The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser (review)

Labour historian Steve Fraser has written a book that addresses one of the central issues of our era, the combination of sharp and ever-increasing social polarization with a relatively low level of resistance. Certainly, there is anger at the glaring accumulation of wealth, but to date this has not fuelled the kind of sustained mass protest that emerged in the past. There are important examples of militant and creative mobilization in such movements as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and Occupy. To date, however, these movements have tended to be momentary rather than sustained and have not generally developed the social weight, infrastructure of dissent, or transformative vision to really push back against employers and the state.

Fraser’s book fuels the fire of the radical imagination, providing a rich and compelling picture of mass insurgency in the United States over the period from the “second civil war” of the 1870s to the great struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. The core argument here is that these waves of mobilization were a response to the brutal process of dispossession that created the conditions for capitalist development by violently separating toilers from control over the means of production and beginning the commodification of everything. This account is attentive to the ways that racism, slavery, and the destruction of Indigenous ways of life were central to the process of primitive accumulation in the US. The process of dispossession interrupts all previously existing cycles of production and subsistence: “the process of primitive accumulation worked its magic by absorbing and eliminating all those preexisting forms of household and craft production that until then had supplied those markets.” (46)

Within 15 years of the wrenching violence of the Civil War, the United States was engaged in a “second civil war” around issues of class and inequality. This included farmer mobilization on the land and worker activism in industry. Farmers were squeezed by the intensified commodification of agriculture that often left them in debt and beholden to corporations for supplies, storage, and the sale of their produce. Increased speculation made the market price of the harvest less predictable, increasing the precariousness of farming life. In response, farmers developed new forms of organization and political expressions from co-operatives to political parties that organized the countryside and transformed relations in important ways.

Worker activism in industry paralleled farmer mobilization on the land. The long depression of the 1870s intensified the misery and insecurity that was already being produced by processes of dispossession. Workers began to fight back at whole new scale and level of militancy. These mobilizations did not shy away from violence, which is not surprising given the brutality that workers faced in their everyday lives and especially when they acted politically. One of the slogans “common at working-class demonstrations” at this time was “Bread or Blood.” (109)

The great uprising of 1877 took the form of a mass strike with rail workers playing a central role. During this period members of the working class began to develop a set of demands and a repertoire of organizational and political tools. The labour movement set an ambitious agenda of demands for reforms like the 8 hour day that were really only fulfilled with the introduction of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, and then only for parts of the working class. But the vision of these insurgent workers went beyond these reforms: “A culture of anticapitalism defined the horizon of what was then conceivable; it had become a common element of the atmosphere.” (142)

The trajectory of this great upsurge from below continued in waves right through to the establishment of the “New Deal Order” in which sections of the working class won a place within capitalism that included collective bargaining rights, social insurance benefits, and increased living standards. Yet these very rights tended to isolate the labour movement as...