We Need a Retromania of the Left

Courtesy of Scarfolk Council

Some interesting notions in Steve Fraser's recent historical account of left resistance that concludes that America is too deeply into the reign of capitalism to be nostalgic for anything outside of it, fueling the notion that "there is no alternative".

"This is key to Fraser’s thesis. What ­fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future.

"It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again in the latter half of the book. The latest inequality chasm has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory — in the United States, at least — of another kind of economic system. Whereas the activists and agitators of the first Gilded Age straddled two worlds, we find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely.

- Naomi Klein's review of  Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence, New York Times

Corey Robin actually one-ups this notion by indicating that it was a sense of lost futurism that was propelled the pre-industrial masses.  They didn't want to go back to a time before the technological advances.  Indeed, they wanted to collectivize and democratize technology, to have advancement advance them and not just the gilded class.

"In 1820, 80% of Americans were self-employed; by 1940, 80% worked for someone—or something—else. “The individual has gone,” declared John D. Rockefeller, “never to return.” Driven into the mills and the mines or onto the rails, these refugees from the shop and the farm were injured, maimed, or killed (35,000 per year) by industrial capitalism. They were the lucky ones. Many Americans couldn’t get work at all. In the 1870s, unemployment became a census category for the first time. So desperate were jobless New Yorkers that they got themselves arrested just to enjoy a night off the streets, in jail. They also struck, marched, organized, bombed and killed, launching decades of class warfare, literal and metaphoric, that would haunt the country’s elites for years to come.

"The fact of unemployment, Fraser writes, struck these men and women “as shocking, unnatural, and traumatic,” as did the astronomic new wealth of the nation’s plutocrats. That’s because they remembered a life before wage labor and their pervasive dependence on—and the compulsion of—the market. So powerful was this memory of a pre-capitalist past that it framed the way they understood their enemies: well into the twentieth century, Fraser reminds us, FDR was railing against “economic royalists” and “Tories of industry.” Not merely as propaganda but as a residue of the world not long ago left behind.

"But it was precisely that memory, Fraser argues, that shock of the new, that made these rebels so ready to demand something even newer: a cooperative commonwealth, in which production would be collectively managed and profit democratically shared. Scandalized by the novelty of capital, they did not opt for an escapist nostalgia. They instead turned to the state, traditionally an object of opprobrium, and demanded that it assume new responsibilities: take over industry, tax wealth, supply credit, store surpluses—all for the sake of a vision drawn from a pre-capitalist past.

 - Corey Robin, "We Have the Left and Right All Wrong: The Real Story of the Politics of Nostalgia and Tradition", Salon