Linked Labor Histories

New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class

Bibliographic Data

ID2806174
AuthorsCary Fraser (0000-0001-5335-621X, Pennsylvania State University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume89
Issue4
Pages735-737
Publication date2009-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2009-085
OpenAlexW2334468185
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Aviva Chomsky has produced a book that seeks to explore the origins, processes, and outcomes of “globalization” in the restructuring of the international political economy over the course of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. She focuses on the ways in which the mobility of labor, capital, and technology interacted with the political economy of both New England and Colombia to define the context and outcomes for working people and/or immigrants in both societies. It is an ambitious project that requires readers to think outside the box of “national” historiography and to link developments in both societies across time and space. It is also a project that grounds itself in the view that capitalism and democracy are shaped by contradictory agendas: “Democracy demands government by, for, and of the people. Capital seeks governments that will control the people in its interest. Democracy thrives on social equality; capitalism thrives on social inequality” (p. 4). Unfortunately, this contradiction is not as simple as the author professes, since it is not evident that democracy is sustained by social equality; rather, it may rely upon social inequalities to energize its citizens and create the conditions for political mobilization. However, capitalism is by its very nature predatory and will maximize opportunities for capital accumulation under conditions of both stability and instability, and under both authoritarian and representative/democratic political systems. Further, the study would have been better situated if Chomsky had explored the strategy of capital mobility that has been classified as “globalization” within the long history of such activity by the major European countries prior to the twentieth century. The British imperial expansion of the nineteenth century was both a predecessor and exemplar for American business elites, who saw globalization as a way of maximizing profitability under a variety of conditions. Like the United States in the twentieth century, British capitalists invested abroad in search of profits in regions where democracy was notably absent, even as the British state expanded the scope of democratic governance at home as a strategy for mobilizing domestic support for the imperial project.Given that broader context of “globalization as imperialism,” Chomsky’s study provides very interesting insights into the workings of American imperial expansion over the course of the twentieth century. It is particularly revealing about the ways in which “Yankee” capitalism functioned to create internal colonies of exploitation among immigrant workers in New England — the “cradle” of American democratic culture — as well as in the South, where the impoverished white working class was trapped by the oligarchs who controlled Southern life. The South’s antidemocratic culture of political corruption and aggressive disenfranchisement of both poor whites and people of color would seem to have functioned as a laboratory for practices that would later be exported to Latin America. In effect, the behavior of American capitalists in the twentieth century mimicked that of the American founders, among whom slaveholders were well represented. The original American constitution recognized property holders as full-fledged citizens, while slaves were reduced to the status of “beings of an inferior order.” Is it possible that the consistent opposition to labor unions that has informed American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the South, represents the internalization of the ethos of the American founders? Further, as Chomsky shows, the relationship between the promotion of social engineering and racist ideas by the Draper family, key players in the New England textile industry, should encourage scholars to think more systematically about the ways in which the predatory culture of American capitalism is rooted in the legacies of slavery and the obsession with racial hierarchy in American life.Chomsky’s study of American investment in Colombia illustrates both the globalization of capital and the perpetuation of disadvantages for working people in the United States and Colombia. As she correctly observes, American military “assistance” to the Colombian government has helped to exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy that the Colombian state has confronted for several decades. The study has certainly provided an interesting twist on the idea of the “Banana Republic” as a servant of American investors. However, it also suggests the need to interrogate American policy in a country that in the early twentieth century was dismembered through the secession of Panama in order to facilitate American control over the proposed site of the interoceanic canal. Does the dispossession and dehumanization of rural communities in Colombia reflect a longer-term preoccupation among American capitalist investors? Is it possible that the behavior of the investors is shaped less by antiunion sentiment per se, and more by the desire to systematically strip workers of their humanity, as was stipulated in the original American Constitution

Authoritarianism · Capital (architecture) · Capitalism · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Globalization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Working class · History · Indian Economic and Social Development · Law

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