The Composition of Capitalist Society: Assembly Lines, Monopolies, and Labor Unions

The Development of the Assembly Line

Arguably, the assembly line captures the controversy of capitalism writ large. Specifically, the assembly line captures the struggle between management and labor. With regard to management, certain historians emphasize, and often praise, the amount of efficiency management could accomplish with the assembly line—efficiency being a core tenet of capitalism. To be sure, this efficiency allowed vehicles to be rolled off of the assembly line at a price that common people could afford. It would seem that historians such as David E. Nye are inclined to understate the unsavory aspects of management if this assembly line produced vehicles that the general public could afford. The fact that Henry Ford implemented a five-dollar, eight-hour day system for his factory workers also serves to justify this historiographical view, which holds the assembly line as a success story in the history of capitalism.[1]

With regard to labor, however, certain historians such as Craig Heron would remind readers that Henry Ford, his management, and his public relations team would want the public to remember his company and the assembly line for these wage increases and for the affordability of the vehicles produced on the assembly line. Ford would want posterity to hold him in a positive light. Ford would not want people to remember the harsher realities of his assembly line system, which first and foremost sought to exact greater control over the labor force by placing workers in concentrated rolls in the plant, where they served as extensions to the machinery of the assembly line.[2] Thousands of people left the plant within hours or within days of having been hired as they faced the monotonous routines of the assembly line. Fostering a culture of fear within his plant, Ford also depended on his security service to silence those employees who might criticize this alienating system.[3] 

Indeed, Karl Marx’s theory of alienation is an important concept to consider as one reflects on the legacy of the assembly line. As workers are placed in separate roles to accomplish minute, exacting tasks, they do not feel connected to the product they have been instrumental in creating, which has the potential to change the world. Marx would argue that assembly line workers, for example, have no creative input in a system that requires these workers to repeat the same action before another employee takes over the process and repeats his action on the line. This lack of creative input alienates the worker from the fruit of his labor. Ultimately, however, because of their surrender to the alienating process of the automobile assembly line, these workers deserved credit for lifting others out of their station in life. The reasonable price of the automobile enabled others to purchase cars and venture beyond their boundaries to seek better employment and thus a higher standard of living.[4] While capitalists benefited from the alienating aspects of the assembly line, the working class arguably benefited in their own right. This synthesis of alienation and social mobility is ultimately the legacy of the assembly line.

The Growth of Monopolies

An irony inheres in the concept of monopoly: businesses that compete in a market, which therefore strive to develop better products, increase profits, expand their markets, and grow in size, tend to monopolize as a natural consequence of this capitalist process.[5] Critics and proponents of capitalism and monopolies alike recognize this fact; the difference lies in the judgment they render as the process unfolds. On one hand, we have neoclassical economists who recognize theoretical problems with monopolies, although these neoclassical economists approach the problem from different political and economic perspectives. Marxist economists, for example, maintain that monopoly represents the final stage of the capitalist process; after monopoly, commercial life is stagnant, and, by implication, so is capitalism. Marxists laud monopolies as integral steps in the dialectic process from capitalism to socialism.[6] More critical of monopolies, non-Marxist neoclassical economists maintain that monopolies are similar to the structures one might see in a command economy, which do not depend on competition and self-correcting mechanisms guaranteed in a free market.[7] Monopolies are intolerable, anti-competitive, inefficient entities, according to these economists.

These criticisms have likely impacted popular concepts of monopoly, which tend to view monopolies as harmful to the core tenets of a market economy, the orthodoxies for which require businesses to compete with each other and therefore lower the prices of goods. Charles Geisst elaborates, detailing how businesses facing competition must adjust their prices in the consumer’s favor and how businesses must continually improve upon their products. Removing competition invariably removes the incentive to innovate. If a business, having removed all competition, having consolidated vertically and/or horizontally, has complete control of the marketing forces, then consumers will quite literally pay the price for items of diminishing quality.

While neoclassical views of monopoly might have shaped popular negative connotations of monopoly, many academics have questioned the orthodoxy that monopolies in general are examples of capitalism run amok. C.W. DeMarco takes a position different from the neoclassical one. DeMarco holds that that monopolies are not “necessarily economically odious.”[8] DeMarco argues that just because monopolies might have the ability to act inefficiently does not necessarily mean that critics can label all monopolies as inefficiencies.[9]

DeMarco’s argument would be more compelling if DeMarco produced examples of monopolistic entities that did not exhibit unethical, anticompetitive, inefficient behavior. DeMarco approaches matters from a theoretical standpoint, but he does not discuss monopolies in practice. Nevertheless, the fact that Standard Oil and American Tobacco were dismantled in 1911, while in 1919 the Supreme Court kept U.S. Steel intact, might indicate that these rules are dependent upon the political landscape of the time, not on a consistent application of antitrust laws.[10] Or, seen differently, these two different verdicts in 1911 and 1919 might indicate the Supreme Court applied logic that DeMarco later would later apply, namely, that not all companies moving toward monopoly are necessarily economically odious and inefficient players in the market.

If Americans insist upon having a market economy, which implies competition, which further implies that the forces of competition will invariably choose a winner among companies, then Americans should accept with less judgment that monopolies result from this competition. Americans are right to be skeptical of monopolies and their power, but this skepticism should not preclude monopolies from existing, especially when, as Geisst demonstrates, these monopolies have been sources of efficiency. Geisst specifically cites the railroad as an example of an efficient monopoly. Stretching from coast to coast, railroads facilitated westward expansion. Without these railroads, farmers could not have delivered their produce to the growing populations, while oil and steel would not have been distributed with such efficiency to provide infrastructure.[11]

Development of Labor Unions

Scholars have long posed a question on how labor unions should be defined: Are labor unions no different from monopolies and cartels, labels conventionally extended only to businesses? Albert Rees highlights the difficulties of maintaining this equivalency between labor unions and monopolies/cartels because, one, a union’s makeup extends beyond its economic character, as this makeup includes political and social characteristics; and, two, all of the gains a union makes are redistributed among its workers in the form of wages, meaning that the union itself does not collect these gains.[12] Responding to Rees’s difficulties, Morgan O. Reynolds argues that labor unions “behave in labor markets as conventional monopoly theory predicts”[13] as they attempt to capture as much wealth as possible for their members.[14] That members, not the organization itself, receive those gains ultimately should not factor into the negation of the equivalency, according to Reynolds.

Charles Baird accepts the equivalence between monopoly/cartels and labor unions, taking the issue to its next logical step: Why have labor unions been exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890?[15] Baird wants readers to understand that if General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, and Ford were to make an agreement that eliminated competition among themselves and were to be prosecuted accordingly under antitrust provisions, then employees coming together across these companies, organizing a labor union to fix wages and demarcate labor, should likewise be subject to antitrust legislation.[16] 

The United States Congress, passing the Clayton Act in 1914, tended to disagree that unions had equal footing with firms subject to antitrust legislation. The Clayton Act was predicated on the notion that the “labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.”[17] As such, any attempt among workers to organize should be exempt from antitrust legislation because such legislation concerns the conspiracy to manipulate articles of commerce. Baird categorically disagrees with the Clayton Act’s premise, recognizing that labor is a commodity because people sell their labor services to employers (i.e., buyers).[18] Laborers who unionize manipulate the articles of commerce because adjusting wages in their favor impacts the price consumers pay for goods—the very stuff of commerce.

Although Baird’s logic is compelling, and while on many accounts unions meet the criteria that define either monopolies or cartels, one criterion seems to complicate the equivalence. If, for example, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, and Ford were to conspire to eliminate competition, they would be doing so ultimately with the intention to increase their profits. However, if employees among these companies were to conspire to raise wages and demarcate labor, they would be doing so with the intent to tap into the profits of the companies that employ them. But tapping into profits, and recovering money for those who face exploitation and unsafe working conditions, is not the same as generating profits.

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[1]. Craig Heron, review of America’s Assembly Line, by David E. Nye, Labour/LeTravail no. 75 (Spring 2005): 288.

[2]. Heron, review of America’s Assembly Line, 287.

[3]. Heron, 288.

[4]. Charles W. Baird, “Unions and Antitrust,” Journal of Labor Research 21, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 593.

[5]. Charles Geisst, Monopolies in America: Empire Builders and Their Enemies from Jay Gould to Bill Gates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 12; C.W. DeMarco, “Knee Deep in Technique: The Ethics of Monopoly Capital,” Journal of Business Ethics 32, no. 2 (May 2001): 158.

[6]. Geisst, Monopolies in America, 12; DeMarco, “Knee Deep in Technique,” 159.

[7]. DeMarco, 152.

[8]. DeMarco, 152.

[9]. DeMarco, 153.

[10]. Geisst, Monopolies in America, 11.

[11]. Geisst, 16.

[12]. Morgan O. Reynolds, “Whatever Happened to the Monopoly Theory of Labor Unions?” Journal of Labor Research 2, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 163.

[13]. Reynolds, “Whatever Happened,” 171.

[14]. Reynolds, 164.

[15]. Baird, “Unions and Antitrust,” 585.

[16]. Baird, 586.

[17]. Baird, 594.

[18]. Baird, 592.

Bibliography

Baird, Charles W. “Unions and Antitrust.” Journal of Labor Research 21, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 585-600.

DeMarco, C.W. “Knee Deep in Technique: The Ethics of Monopoly Capital.” Journal of Business Ethics 32, no. 2 (May 2001): 151-164.

Geisst, Charles. Monopolies in America: Empire Builders and Their Enemies from Jay Gould to Bill Gates. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Heron, Craig. Review of America’s Assembly Line, by David E. Nye. Labour/LeTravail no. 75 (Spring 2005): 286-289.

Reynolds, Morgan O. “Whatever Happened to the Monopoly Theory of Labor Unions?” Journal of Labor Research 2, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 163-173.

Sacred Lands and Political Boundaries: Consolidating the Political West and its Natural Resources

The American West conjures images of striking, sublime landscapes, which vary in their majesty from region to region, state to state. From deep canyons to high summits, these landmarks have attracted attention from all over the country—in fact, from all over the world. These landmarks are tied to the idea of the West: A place where ruggedness dominates the imagination. These landmarks work to reify the political character of the West—again, capturing the rugged individualism of the American spirit that informs the cultural and political zeitgeist. 

In the history of the United States, the natural beauty of the mountains, the canyons, the forests, the deserts, did not stay Americans’ hands, pick axes, and plows as they interacted with these environments. Americans extracted what they deemed necessary to provide for the American settlers, whose needs grew in proportion to their expansion and their need for infrastructure. While Americans, and indeed the world, have looked at these landscapes with wonder, the extraction of resources from these landmarks, such as gold or silver, has necessarily contributed to their ruggedness. Man has subdued the frontier, with its varied landscapes, to support the westward expansion, where settlers build, plow, dig, and mine—in short, where they transform the environment. The beauty of these sites serves as an added benefit to their utility for pragmatic Americans.

But these landmarks and landscapes, with the resources they provide, have not always been aligned with concept of the American West—with its Anglo-American connotations. Rather, these landmarks and landscapes, supporting American Indians for centuries, have a deeper, spiritual meaning. The spirituality of these lands, according to the American Indian, requires those living in these lands to revere them—to preserve them as they have always been.

Military expansion and imperial pursuit of resources to sustain western expansion can adequately explain the United States federal government’s initial seizure of these lands that have been sacred to American Indians—a seizure accompanied by the relocation of American Indians from these lands. If the United States could leverage its strengths to define—indeed, dictate—the political boundaries of the American Indians who had occupied these western lands before them; if the United States could confine tribes to these boundaries, or reservations, to keep vigil over them; and if the United States could use the land gained to support western settlement, then politically, the United States could control the American West, with all of its resources. Without this control, the West would not have been defined and exploited more readily to support settlement. Rather than being an area with political boundaries, with all of the benefits these boundaries allow settlers and companies to enjoy, the West would have remained something of a hinterland settlement, an inchoate region that could not be fully secured while American Indians continued to use the land and its resources in competition with the Americans, who valued the lands and resources quite differently—materially and spiritually.

The Sioux

The history of the conflict between the United States and the Sioux demonstrates the American resolve to maintain complete—and indeed, capricious—control of political boundaries that ensured its mastery of the West. The United States and the Sioux Nation in 1868 resolved their conflicts during the Powder River War with the Fort Laramie Treaty, which established the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation that encompassed the Black Hills as well as the lands west of the Missouri River. Despite having “‘solemnly agree[d]’ that no unauthorized person ‘shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in [the Great Sioux Reservation],’” the United States almost immediately allowed its western settlers to pursue mining interests in the Black Hills.[1] As settlers continued to make incursions into the Black Hills, the United States military, which had agreed to protect the Sioux’s treaty rights, took no action per their treaty obligations.[2] Taking no action, the military, the Department of the Interior, and President Ulysses S. Grant in effect sanctioned the exploitation of the Black Hills—a move that emboldened them further to limit the political boundaries of the Sioux as the United States then coerced the Sioux to surrender the Black Hills through a “Sell or Starve” policy, withholding the rations upon which the Sioux depended as their hunting rights were further limited unless they acquiesced to the government’s demand.[3] Supplementing this threat with another, the United States through the Mannypenny Commission threatened to remove the Sioux wholesale from their homelands near the Missouri River. The Sioux were to be relocated to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma if they did not surrender the Black Hills, with all of its resources to United States’ political boundaries. The United States continued to use this threat of removal to force the Sioux to relinquish even more “surplus” land.[4] 

Navajo and Hopi

Navajo and the Hopi have likewise been at the mercy of the United States, which, after annexing New Mexico Territory (comprising modern-day New Mexico and Arizona) from Mexico, sought to assert its exclusive political control in the Southwest by declaring all enemies of the New Mexicans their enemies as well.[5] In effect, because the Navajo had an adversarial relationship with the New Mexicans under Mexican rule, the United States approached them as a challenge to their authority and to their manifest destiny. After subjugating the Navajo and marching them into New Mexican concentration camps in the 1860s, the United States eventually relocated the Navajo to lands that had belonged historically to the Hopi—a relocation project that has been a continued source of conflict between these two peoples, who both claim these lands as their spiritual homes. Despite continued protest and observable conflict between the two tribes, the United States continued to operate under the assumption that this arrangement could be remedied with a Joint Use Area, but this area likewise created conflict between these groups, whose population growth saw them need more and more resources.[6] With such a heavy burden placed on these tribes, as well as on the United States, one finds it difficult to determine what interest the United States had in perpetuating such a zone of renewed conflict. One might conclude that while these tribes remained in a state of conflict within these defined borders, established by the United States, the United States might have better guaranteed stability for itself within its own political boundaries, for the Navajo had been a hinderance to smooth expansion and “pests” to everyone in the region, especially the Hopi, whose agricultural lifestyle did not align with the Navajo’s pastoral lifestyle.[7] Better the Hopi continue dealing with pests within their boundaries than the United States having to deal with them in theirs.

Sacred Lands, Religious Liberty, and the First Amendment

Placing the Navajo, the Sioux, and other American Indian tribes within these reservations, which do not correspond with their aboriginal homelands, has had many religious implications. The Black Hills, for example, are sacred to the Sioux, yet their United States, through coercion, seized the hills and has since administered the land use, where mining historically has been pursued. The Navajo’s sacred Rainbow Bridge and its surrounding Glen Canyon environment, under federal control since the 1930s, has been impacted by the creation of Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which submerged much of the canyon under water, thus altering these sacred lands where Navajo had worshipped for more than 120 years.[8] The San Francisco Peaks, well beyond the Hopi reservation but nevertheless sacred to the Hopi, have been the site of pumice extraction, sanctioned by the federal government.[9]

In the United States, which is a secular republic, economic and material pursuits are paradoxically tantamount to sacred pursuits. The ancillary is that private property, which allows people and industry to secure material resources for economic gain to the exclusion of others, is also a sacred institution. Thus, land may be used, enjoyed, appreciated, and exploited, as sanctioned by the government, as a part of the sacred. The federal government has prioritized land use along this paradigm, allowing, for example, the Woodruff Butte to be pulverized for gravel necessary to build roads in the Southwest to the dismay of the Hopi.[10] As the American West continued to expanded its infrastructure, requiring resources and infrastructure commensurate with this growth, it has been culturally, economically, and politically expedient to pursue land use along these sacred lines, not according to the Native American applications of sacred.

As tribes have sought restitution in the 20^th century, and as they have sought to reclaim rights to their sacred lands and their resources, the differing definitions of sacred and the different concepts on the practice of religion continue to complicate American Indian efforts in the court of law where the First Amendment, written from a western paradigm of religious practice, does not readily accommodate American Indians’ needs as religious practitioners. Granted, the United States no longer criminalizes American Indian attempts to worship as it did when the government outlawed the Ghost Dance in 1890 in the wake of Wounded Knee.[11] The United States no longer pursues Indian Schools in conjunction with Catholic and Protestant churches to convert “heathens” to an American lifestyle.[12] But courts have had a difficult time siding with American Indians as they appeal to the First Amendment to protect their ancestral sites because Anglo-American religion practices, centering on a Judeo-Christian worldview, might take place in physical structures, but these practices are not exclusive to those structures. In other words, Catholics may worship their God at any Catholic Church, irrespective of its location.[13] To limit God to a location would be to make God a temporal entity, when God instead is omnipresent. Because American Indian religions are spatially located, meaning that the divine is manifest at specific locations such as mountains, hills, forests, or desert landscapes where specific events occurred, courts have not readily been able to accept American Indian arguments that the sites are themselves divine, and that their (mis)use or alteration is tantamount to deicide. The Supreme Court, in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, held that even if an alteration would “virtually destroy” American Indians’ ability to practice religion at a site, the federal government could nevertheless destroy this site on public lands because doing so would not coerce belief or force American Indians to abandon their beliefs.[14] Religion, in other words, is separate from the site itself, according to this western paradigm.

To be sure, conservation efforts in the United States, in national parks and beyond, have halted certain private forms of extraction and consumption, such as logging and mining, so that Americans could also enjoy these landmarks for posterity. On the surface of things, conservation efforts appear to offer at least partial redress to the many land abuses that have provoked the ire of Native American communities who hold these lands as sacred. The conservation efforts seem to speak to the spiritual goals of American Indian, who want their sites unaltered and therefore respected. But as generations of Americans continue coming to the West either as tourists or as residents, climbing or descending the mountains and the canyons, they participate in their own forms of consumption,[15] which continue to impact these landscapes. They are participating in the American West experience, encouraged to do so tacitly by the government who has controlled these areas for public use. The current and predominant uses of these sites serve as a continued source of lament for American Indian groups, whose sacred sites, while better protected and respected, still must accommodate the consuming American public as they climb, camp, drive, and need facilities. These sites, as they are managed in American political boundaries by the federal government, continue to reinforce America’s political power in the West. To compromise, to concede, to reconcile with the American Indian would be to relinquish some of this political power. 

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[1]. John P. La Velle, “Rescuing Paha Sapa: Achieving Environmental Justice by Restoring the Great Grasslands and Returning the Sacred Black Hills to the Great Sioux Nation,” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 5, no. 1/2 (Spring and Summer 2001): 44-45.

[2]. La Velle, “Rescuing Paha Sapa,” 46.

[3]. La Velle, 51.

[4]. La Velle, 53-60. See also footnote no. 64.

[5]. Catherine Feher-Elston, Children of Sacred Ground: America’s Last Indian War (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1988), 22.

[6]. Feher-Elston, Children of Sacred Ground, xxiii.

[7]. Feher-Elston, 25.

[8]. Amber L. McDonald, “Secularizing the Sacrosanct: Defining ‘Sacred’ for Native American Sacred Sites Protection Legislation,” Hofstra Law Review 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 751.

[9]. Nancy Stimson, “Interpreting Reverence in American Indian Sacred Sites,” Legacy Magazine 21, no. 5 (October 2010): 16.

[10]. Stimson, “Interpreting Reverence,” 16.

[11]. Shawna Lee, “Government Managed Shrines: Protection of Native American Sacred Site Worship,” Valparaiso University Law Review 35 (October 2000): 269.

[12]. See Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier in the American West, 1846-1890 (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 215.

[13]. McDonald, “Secularizing the Sacrosanct,” 756.

[14]. Kristen A. Carpenter, “Old Ground and New Directions at Sacred Sites on the Western Landscape,” Denver University Law Review 83, no. 4 (January 2006): 986; Karly C. Winter, “Saving Bear Butte and Other Sacred Sites,” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 13 (Spring 2010), 73-74.

[15]. Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscape: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” in A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 186.

Bibliography

Carpenter, Kristen A. “Old Ground and New Directions at Sacred Sites on the Western Landscape.” Denver University Law Review 83, no. 4 (January 2006): 981-1002.

Feher-Elston, Catherine. Children of Sacred Ground: America’s Last Indian War. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1988.

La Velle, John P. “Rescuing Paha Sapa: Achieving Environmental Justice by Restoring the Great Grasslands and Returning the Sacred Black Hills to the Great Sioux Nation.” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 5, no. 1/2 (Spring and Summer 2001): 40-101.

Lee, Shawna. “Government Managed Shrines: Protection of Native American Sacred Site Worship.” Valparaiso University Law Review 35 (October 2000): 265-308.

McDonald, Amber L. “Secularizing the Sacrosanct: Defining ‘Sacred’ for Native American Sacred Sites Protection Legislation,” Hofstra Law Review 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 751-783.

Stimson, Nancy. “Interpreting Reverence in American Indian Sacred Sites,” Legacy Magazine 21, no. 5 (October 2010): 16-17.

Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier in the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

White, Richard. “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscape: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History.” In A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman, 183-190. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2010.

Winter, Karly C. “Saving Bear Butte and Other Sacred Sites.” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 13 (Spring 2010): 71-84.