nine, a shop assistant at a drapers. Keeping his eye on the boss, he figured out the capitalist system, becoming a mill manager then part owner. Meanwhile New Lanark became famous as the only mill in England where a large portion of the income was plowed back into high salaries, good working conditions and fringe benefits for workers. In 1817 Owen went to the House of Commons, unveiling his plan to replace capitalism and requesting government assistance to set up the first of these Villages of Cooperation or Home Colonies, as he called them. They would not only solve the problems of poverty and inequality, he claimed, but would rejuvenate all of society. He estimated the best size as about 1200 people on 1000 to 1500 acres. According to his plan, the government would help set them up then get out, leaving them autonomous and self-supporting. The capitalists in control of Commons rejected him out of hand. Scarcely five years had passed since their former colonies in America had whipped them in a second war; now this former wage-earner wanted to set up "home" colonies right in Britain. Owen turned to wealthy individuals, appealing to their "moral sensibilities," but got the same response. He decided that a self-supporting movement could be created, without any further outside help, once the first few got off the ground. He and his friends began gathering resources to start one in Scotland. But Blatchly caught his ear and Owen was soon convinced that America was the most fertile ground for Socialism to develop first. At that moment it happened that George Rapp and his group of a thousand immigrant communalists decided to sell their home, Harmony, in Indiana, and move to a new site in Pennsylvania. Owen put his money on the line and set sail for America. And so the first movement in the world to call itself Socialist was about to take place, in the U.S.A., while the generation of Karl Marx was going to kindergarten.

In the Spring of 1825 New Harmony was opened to any and all. Within a short time over 900 had crowded in, mostly urban working people. For a year the community thrived. They had 20,000 acres, large tracts under cultivation, a cooperative silk factory, woolen mill, brick yard, distillery, oil mill and die works. They functioned under a cooperative system, each being responsible for balancing debits from the community store with work-credits on an annual basis. This plan was to be in effect two years, under direction of a committee, at the end of which the community would work out a permanent constitution.

Between 1825 and '26 New Harmony was thriving, and received nationwide publicity, along with Owen's theories, which inspired the founding of a good number of other cooperative communities across the northern states into the mid-west. Fragmentary histories of at least nine are recorded, the most successful being Kendal and Yellow Springs in Ohio, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, Blue Springs in Indiana, and Franklin and Coxsakie in New York.

During most of the first nine months Owen himself was not there, but was touring the country speaking about Socialism, leaving the people at New Harmony space to work out their own destiny. When he returned, the community was functioning so well that he decided to spring early what he had expected to present at the end of the two year period. He offered a plan for a "community of equals." All would be resolved into a democratic family of equals, holding means of survival in common and working all for each others' needs. They would switch from a cooperative community to a commune, from each receiving material benefits according to work performed, to each receiving according to need.

The community, excited at the prospect, decided to dive in head first. They met with disaster. The community was barely on its feet as a cooperative, a great achievement for 900 people who mostly did not know each other to begin with. There was a wide range of people from the most varied backgrounds: working families, middle-class "intellectuals" and lumpen vagrants. The transition to commune was premature at the least, and resulted in factions and feuds; open struggle among people of differing class backgrounds and outlooks, splitting the community beyond repair. Even after they retreated back into a cooperative system, the personal wounds could not be healed. New Harmony split into several different cooperative communities and some separate families, dividing the land. Owen, undefeated, decided to try his plan again in Mexico, where he soon bumped into the Catholic Church.

One of the participants during the successful first period was Frances Wright, one of America's early women's suffragists. A few months after she left New Harmony, she founded Nashoba Community in Tennessee. While Owen's concept strove toward the liberation of all people from wage-slavery, Wright tried to apply the concept to chattel-slavery. She considered it one last hope for the liberation of black people short of violent insurrection. Communes of blacks and whites producing for their common needs and raising funds to found new communes and liberate more blacks. She wrote to Thomas Jefferson, trying to get him involved. He answered with encouragement and support but said this was a job for young people, while he was near his end. Nashoba survived for three years, despite harassment from local racists. But the 1828 depression hit them hard, and the next year they could not meet their land payments. The now-free blacks shipped off to "liberated" Haiti, while Wright, together with Owen's son Robert Dale Owen, became active in the New York Workingmen's Party, giving up the socialist community strategy as impracticable at the time.

Just as anabaptism had two wings, one separationist and one social-revolutionary, with the same ultimate goal but with different roads toward it, the separationists going off cooperatively and communally to live among themselves, the revolutionaries trying to take over state power and transform the whole of society directly, so the socialist movement could be viewed as the secularization of anabaptism, mirroring the secularization of the whole of Western society, the separation of church and state. While the church-state used religious authority to back up arbitrary power, the mass socialist movement grew out of the democratic tradition and attempted to extend democracy and equality to the economic life of society, instead of its remaining formalistically limited to politics and law. This vacillation between socialist communities and socialist parties would be later followed by other socialist leaders in America, including Weitling, Haskell and Debs. The union-based worker cooperative movement stood with one foot firmly planted in each of these wings, and was a bridge between them.

Many expected New Harmony to act as both a seed-pod and a bank for the movement, gathering capital that could be used to start numerous other communes. Its failure meant that only by individual workers combining resources could many small communities get started. This worked well for several years, but without a center, the movement lost direction. Almost all the communities were absorbed into the larger surrounding farm communities after a number of years. Apart from common land ownership, the new arrivals were mostly repeating in microcosm the already-existing cooperative work networks in much of rural America. They found many of the same problems in the countryside that they'd hoped to leave behind them in the cities. Becoming part of a land cooperative or a commune meant changing classes for most, as they'd usually been tenants and wage earners in the cities and now they were joint land-owners and collectively self-employed.

But the banks, middlemen and land speculators were squeezing small farmers dry. It was becoming increasingly difficult for people who'd known farming all their lives to make a living; so much more so for these former city people. Besides, for the most part the banks still owned the land, and the communalists remained slaves to large mortgage payments for many years. The worsening of the depression and the disheartenment of New Harmony's collapse brought a temporary end to socialist communalism as a movement. While money was scarce and getting scarcer, not even the top layers of the working population could afford land, even with collectivizing resources. It would be another decade before economic conditions would permit the movement to burst forth again. By 1830 all of these early communities had faded into the rural landscape and were gone.

Josiah Warren, who had been a participant during New Harmony's first year, went on to become America's major exponent of mutualism. He organized the Cincinnati Labor for Labor Store in 1827, better known as the "Time Store." It attempted to undercut the market and money systems by basing the value of a product to be bartered at the store on the labor-time contained in it. The member-worker would get time-credit for each product deposited, which could be used toward the barter of other products. An hour's work was considered worth an hour's work; no adjustment was made to account for the different hourly values of every different type of work on the capitalist market. Warren's store inspired the Producers' Exchange Association in Philadelphia, which opened three similar stores beginning the following year. Soon however, all these warehouses began accepting money also, as the producers preferred this flexibility, and were opened to non-member cash buyers, retaining barter among members. They all lasted into the 1830s. Warren went on to found mutualist cooperative communities in Ohio (Equity in '34 and then Utopia in '46) and New York (Modern Times in 1850), with no government from above but simple mutual-aid structures from below. Equity community was soon struck with malaria, but Utopia and Modern Times both lasted over twenty years, never disbanding but simply merging with the surrounding communities that had grown about them.

American-born religious communal groups kept forming. The Mormons were first organized in 1831 in upper New York. They lived communally at first, as a "United Order," but this system was abandoned after less than two years, in favor of separate cooperative households. In 1874, by then long-entrenched in Utah, a new attempt was made to create a United Order, on a larger scale than the first. Twenty-five families joined together, founding Orderville, which soon had a population of over 500. All members drew necessities from a common fund; all surpluses and debts were canceled once a year. Within the next decade several other semi-communal settlements were organized. But the patriarchal theocratic Church, by then committed to capitalism, disclaimed them, leading to great internal strife and to the eventual dissolving of the communes and division of property after twenty-five years.

Between 1864 and 1882 the Mormon Church organized a chain of cooperative stores, extending to almost every community, 146 branches in 126 towns at its peak. But the wholesale, like the Church, was organized theocratically and the stores were set up under a stock system with votes not limited to one per person, so eventually control shifted to an ever-smaller number of members. The church hierarchy decided in 1882 to abandon the goal of a cooperative distribution system, and opened the area to "regular" capitalist stores for the first time.

The Mormons of course grew to be the largest of all the separatist communities, eventually joining the U.S. as essentially a separate state.

Hopedale was begun in 1841 by Christian Socialists in Massachusetts, as an expression of their belief that the struggle for social justice was "the true means of salvation." They lasted fifteen years, with 235 members at their height. With Christian Socialism the religious and secular movements dovetailed once again.

The Perfectionists established their first commune in Vermont in '46, later moving to New York then branching out into Connecticut; at their height their main commune, Oneida, had over eight hundred members. Unlike almost any other 19th century group they practiced group marriage. After four decades Oneida crumbled on personality clashes and wound up transformed into a capitalist corporation.

The Perfectionists, the Mormons and the Shakers were all strong at the same time. Besides being attempts to gain a constructive sense of community by separating from the capitalist wage system, and to lead a "spiritual" life, all were expressions of a widespread dissatisfaction with the bounds and constraints, both economic and social, that accompanied the isolated nuclear family. In capitalist-dominated communities, each family was pitted against each other for survival. In reaction, communalism attempted to restructure society as a cooperating family. Oneida's group marriage, the Mormons' polygamy and the Shakers' celibacy were all attempts to create "improved" internal structures in these new extended families.

At mid-19th century, there were at least fifty religious communal groups in the US, averaging about 200 members.

It was during the intense depression years of the late 1820s that wage-earners first organized their own separate parties. In Philadelphia the first Workers' Party won twenty local offices in its first election in 1828; in New York the next year the Workingmen's Party's first candidate, a carpenter, was elected assemblyman. The New York party was split between supporters of Skidmore's equalitarianism, and Evans' free land and abolitionism. R. D. Owen and Frances Wright, the former communalists, were among the leaders of the Evans group, and raised the first call for free public education, on which they pinned much hope. Josiah Warren was active in the Philadelphia party.

These early workers' parties and others like them in other eastern cities were swept into the upsurge of urban workers and western small farmers behind Andrew Jackson, "the foe of monopoly," in the next few years, and disappeared inside the Democratic Party. This would be a recurring pattern for independent worker parties in the U.S.: politics quickly became conducted by professional politicians, who would attempt to enter every new party and entangle it with one of the "major" parties, with the promise of short-term gains; the developing "two party system" was making it very difficult for new parties to get off the ground. During Jackson's presidency, restrictions on voting for male wage-earners and small farmers were almost entirely removed, and servantry outlawed; still the federal government remained basically controlled by the planters. Wage-earners' problems were not at all solved, and in the following years they would be turning to unions and cooperatives to deal with them.

The first recorded cooperative store in the U.S. opened in Philadelphia in 1829. It sold just to members at cost, charging 20 cents per month dues. Later that year another was started in New York City. The separation of producers and consumers by ever-larger distances was resulting in the domination by middlemen; workingpeople turned to buying-cooperatives to eliminate middleman profits as much as possible, reducing their cost of living.

In '31 the Massachusetts Workingmen's Party, based in Boston, disbanded and many of its leading members regrouped into the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workers, and organized America's first "consumer" cooperative movement of stores and buying clubs. In '32 there were a half dozen stores around Utica, N.Y. and a newspaper, The Cooperator, the first of a long line of American papers with that name. A very successful cooperative food store was run in the same period by the journeymen shoemakers of Lynn, Mass. Until the 1837 depression hit hard, stores were springing up all throughout the northeast.

The disappearance of the stores during the depression did not mean the disappearance of cooperative buying. Groups of neighbors would often do wholesale buying together, and some of the early stores developed out of these buying cooperatives. At first there would usually be a labor requirement for each member. But some members would prefer the alternative of a surcharge. This made for two types of members, working and non-working. It was a small step from there to the workers being put on salary, membership open to the general community, and a store open to members and non-members alike, but with members receiving special discounts or refunds on items purchased.

From the other direction, other early stores began as worker cooperatives, with worker-members employing themselves at modest salaries to run the operation, and passing the rest on in lower prices much like today's "collective" stores. Some members were probably former grocery clerks. But the need for capital was a major stumbling block. To get it, they would open up membership to the community and sell shares.

Other areas of "consumer" cooperation were appearing at this time also. The 1830s saw the first cooperative building, banking and credit associations. The earliest "building and loan" cooperative on record was opened in Philadelphia in 1831. Some of these made it through the depression of the late '30s and '40's, only to be wiped out, along with almost every cooperative in the U.S., by the Civil War.

During the early 1830s was the first great rise of unions in the US. Workers' wages were lagging behind prices and cost of living, due to runaway paper-money inflation, and employers also hit workers with wage-cuts and layoffs. They formed trade unions to fight back; many struck and lost, then turned to worker cooperatives.

American wage-earners' experience had long taught them that small strikes, guerrilla battles, were not getting them the larger things they wanted even when they won. Offensive strikes, waged when the bosses needed workers (often when the economy was on an upswing), sometimes did win. But even then their gains were usually soon whittled away, by speedup, inflation, by any of a hundred tricks. As soon as recession hit, layoffs and wage-cuts were shoved down workers' throats. Defensive strikes, against these, almost invariably lost. The bosses simply didn't need them any more; unemployment created a large labor pool so workers had to compete furiously to survive and bosses could call all the shots. It was during and after these defensive strikes, that wage-earners first formed cooperatives. Many soon realized that this was a bit late, and unions later formed cooperatives in expectation of hard times. The cooperatives would take in unemployed union members. Less unemployment meant less competition in the labor market and therefore higher wages.

In 1834 the Philadelphia cabinetmakers union opened a cooperative warehouse; by '36 it was one of the largest in the city. Soon much of the Philadelphia trade union movement swung to cooperation: the hand loom weavers opened five shops in '36, soon followed by the tailors, hatters and saddlers. That same year shoemakers unions opened cooperatives in New Brunswick, N.J., Cincinnati, St. Louis and Louisville; in the last three cities, tailors unions followed suit. Painters' unions in New York City and Brooklyn lost strikes in 1837, then formed cooperatives.

In the early 1830s unions began coming together into city-wide federations, "trades' unions," the first organizations of American wage-earners that cut across trade lines and looked to the interests of wage-earners as a class. Very soon these trades' unions joined into the National Trades' Union, the first national labor organization. The third annual convention of the NTU in 1836 appointed a committee on cooperation, which recommended that all unions investigate setting up cooperatives, because "until a system of Cooperation is adopted by which the producers of wealth may also be its possessors...the great burden of the evils of which we so justly complain, will never be removed."

Later that year, the Philadelphia Trades' Union adopted a resolution "to place in the Constitution a clause allowing the funds of the Union to be loaned to the Societies (individual unions) for the purpose of Cooperation." Its official newspaper urged each union to raise a fund through regular member contributions to get capital to begin. At the same time each union was to contribute monthly to the Trades' Union fund to help start cooperatives. A conference of nearly two hundred union delegates in 1837 resolved that each union work out an estimate for setting up a cooperative to support ten members. But in the middle of this conference, the capitalist financiers panicked, beginning a new depression that temporarily wiped out not only the cooperatives but almost the entire union movement. This depressed state, relieved only slightly during the California gold rush of the early 1850s after the U.S. seized a large part of Mexico, continued until the Civil War was well under way in 1862.

Thus from the very beginning unions were emancipationist, abolitionist, and revolutionary organizations, trying to raise their members from wage-slavery, and looking to its abolition in a new cooperative economic system.

While hardening times can cause a cooperative movement to blossom, the hardest of times can destroy it, at least in its more visible forms, as the experience of 1837 shows. But the depths of capitalist depression, when cooperatives can no longer pay their rent to landlords and are forced to close shop, does not mean the end of the cooperative movement. It merely forces it to flower on a different level. During the hardest depressions cooperative movements go underground. In almost every community, neighbor cooperation, barter, labor exchange, mutual survival aid of every sort grows. When times are ripe again, the movement resurfaces.

Brisbane

Associationism in America started in 1840 with the publication of The Social Destiny of Man, by Albert Brisbane, editor of the New York Tribune, the most widely circulated newspaper of the time, radical and Abolitionist. This book introduced the ideas of Charles Fourier, the Frenchman, to this country, in a manner similar to the way Owen had been introduced. Brisbane and Horace Greeley, publisher of the paper, felt that the earlier Socialist community movement had not succeeded partly because a successful formula had not been developed for workers to use to collectivize their resources, gather capital, buy land and start their cooperative communities. They did not see the cooperative community as a short transitional step to the full commune, as did Owen before New Harmony's disaster. Rather, the cooperative community was the end in itself. Fourier and the Associationists felt that all could be emancipated and the inequalities and injustices of capitalist society cured by a vast network of these cooperative villages, "phalanxes" or "associations" as they were variously called in Fourier's plan. Once the restraints imposed by capitalism were removed, people would naturally work together in a spirit of cooperation. The phalanxes would spring up all over the country, they hoped, and gradually federate like cells into a growing organism that would eventually transform America and the world. While the movement of the '20s had been, in practice, more oriented toward agriculture and handicrafts, the Associationists, keeping up with the times, stressed industry more. They felt that collective production for trade or sale was necessary for a phalanx to survive.

Greeley developed a formula for gathering resources to get phalanxes started and for operating them. They would be incorporated; each member would have one vote no matter how many shares owned; surplus income from their industries would be distributed as dividends. Members received survival needs plus money income varying with the amount of work performed. Outsiders could also buy stock.

But while the Tribune supported them, other papers denounced them, as did legislators and various church leaders, as a threat to the social system.

Between 1843 and '50 at least thirty-four phalanxes averaging well over a hundred members apiece, sprouted across the northern states from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The most successful perhaps was the North American Phalanx in New Jersey, which lasted until '55. The most famous was Brook Farm, in Massachusetts, which had begun as a spiritual commune in 1841, founded by "transcendentalists" coming out of the Unitarian tradition; they became Associationist two years later.

By 1844 the movement was progressing so rapidly a National Convention of Associations was held.

But the same problems that had stopped the movement in the 1820s stopped it again. Most poor and working people simply could not afford to form phalanxes, even with combining resources. The phalanxes that were started usually remained poor, often strangled by debts they had undertaken, so most workers were not convinced they were the answer to raising the quality of their lives. Rather than move out of their communities like separationists, most saw a more solid road to progress in staying and transforming them. Furthermore, the Greeley system stressed profit sharing at the expense of simple communal sharing. Outside investors had as much say as community members, and the enormous amounts of work members put into the place itself were owned as much by these outsiders too. Some found themselves being strangled by their investors, in much the same way the Pilgrim commune had been 200 years earlier. Associationism was more of a middle-class movement than Socialism, as shown by its focus on the contract form.

The Associationist movement had risen in response to the depression that had begun with the panic of 1837. When the economy picked up due to the imperialist war against Mexico, the movement was shaken. The rush for gold in newly-annexed California deflected much of the pent-up social energy that had been behind Associationism. Meanwhile the new flood of immigrants onto the east coast helped a new worker cooperative movement to rise, also publicized and supported by the Tribune. Most phalanxes died by 1850, although the North American Phalanx held on till 1855.

After the collapse of Associationism, communalism lost its credibility among the American-born as a method of social change, and did not become a mass movement again until the 1890s. While the Socialists could point to New Harmony's failure as disheartening the movement, the Associationists did not really have one particular community as their focus, so their failure was clearly the failure of some basic assumptions of the entire movement. Communities had shown that they were fragile and dependent for success on a large variety of difficult factors; communal survival had proved no utopia or panacea to most participants. The movement never grew large enough to become an imminent threat to the established order, and most people were satisfied that it never could. It lost heart in thinking of itself as a mass movement, and so lost its center: the movement was to the communities what a shared millennial spirituality was to the religious communalists.

In this same period there were several non-Fourierist communities.

Skaneateles, in upper New York, was a community of socialists involved with the Abolitionist movement. Northhampton was secular and cooperative. Both had well over a hundred members, but both disintegrated after four years.

The mutualist communities started by groups centered around Josiah Warren in this period, Utopia and Modern Times, both contained many former Associationists, and both made it through these hard years. The bare simplicity of their social structure, just a basic agreement to mutual-aid and cooperation whenever possible, provided a flexibility that helped pull them through.

In 1849, 260 French political refugees from the failed revolution of the previous year, led by Etienne Cabet (who'd been a member of the Insurrection Committee during the earlier 1830 uprising), formed a commune in Illinois, taking over the old Mormon community of Nauvoo, eventually rising to about 500. They called it Icaria, after a socialist utopian novel Cabet had written between the two insurgencies. Cabet, like others before him, envisioned a federation of socialist colonies in America involving millions. But he himself grew authoritarian, and the commune expelled him in 1856. A large group followed him to St. Louis, where he soon died, but the others ran several cooperative houses for many years. The original group was forced to leave Illinois due to debt, and moved to Iowa. More French refugees poured into these communities after the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871. Clashes between older and newer residents caused further splits, resulting in Icaria Esperanza in southern California in 1884, which lasted only a few years. Icaria itself finally folded in 1895.

There had also been an attempted revolution in Germany in '48, and refugees from this, led by William Weitling, moved to Iowa to found a commune called Communia, which disbanded after several poverty-stricken years on impossible land.

After 1840 independence was impossible for ever-growing numbers. Technological advances in machinery were making many skills useless, creating unskilled laborers out of formerly skilled workers. These new machines and their expense brought ownership of means of production out of the reach of most "free" workers, and drove them under the domination of the machine-owners. Native-born Americans found themselves competing for factory jobs with the massive influx of new immigrants, mostly unskilled and very poor, predominantly from Germany in the wake of their failed revolution of 1848, and then from Ireland as the potato famine deepened. Immigration had been helping explode the population almost double every twenty years since the American Revolution, when it had been only about 2 1/2 million, up to 23 million in 1850. With complex machines came the necessity of worker coordination on an ever-larger scale. But the capitalist system decreed that this coordination would take place under the centralized autocratic control of a boss, single or corporate, and not through democratic worker cooperation. The work process was being rationalized with crude efficiency, with little thought to the cost in human life. The bosses were incorporating, floating faceless pieces of paper between themselves and the factories. Besides giving them more capital without really having to relinquish control, incorporation provided limited liability and all variety of tax benefits; the bosses themselves wrote the laws making these advantages possible. Meanwhile down at the factory they heated things up with the newly instituted assembly-line. Individual workers were at a tremendous disadvantage against this yoked team.

But a group of cooperating workers, pooling their resources to get machinery and combining their skills to become an efficient team themselves, might be able to make it, and avoid having to sell themselves into slavery.

When 1847 brought depression, layoffs, wage cuts and failing strikes, workers turned to cooperation again. Unions had grown fast since 1842, when a judicial decision finally declared they had a right to exist at all.

In '47, a year after the South was hit with a wave of slave insurrections, the Iron Molders of Cincinnati struck. The strike, like the insurrections, eventually lost. But wage-earners were "free," and one group chose not to sulk back at lower pay but instead stalked off to organize their own cooperative foundry. They met with immediate success. A group of Pittsburgh foundry workers, inspired by the Cincinnati cooperative, followed their example later in the year.

This was also a time when the women's rights movement was gathering steam, with the first Women's Rights Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who were both also leaders in the Abolitionist movement, which was growing to enormous proportions.

By 1849 whole unions began forming cooperatives again, on an unprecedented scale. First iron molders locals in West Virginia, Ohio and several parts of Pennsylvania, followed by the Boston tailors. The next year the Buffalo, N.Y., tailors formed a cooperative for eighty of their members in the wake of a losing strike. In that same city the seamstresses union formed a cooperative too, as did the seamstresses of Philadelphia and Providence. In New York City there were union cooperatives of barrel-makers, hat-finishers, shade-painters, cabinetmakers and tailors. In Pittsburgh of glass-blowers, silver-platers, puddlers and boilers, as well as iron-molders. Many of these were connected with unsuccessful strikes.

A new flood of immigrant workers hit American shores, German and French, refugees from their failed revolutions of '48, where a major demand had been large-scale worker cooperatives "social work-shops," financed by the state. These refugees were soon followed by Hungarians and Italians. There was a strong worker cooperative movement among these new Americans, particularly those from Germany, centered around New York City.

Soon the German immigrants had functioning cooperatives in seven American cities. In New York they attempted to organize a large scale labor-exchange and barter system centered around a "bank of exchange," aimed primarily at serving individual producers. But capitalist industrialization had made individual production obsolete in most industries. Experience soon proved that exchange and distribution cooperation would not suffice to keep city workers self-employed, and most were forced into the factories. The bank of exchange never got off the ground, despite the efforts of William Weitling, who had been a leader of the revolutionary workers in Germany, along with Marx and Engels. He and others soon joined into a communal group that took off to Iowa to found Communia.

Many of the worker cooperatives started in the late 1840 s and early '50s lasted only a few years. Besides scarcely having the resources to get off the ground, they met with cutthroat capitalist competition. Businessmen's associations did everything they could to wreck them. They were attacked in legislatures and churches. Some states, including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, refused to charter them. As one legislator said, "It will not do to encourage the journeymen in such movements; it would ruin the employers." Many Protestant ministers and Catholic priests attacked them openly and violently. A common accusation reported in the newspapers was that they were "the first step to Socialism."

This attack was not confined to worker cooperatives, but also was directed at the Associationist movement. Both movements were closely connected. Brisbane, Greeley, and the group centered around the Tribune realized that cooperatives had great potential as agencies for social change, and advocated to the workers, particularly strikers, to form them. Greeley came up with a formula for their organization that he thought would meet all the needs of the movement. The cooperatives could variously be either ends in themselves, cell-units in larger industrial organism, or steps toward gathering resources to eventually form phalanxes. The Tribune did not start or invent the movement of the late '40s but gave great aid in publicizing its successes.

The Greeley formula was essentially the same for worker cooperatives or phalanxes. It was a profit-sharing system, oriented toward capitalist conditions, with the first goal of gathering enough resources to get started. They would be incorporated and float stock, which not only worker-members but anyone could buy. Each stockholder got only one vote, no matter how many stocks were owned. Cooperatives would pay workers normal market wages or, rather, a living wage. Over that, investor-members would be paid low interest and dividends. The rest of any surplus income would be divided among the worker-members.

What the Greeley formula boiled down to was structuring the movement to fit inside capital corporate law. Until this time, worker cooperatives had been predominantly (technically speaking) unincorporated associations of individual producers. With the coordination of the work-process around machinery, the group as a whole became the predominant entity, and the incorporated cooperative was inevitable under capitalist law. Besides the usual corporate advantages of capital-gathering and limited liability, it was a legal way to separate ownership of the cooperative means of production from changing membership.

But the corporate structure also brought great disadvantages with it. Non-worker share-owners were given a say in management. Most beginning cooperatives put tremendous amounts of labor into their shops, which were accumulated as capital and owned as much by the outside investors as by the workers. The cooperative spirit was stifled by being too much counted in dollars and cents. A capitalist foothold was inside the cooperatives, and was wedged further open by some groups hiring non-members as extra help, and paying them at lower wages than they paid themselves.

The hopes of the cooperators were dashed when many failed as the country sank back into severe depression in the mid-185Os, with the Civil War delivering the final blow.

Greeley would go on to form a political party of his own, the Liberal Republicans, challenge the corrupted Grant in the election of 1872, and garner 44% of the popular vote.

Between 1845 and '60, the first major American "consumer" cooperative movement rose and fell.

The Working Men's (New England) Protective Union was begun by John Kaulback, a journeyman tailor and a former member of the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workers, which had organized cooperative buying in the '30s. 1845 was a time of fast-rising prices. In '47 the economy slipped badly again, but by that time there were over 3000 Protective Union members and soon there would be a chain of stores across the north-east. The Union's principles were similar to those of the British Rochdale movement, and were developed separately at about the same time. The first Rochdale store was organized less than a year before the first Protective Union. Union membership was open to the whole community; anyone could buy a share. No matter how many shares owned, each member had only one vote in electing the board that managed each store. Stores were locally controlled but federated for wholesale buying and other mutual-aid. Unlike Rochdale, they sold at near cost instead of giving refunds. Many Unions set up production and service cooperatives for their members. The New York Protective Union, for example, ran a smithy, a wheelright shop and a bakery. By 1852 there were 403 divisions in New England, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Canada; five years later there were almost twice that number. But in 1853 a schism developed in the organization. Kaulback and his supporters withdrew and started a new organization, which also grew strong, with 350 units in ten states in 1857.

But the financiers panicked again in 1857. As the economy plunged, their capitalist competitors hit the Protective Unions with a ferocious attack in many areas at once. They used every weapon in their arsenal: price wars, blacklisting by merchants, employers and suppliers, etc. Soon the Unions were no longer able to meet members' needs, and the membership simply could not afford to support them. By 1860 the Central Divisions of both rival Protective Unions were gone. The Civil War devastated them. Nevertheless a few locals hung on, and one observer in 1886 was able to unearth four still-functioning Union stores.

It was the Protective Unions' policy of passing or savings directly to consumers by selling at almost cost that brought the greatest wrath of the capitalist merchants down on their heads. It shook up and threatened the market, which the businessmen would not long permit. It was to their long-run advantage to hit the Unions with unlimited price wars; as soon as the Unions were broken in a locale and out of the way, the merchants were free to raise their prices again. Eventually most of the American "consumer" cooperative movement would turn to the Rochdale system of selling at about market price and refunding savings periodically to members. The capitalist merchants could live with this a little better. That was the only really original contribution of Rochdale. The "consumer" cooperative movement was not imported, but was a native American plant.

With the coming of the Protective Union, cooperatives in America took two distinct forms. One, typical of industrial production cooperatives, had all or almost all members working in the cooperative; the other, typical of purchasing and service cooperatives, had only a small number actually working in the cooperative out of a much larger membership. In the production cooperative, the workers were their own boss; in the "consumer" cooperative, the membership usually elected a board who hired managers who in turn hired and fired workers almost as in a capitalist enterprise. The worker, by this twist, again became a hired laborer.

It was not long before workers in consumer cooperatives saw that their interests were not identical with those of the entire membership, and began organizing labor unions. Although consumer cooperatives tended to be good bosses, over the years there have been instances of strikes. But even labor unions themselves have had to confront this seemingly paradoxical situation, as they too have been struck by their employees. In recent times, the "new wave" cooperatives of the 1970s tried to bridge this paradox by having a worker collective (in which all members have equal power and decisions are made by consensus) run the cooperative in its daily functioning.

The Abolitionist movement, based among wage-earners, artisans, small farmers and homemakers among the "free" population, and of course primarily based among the slaves, demanded immediate and uncompensated emancipation. It was a great revolutionary movement that sought to change property relationships by overthrowing an oppressor ruling class. Throughout colonial times "free" blacks and whites commonly aided and helped organize slave insurrections, and began to set up open Emancipation Societies as early as 1775. Both Paine and Franklin as well as Richard Allen and Absolom Jones were among the earliest members and leaders. By 1892 there were societies in eight states, but as slavery rose to enormous proportions in the early 19th century, they lost heart and disappeared for a couple decades.

During the entire first half of the century the plantation owners and the Northern factory owners became locked in a death struggle over whether the vast western lands should be slave or "free." The slavers needed the land because they had worn out much of the South with agricultural abuse; the factory owners needed the land to constantly dangle before workers as a possibility of escape, a safety valve to retard the labor movement and keep organized discontent down. The stakes became higher and higher. Propertyless workers were piling up in the eastern cities in ever-greater numbers, becoming correspondingly angrier and more insistent in their demands for decent conditions and control of their own means of survival. Strikes and slave insurrection broke out constantly. Organized Abolitionism surged forth again in the early 1830s, stirred by the revolt in Virginia led by Net Turner, minister. The unions were solidly Abolitionist; experience had shown that the slave system in an area created near-slave conditions for wage-earners and small farmers. By 1850 it had become a true mass movement in the north and west, involving large numbers of people, with many newspapers and organizations, huge meetings and conventions. Their meetings were attacked; halls burnt down; leaders and members jailed, beaten, and murdered; papers harassed and denied use of the mail. They were vilified as "foreign agents." Many women were in the Abolitionist front lines and made good use of what they leaned in this struggle when they turned again to fight for their own equal rights.

As the country hurtled into a great depression, the Abolitionist movement surged to a climax. In 1860 Buchanan vetoed the Homestead Act, calling it "communistic;" Lincoln's election a few months later on the newly-formed Republican Party, financed by Northern industrialists but with grassroot support of all the "free-soil" and anti-slavery forces, meant that for the first time since the country's founding the slavers had control of the federal government wrenched totally from their grasp, and they responded with secession. In '61 hundreds of thousands of Northern workers and western farmers poured voluntarily into the Union army; the union and cooperative movements were almost entirely disbanded because the workers were gone. Down South the slaver army had to fight with only one hand, as it had to use the other to keep its own workers, the slaves and their allies (centered in the "hillbilly" mountain communities, where there had almost never been slaves, and which were a haven for runaways and draft resistors), off its throat.

Ironically, even as "free" workers and slaves struggled against the army of the slavocracy, about ten thousand Asian workers, mostly Chinese, and about three thousand Irish, slaved for Northern employers as contract laborers on the first trans-continental railroad to the west.

The Abolitionist movement had deep anabaptist undertones. This can be seen most clearly perhaps in the poem-song Battle Hymn of the Republic, written as the poet watched the Union army marching south singing the Abolitionist anthem, John Brown's Body, and to the same melody:

Almost half a century later, an IWW poet would take one step further with this tradition, in Solidarity Forever:

While the rest of the country hurtled toward Civil War, a religious group turned away from the war to communalism: the Use, first formed in 1861 in upper New York, later moving to California where they called their group Fountaingrove, which did not finally disband until around 1900.

Shortly after the South conceded defeat in 1865, days before his assassination, Lincoln said, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." The Union army, returning home thinking itself victorious, found mostly poverty and wage-slavery waiting for them. Their response culminated in the "Great Upheaval," the national uprising centered around the railroad strike of 1877.

The outcome of the war expropriated the slavers of "their private property," and threw four million "freed" blacks onto the labor market, almost all totally impoverished. Few found jobs; most remained destitute and unemployed. Demands to break up the old plantations and distribute "Ten acres and a mule" to each "freed" slave, by Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans in Congress, were quickly shelved by the rightists who consolidated power as soon as a bullet disposed of Lincoln. The majority of blacks soon wound up as tenant farmers, almost serfs, only slightly better off than before.

Although the Homestead Act of 1862 threw open millions of acres for "free" workers to settle on, railroad grants ate up gigantic tracts. The speculators rushed in, reaping immense profits and winding up with most of the land in the end. Only one out of ten families who went west ever actually wound up with a free homestead. This was the ultimate failure of Jeffersonian democracy.

Northern capitalists were now firmly in the saddle of government. Under their control an all-enveloping national market quickly developed for the first time. This broke up many regional economies, to the disadvantage of small individual producers, who could not compete with goods made in distant factories. Producers and consumers were separated ever farther, to the advantage of the middlemen. Small farmers had to ship their produce hundreds of miles to market, at freight rates that were often higher than the prices their produce brought.

Right after the war, in 1866, recession hit. Amidst the first great wave of American imperialist armed interventions abroad, the country slid slowly down into the disastrous depression of 73, one of the worst ever. This long slide spawned radical movements among both farmers and wage-earners: the National Grange, the National Labor Union, the Sovereigns of Industry, the Knights of Labor, the International: all intimately connected with cooperatives.

Sylvis & Myers

By 1866 the union movement was recovering and reforming. The industrial sector of the labor force was almost as large as the agricultural, and by 1870 would surpass it. There were over five and a half million wage-earners, approaching half the work force, with over two million in factories. Following nationalization of the market and nationalization of employers' associations, truly coast-to-coast unions sprung up in the various trades for the first time. The largest was the Iron Molders, with the leadership of William Sylvis, considered by many to be the first truly great labor leader in the U.S. The Molders set up a cooperative stove foundry in Troy, N.Y., in 1866. It was a fast success. Soon the Molders were embroiled in a bitter nine month strike in Cincinnati. It wound up a disaster for the Molders. But they picked themselves up and the whole organization turned to cooperatives "for relief from the wages system."

In the fall of '66, representatives from local unions, city federations, Eight-Hour Leagues and national unions met in Baltimore to form the first American union federation on a coast-to-coast scale, the National Labor Union. It was a loose federation, like its predecessor the National Trades' Union; at its peak it would have 200,000 members. The NLU fought for the eight hour day, for land for settlers, for black and white labor solidarity, for the rights of women, against the contract and convict labor systems, and threw all of its weight behind the cooperative movement.

The first Congress of the NLU resolved, "that in cooperation we recognize a sure and lasting remedy for the abuses of the present industrial system, and hail with delight the organization of cooperative stores and workshops in this country, and would urge their promotion in every sector of the country and in every branch of business."

At the second Congress, Sylvis was elected president, and called on all workers to form cooperatives "and drive the non-producers to honorable toil or starvation." "Single-handed we can accomplish nothing, but united there is no power of wrong that we cannot openly defy." Worker cooperatives, they hoped, would become labor's biggest weapon, a "substitute for strikes." Strikes were not winning bread-and-butter demands, much less liberation.

By the end of '67, NLU newspapers were filled with optimism. "Cooperation is taking hold upon the minds of our members," Sylvis wrote, "and in many places very little else is talked about." Locals of bakers, coachmakers, shipwrights, printers, barrel-makers, mechanics, blacksmiths, hatters, carpenters and other trades formed cooperatives across the country. Many of these were after lockouts by their former bosses, the result of defensive strikes that failed. Sylvis' Iron Molders Union set up eleven cooperative foundries in 1868.

The NLU was soon joined by the National Colored Labor Union, with leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Isaac Myers. Its platform backed worker cooperatives for black people. Besides the usual advantages, cooperatives would help remedy racist exclusion from the skilled trades. Cooperation was taking hold in black communities across the country, rural and urban. One center was in Baltimore, where there were cooperatives of all sorts, including stores, coal yards and small industries run by black people.

But all throughout the 19th century, employers were organizing their own associations to preserve the capitalist system and fight the workers. They saw the threat the NLU and NCLU were posing, and moved in combination to destroy the workers' movement, both the cooperatives and the unions themselves.

Soon Sylvis was speaking with alarm. Many of the cooperatives were in trouble and were failing. The capitalists were pulling financial strings and this was having a telling effect. Sylvis accused "Wall Street's control of money and credit," and urged all workers to get behind the Greenback program of more and cheaper money, and break Wall Street's control. Under the Greenback plan, government-issued paper money, backed with silver, would replace the then-current system of bank-issued notes backed with gold. The government would offer long-term negligible-interest loans to all citizens in need. This would provide the cheap capital that workers and unions needed to set up the vast system of cooperatives that would lead to liberation. Greenbackism was a direct attack on bank control and private ownership.

Through the NLU, Greenbackers organized the first nationwide workers' political party, the National Labor Reform Party, and set their sights on taking national power. Although this party was a still-birth, it set the stage for the great Greenback parties that would follow in a few years.

Sylvis was the first American labor leader to actively try to establish relations with the European and international worker movements. He attempted to steer the NLU into the International Workingmen's Association, the "First International," to which many NLU members belonged as individuals. The IWA formed in London in '64, marked the first time wage-earner movements of different countries inter-penetrated and coordinated their ideas and actions, creating a supranational character to the movement. The first IWA American sections were formed in '68; their program called for "The adoption of the principle of associative production, with a view to complete supercession of the present system of capitalist production." It was an open organization, basically for educational and support activities, but geared also to give direct leadership in times of mass struggle. The IWA looked to the unions as the centers of the struggle. Its greatest strength lay in the cities, among the unskilled, the unemployed, and the newer immigrants, mainly German at first but soon also Irish, Bohemian, Scandinavian, and French.

Suddenly Sylvis died in '69 at age 42. Shortly afterward, the NLU, inspired to carry on the work he had begun, voted its "adherence to the principles of the International Workingmen's Association," adding it would "join in a short time."

But without Sylvis' visionary leaders'hip, the NLU was splitting apart, one wing trade union, the other wing political party. The unions took great losses in the strike wave of 1871 and 72. The National Labor Reform Party collapsed after the election of '72 and the NLU collapsed on the eve of the great depression of 1873, never having joined the International, which had just moved its central headquarters from London to New York.

During the worst depression years most of the cooperatives started under the National Labor Union were wiped out. But not all. In Minnesota barrel-makers organized at least eight cooperative factories after 1874, some lasting till '86. In the same period there were cooperative carpentry shops in New York City. The 60,000 member Knights of St. Crispin, the largest individual union in the world, ran shoemaking cooperatives scattered throughout the northern states, not only factories but almost forty stores and many buying clubs for members; the Crispins began to fade in the late '70s after a rash of losing strikes.

The NLU cooperatives were mostly organized under a system similar to the one Greeley had devised two decades earlier. Outsiders could usually buy stock and departing members retain theirs. Although each member could have only one vote no matter how much stock was owned, this still created unbalanced situations over a long period of time, and caused many cooperatives to deteriorate. Thus internal disorders added to the disheartenment the movement felt over its inability to ward off capitalist attacks. For example, Cooperative Stove Works, founded as the result of a strike led by Sylvis in Troy, New York, in 1866, was disbanded twenty-five years later with six people owning more than half the stock. The Cooperative Foundry in Rochester became a capitalist business in 1887 after twenty years, owned by 35 stockholders. Others failed of course for reasons of every sort: the Cooperative Barrel Works, formed in 1874 in Philadelphia, for example, eventually failed because bags replaced barrels in the nearby mill industry; internal personality clashes of course wrecked a share.

The International was organized in 1864 through the initiative of British and French unionists and cooperators to serve as a central medium of communication and cooperation among workers and worker organizations of different countries. Within a few years it became an umbrella for worker movements in almost every country in the industrializing world. These had all followed a pattern similar to the movement in the U.S.: as industry, capitalism and wage-slavery grew, so grew the resistance organizations of the workers--unions, cooperatives and parties. All the union movements were connected to cooperative movements.

All schools of thought were represented within the International. Its yearly congresses attempted to hammer out a common program for worker movements everywhere. The concepts of socialism were rooted in the aspirations of every worker movement. With the IWA, these movements inter-penetrated, The largest divisions were between the "scientific, "anarchist" and "cooperative" schools of thought. Despite their many disagreements about strategy and organization, all agreed that in the end production should be run through a system of coordinated worker cooperatives, and not by an all-powerful bureaucratic "state." The IWA advocated workers forming cooperatives, particularly producer cooperatives over stores (because the mode of production is more basic to the system than the mode of distribution, which flows from it); recommended that all cooperatives devote part of their income to supporting and spreading the movement; suggested that workers, whether members or not, should receive equal salaries; and that excess income should be plowed back into the cooperative instead of divided as "profit." It proposed that the land and resources belong to society; that mines, public transport and agriculture be operated by worker cooperatives with assistance from "a new kind of state subject to the law of justice"; and that it was the fundamental task of workers to destroy the wage system and develop a new social order. But it also warned that the past thirty years experience had demonstrated in many countries that cooperative movements by themselves could not defeat the domination of "private" capital, and that they could not succeed without an allied political movement to change basic property relationships and the general conditions of society. Therefore, the IWA concluded, the ultimate value of producer cooperatives in the present society lay in their conclusive demonstration that wage-slaves and a class of employers were unnecessary to large-scale "modern" production.

Scientific socialists, led by Marx, had mainly praise and encouragement for cooperatives, criticizing the movement's earlier Owenite and Prudhonian ideologists for not seriously reckoning with the capitalists use of state power to squelch the movement, for not sufficiently allowing for the needs of increasingly complex machinery in their plans, and for not accurately analyzing the laws of money. In 1871 Marx saw the economic system of "communism" to be "united (production) cooperative societies regulating the national production on a common plan, thus taking it under their own control..."

By 1871 there were over 5000 American International members, with sections in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Newark, Springfield, Washington, and Williamsburg.

After its role in the defeated revolutionary Paris Commune of '71, when the working people took and held the city for two months, the IWA was outlawed and persecuted in almost every European country. On top of this, it had become racked by internal struggles over the methods and program of social revolution, particularly between factions led by Marx and the anarchist Bakunin, which came to a head over the question of how centralized the IWA and how independent each national section should be. Most national branches pulled out in '72 and formed a new decentralist International, while the old General Council moved to New York. The American Section became very active, organizing large mass meetings and demonstrations of the unemployed, but was itself split between those looking to the unions as centers of struggle and those looking to electoral politics.

A group that included Victoria Woodhull left the New York Section to found the Equal Rights Party, fielding the Woodhull-Frederick Douglass ticket in the presidential election of 1872, while scientific socialists centered around F.A. Serge assumed leadership in the IWA.

The Commune of Paris had particular significance in the history of the socialist movement worldwide, as it was viewed as the prototype of the future society by all schools of socialists until after the Russian Revolution. With International members among the leadership, it established the most complete and direct democracy the industrialized world had ever known. All public workers were elected, could be recalled at any time, and received the same pay as the average of productive worker. Most of the factories were taken over by their workers as cooperatives (the employers had abandoned them and fled the city), and the workers were organizing themselves into a vast cooperative union. The Commune decreed the right of all workers "to their instruments of labor and to credit." Marx called its ultra-democracy "the form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor." In 1917 Lenin would hold up the Commune as the vision of the Bolsheviks; yet history would prove that the reality of Bolshevik rule was far removed from what the Commune had offered.