THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF WORKING CLASS FORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Chicago, 1844–1886

Cedric de Leon

THIS CHAPTER SEEKS TO EXPLAIN THE TWISTS and turns in the formation of working-class political identity in Chicago from the Jacksonian era (1828–1844) to the Haymarket Affair of 1886. The two main schools of thought in the literature on working-class formation correspond to what Pierre Bourdieu (1989) has called the "objectivist" and "subjectivist" moments of class. Objectivists claim that class formation results from the structural location of workers and their employers in the system of production. Subjectivists by contrast insist that workers come to identify as a class as opposed to another class in contexts such as labor disputes with their employers.

Yet the trajectory of class formation in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago does not fit either of these frameworks neatly. Chicago workers' first political organization was a land reform league established in 1848 to protest the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Workers organized the city's first trade unions as the slavery issue subsided in the early 1850s, but organizing dropped off as the controversy over slavery extension reemerged. Unions resurfaced midway through the U.S. Civil War. It was at this time that workers began increasingly to refer to themselves as a class. Moreover, although workers' analyses of their deteriorating conditions in the postbellum period referenced unscrupulous employers, they reserved a singular animosity for the major political parties, whom they accused of abandoning the republicanism of the American Revolution (which favored independent farming and artisanry over wage dependency) in support of free market liberalism (which viewed the individual wage contract as the ultimate source of freedom).

This trajectory bears out the broad subjectivist claim that workers come to recognize themselves as a class organically, in their own way and time, but adds that class formation may take place in contexts beyond workplace struggles, namely, in the political arena, where parties compete to articulate coalitions or "blocs" by naturalizing and denaturalizing social divisions such as race and class. Whereas Chicago workers saw themselves as an aggrieved class of producers together with farmers in the early years of the Democratic Party, and then as northern "free labor" during the political crisis over slavery, they began to identify as the working class when the major parties reframed the wage contract as a metaphor for freedom in the post–Civil War era. The city's workingmen viewed this discursive shift and the antilabor violence it permitted as a betrayal of their military service and the promise of the war, which they understood to be nothing less than the emancipation of white workers from wage dependency. In other words, whereas the antebellum period was marked by the successful articulation of workers to political parties, the postbellum period was marked by profound disarticulation.

The interlocking dynamics of articulation and disarticulation in turn helped to set the stage for the monumental clashes between capital and labor during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, not least in the Haymarket Affair of 1886, in which leading Chicago anarchists were hanged for allegedly bombing a rally that they themselves had organized. On the one hand, because of their victory in the late war, Chicago political elites claimed the coercive prerogative of the state to protect industrial capital from labor as it did from the South. Accordingly, the major parties often equated the Chicago labor movement's criticisms of capitalism with proslavery rhetoric. On the other hand, the end of the war limited the Chicago party system's ability to articulate northern workers together with their employers as partners in the Grand Army of the Republic, thereby creating room for a new mode of articulation in which trade unionists and socialists, among others, began to hail workers into a "workingman's party." The convergence of a triumphant and still belligerent northern political elite and a double-crossed working class therefore comprised the real Haymarket bomb, but its fuse, as I seek to demonstrate, had been set well before 1886.

Accordingly, this chapter is not only about the capacity of parties to articulate novel identities and forms of social organization but also about the ways in which the dissolution of previous articulations may give rise to alternative sociopolitical blocs. The postbellum eclipse of the slavery question and the major parties' failure to articulate workers with a contractual vision of a free society cleared the way for the incipient organized Left to articulate workers as a class.

CLASS FORMATION AND POLITICAL ARTICULATION

The debate over the origins of working class formation proceeds in large part from Marx's own enigmatic distinction in the Communist Manifesto between the class-in-itself (an sich) and the class-for-itself (für sich). Marx states that the goal of communism is "the formation of the proletariat into a class"; that is, from a group of workers who share the same structural position as non-owners of the means of production to a "self-conscious" revolutionary movement (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998, 51). The distinction is enigmatic, because it is unclear whether working-class formation follows inexorably from workers' structural location at the bottom of the capitalist system or if a working class can be said to exist only when workers actually identify as a class through their experience of struggle against another class.

Objectivists claim that class formation is a matter of structural position. Thus, Dahrendorf writes, "Classes are based on the differences in legitimate power associated with certain positions, i.e., on the structure of social roles." As such, an individual "belongs to a class because he occupies a position in a social organization; i.e., class membership is derived from the incumbency of a social role" (Dahrendorf 1959, 148–149). Perry Anderson likewise argued against the subjectivist notion that "class consciousness" is the "very hallmark of class formation." "Classes have frequently existed whose members did not 'identify their antagonistic interests' in any process of common clarification or struggle," Anderson wrote, adding, "the concept of class" is "an...