OT - Yes. There was a tremendous surge in various programs, co-ops, communes, activity-based, resource-based, religion-based, government-based - and sometimes (as the following illustrates) one affected another adversely.
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"SELF-HELP
In the '30s there were large numbers of small semi-visible cooperatives. "Self-help" cooperatives, mutual-aid and barter became widespread. Exchanges between laborers and farmers, work for produce, became part of daily life in many areas across the country.
In Seattle the Unemployed Citizen's League organized larger scale mutual-aid. Through them the fishermen's union found boats for the unemployed to use cooperatively; local farmers gave unmarketable fruit and vegetables over to their members to pick; they gained the right to cut firewood on scrub timberland. The League had 22 local commissaries around the city, where this food and firewood was used to exchange for every type of service and commodity, from home repairs to doctor bills.
The Unemployed Exchange Association (UXA), based in Oakland, California, brought together 1500 into a self-help producer-consumer barter cooperative, providing members with farm produce, medical and dental benefits, auto repair, housing and other services. It ran a foundry, a machine shop, and lumber mills in Oroville and the Santa Cruz mountains.The Self-Help movement was also very large in southern California; state-wide networks were set up.
By the end of 1932 there were similar "Self-Help" barter organizations in 37 states with over 300,000 members. But the limitations of trying to subsist from the scraps of a collapsing society were great.
In Pennsylvania unemployed coal miners formed cooperative teams to seize their means of survival. They dug coal on company property, trucked it out and sold it. It has been estimated that at least 20,000 miners were involved. Company police trying to stop them were met with force; not a jury in the state was willing to convict them.
In the pacific northwest, several cooperative plywood factories were started. They made it through very difficult times and by 1980 there were eighteen of them, producing about 12% of the plywood in the US. They are structured with workers electing managers to oversee the operation but leaving the workers much control. They have given themselves salaries 35% higher than workers in capitalist factories, better safety conditions, health and dental care, lunches, insurance paid by the cooperative, gasoline at wholesale rates, and other side benefits.
NEW DEAL
In 1932 small farmers and wage-earners joined once again into their traditional alliance, and together won the New Deal. There was a resurgence of the left parties too, with Norman Thomas getting almost 900,000 on the Socialist ticket and Foster 100,000 on the Communist in 1932; this election marked the end of serious national electoral threats from the left until Henry Wallace got a million votes on the Progressive ticket in '48.
One of the New Deal's first acts set up a Division of Self-Help Cooperatives, providing technical assistance and grants to cooperatives and barter associations. In some, the cooperators were able to receive pay for producing articles for their own use. Their rural program of "community projects" included setting up cooperative industries such as a wood mill, a tractor assembly plant, a paint factory and hosiery mills. But the program was under-financed and the industries usually met with antagonism and often sabotage from their local business "communities."
The New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) offered a small cash income for make-work labor, but had a destructive influence on many cooperatives, particularly Self-Help barter co-ops. Cooperators asked the New Deal administrators to let work in the Self-Help co-ops count as WPA hours, but they refused. The result was that large numbers left the co-ops to get the small cash income that the WPA offered. Many co-ops folded, including Oakland's U.X.A. Then when the WPA was also closed down, many former cooperators were left unemployed.
Within a year three subsistence homestead colonies were in partial operation in the southwest. Casa Grande, Arizona was the largest. The land was farmed through a centralized cooperative, while each family had its own subsistence plot. There were cooperative handicrafts, food processing and other forms of mutual-aid. This project, like most other New Deal cooperative projects, was burdened by bureaucratic paternalism and under-capitalization, while being attacked as "socialistic" and was soon discarded.
The New Deal's Farm Security Administration (FSA) helped organize around 25,000 cooperatives among about 4 million low-income farmers, usually providing loans to get the co-ops started. Besides supply purchasing and product marketing, the FSA backed cooperatives for farm machinery, breeding stock, veterinary services, insurance, water and medical care. The Tennessee Valley Authority organized electricity and fertilizer cooperatives, as well as canneries, mills, dairies and craft cooperatives. In the South were many "lend-leasing" cooperatives, where small farmers leased whole plantations together.
The most significant effect of the New Deal on the farmer cooperative movement was created by Banks for Cooperatives. This became a member-controlled system of financing farmer cooperatives, as well as telephone and electric cooperatives. After having been set up with government seed-money, the Farm Credit Administration became self-supporting. It is a dominant organization today, and includes twelve banks solely for funding farmer cooperatives.
By 1939 half the farmers in the US belonged to cooperatives, and most were large and incorporated. But the movement, along with the number of small farms, was shrinking.
In '37 the New Deal "greenbelt town" project was begun: cooperative villages surrounded by wide belts of common land to be left permanently undeveloped. Sixty were planned, but only three completed by '39, when the project was abruptly shut down and much of it sold off to speculators. The cooperative traditions in the towns remained however, and Greenbelt, Maryland, is today the largest concentration of consumer co-ops in the US.
The Tennessee Valley Authority planned a total regional cooperativization of the area beginning in '37. One of their first projects was to build the town of Norris for employees at the dam. Norris was to become totally cooperative, a demonstration project to train people in cooperative principles to provide leadership for a vast cooperative movement the New Deal projected for the mountain people. But Norris never got past being a government project and a company town.
Thus the legacy of the New Deal toward cooperatives was very ambivalent: in many cases it was very helpful, but in others it offered only false promises or a kiss of death.
EPIC
In '33 Upton Sinclair outlined a plan for ending the depression in California, in a widely-distributed pamphlet. His plan, EPIC (End Poverty In California), was to create "land colonies whereby the unemployed may become self-sustaining" in the countryside, while in the cities EPIC would procure "production plants whereby the unemployed may produce the basic necessities required for themselves and for the land colonies, and to operate these factories and house and feed and care for the workers." These two groups, in the cities and countryside, would "maintain a distribution system for the exchange of each others products. The industries will (constitute) a complete industrial system, a new and self-sustaining world for those our present system cannot employ."
EPIC planned to incorporate the widespread "self-help" cooperatives into the program. The plan's supporters began forming EPIC clubs; in less than a year Sinclair won the Democratic Party nomination for governor, dumping out the "regular" machine. With the slogan Production for Use, Sinclair and EPIC waged an uphill campaign against both the Republicans and the Democratic machine, who joined to defeat him, spending twenty to thirty times as much and controlling virtually every major newspaper and radio station in the state. Roosevelt promised privately to come out in support, but then never did. Still, Sinclair got 38% of the votes while the Progressive candidate received another 13%. But the old machine politics were soon back in the driver's seat.
With the collapse of the campaign, numerous EPIC clubs turned their energies to organizing co-operatives, mostly stores and buying clubs, reviving the consumer movement. Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley, which became the largest consumer cooperative in the continental US, with 100,000 members, stemmed from the joining of groups of EPIC and of Finnish immigrant cooperators.
FARMERS UNION
During the depression many small farmers, particularly Farmers' Union members, turned to radical actions. In '34 blacks and whites in the Arkansas cotton belt, dominated by huge plantations, formed the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in semi-secrecy. The Union championed cooperatives, organized buying clubs and ran a large cooperative farm. As growers began switching over to wage-labor and evicted tenants land in large numbers, the Union responded with strike, which the growers in turn answered with a reign of terror assisted by the National Guard.
STRIKES
The '30s were a time of great workers' struggles. In 1934, the San Francisco general strike; '36 the sit-down strike--factory occupation--to organize General Motors and the wave of sit-downs that followed across the country; '37 was the organization of Little Steel. Socialists, Communists and former Wobblies were among the leadership of all of them, helping win social security, unemployment insurance, accident compensation, aid to the needy, employees' right to organize, and helping lead the organization of the giant industrial unions of the CIO, probably American labor's greatest triumph.
Nevertheless, the socialist movement in the US was falling apart. This can be attributed partly to the repression, partly to the continued splits, and partly to the failures of the Soviets. The movement fell into a state of great confusion, and lost much of its sense of direction and vision.
Many people had hoped the New Deal would lead ultimately to a form of democratic socialism, but Roosevelt's programs served to strengthen monopoly capitalism in the end. "Bread and butter" demands were acceded to, heading off any mass independent movement of wage-earners and small farmers, while radicals were assimilated and co-opted.
Roosevelt's programs were not able to pull the economy out of its depressed state; this happened only when the country geared for war. As in World War I, the government took charge of the economy and it became in effect planned (but for corporate benefit, not for citizens' equal needs).
COMMUNITIES
The Catholic Worker Movement organized numerous collective and communal projects beginning in the '30s, including a collective farm in upper New York, which continues today, Tivoli. Sunrise Community, organized by a Jewish group in 1933 in Michigan, grew to over 300 quickly but collapsed on ideological struggle after three years. Celo Community, founded in the mountains of North Carolina in '37 by a group of cooperative-socialists, continues today.
Bayard Land Community was begun in 1936 in Pennsylvania, with 17 families homesteading on community-owned land, practicing cooperation and mutual-aid, and trying to be ecologically sound. Connected with the community was the School of Living, organized by Ralph Borsodi. Out of the School and Bayard came a number of cooperative communities in the early 1940s: Van Houten Fields and Skyview Acres in New York State, Bryn Gweled and Tanguy Homesteads in Pennsylvania, May Valley Cooperative Community in Washington State, Melbourne Village in Florida. All of these are still functioning successfully, ranging in size from about ten to fifteen families apiece. In the late 1960s a new generation of School of Living communities would be born.
Religious communalists continued however to turn away from mass society and form communities, many of which survive today. The Vale, in Ohio, was founded in 1940 by a group of fifteen families, mostly Quaker, committed to cooperation on common land. Koinonia Farm was begun in '42 not far from Plains, Georgia, practicing "partnership" cooperative farming on communal land, surplus income from each member's crops going into a communal fund. When they took in their first black members in 1957, they were met with physical and economic violence. About 60 strong, they still hang on. Zion's Order, in Missouri, begun in '52 by a group of Hutterite background, is now an interracial community of about 40. The Bruderhof, a Christian group in the Hutterite tradition, formed in 1920 in Germany, fled Hitler, and immigrated to the US in 1954; today they have large communes in upper New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut; unlike most earlier immigrant anabaptist groups, they take in outsiders, and are today made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Reba Place Fellowship was founded in 1957 by a group of Mennonites, and is today a community of about 250 living as an extended family neighborhood in Evanston, Illinois.
THE WAR
As soon as the US entered World War II, almost the entire American left enlisted, the opposite of their action in the First World War. The Communists went so far as to disband for the duration, supporting Roosevelt. Ironically, while the American people were fighting for democracy and freedom, American big business was fighting for power and markets. While small farmers and their sons were dying overseas, agribusiness was rising back home: it staged a major attack against the Farm Security Administration, by '44 had it crippled and two years later managed to shut it down. The number of small farms continued to drop. And while unionists and their sons and daughters were dying overseas, rightists stayed behind and took control of the unions.
There was a boom in co-op stores during World War II, and many farm-supply regional co-ops began handling groceries too. The United Auto Workers in Detroit and the United Rubber Workers in Akron organized cooperative store systems. But with the war's end consumer-goods' prices dropped, and there were widespread failures, including several mid-western regional wholesales and the UAW group. This rise and fall followed a pattern similar to that around World War I.
As soon as the war was over, big business launched the "cold war," purging the few remaining militants out of the unions entirely, instituting anti-communist oaths, kicking thousands out of jobs and blacklisting many thousands more. Federal troops brought the great post-war strike wave to a cold stop. The Taft-Hartley Act, written by the National Association of Manufacturers, virtually repealed the New Deal's Wagner Act, went far towards destroying internal union democracy, and paralyzed the movement.
Like Northern veterans returning home after the Civil War, veterans returning home after World War II often didn't know what hit them: after bleeding for freedom and democracy, they often found wage-slavery waiting for them. The unions they'd fought so hard to win were now often being used against them. The Attorney General declared hundreds of organizations "subversive;" a million members were kicked out of the CIO as the right wing took control and merged with the AFL; Eisenhower gave away huge amounts of public land, resources, plants and power installations to corporations, while discharging 7,000 government workers as "security risks." Under the Internal Security Act freedom of speech was restricted and the FBI authorized to compile lists of "risks" to be rounded up "in event of a national emergency."
By 1950 there were very few consumer or industrial cooperatives in the US, with only several notable exceptions."
red-coral.net
Jim |
