Opinion | We’re in a New Era of Cl*** Warfare. History Points to a Way Out.

The cl*** violence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries continued during the 1920s, in the mine wars of West Virginia, and the 1930s, when many corporations stockpiled gas equipment and guns to resist rebellion. Company security forces fired on unemployed workers at the Ford Motor Company in 1932 who were participating in a “hunger march.” Police officers killed strikers on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934, sparking a general strike. In Chicago three years later, police officers shot and killed 10 pro-labor marchers in what came to be called the Memorial Day M***acre. Only days before, Ford security guards savagely beat up United Automobile Workers union leaders, including the union president, Walter Reuther, on camera — images that were carried in newspapers throughout the country.

But the growth of the labor movement over these years opened up new possibilities. The creation of independent institutions, like unions and consumer cooperatives, gave workers a say over their basic conditions on the job, to grant them more autonomy and more freedom. Such “countervailing powers,” to quote the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, also mitigated the total power of employers and the wealthy. Henry Ford fought unions at his company bitterly, but when workers finally were able to vote on the question in a federally supervised election in 1941, 97 percent voted to unionize.

After World War II, regular increases in the minimum wage, the expansion of health insurance and pensions, tax policies that reduced extreme inequality and public investment in higher education all added up to an economy more responsive to the needs of working-cl*** people. The political cir***stances of these measures are distinct, but they generally grew out of the political organizing that had helped support the New Deal of the 1930s. They came to be with the help of New Deal Democrats who were responsive to the labor movement, which not only represented workers on the job, but brought their interests into political life.

In short, the distance between the wealthy and the undercl*** became smaller, and the virulence between the cl***es did, too.

In the past 50 years, however, political leaders have vilified government programs, tried to break public sector strikes, starved the welfare state of funds and transformed the tax system so that it has tilted to favor the wealthy. Organizing a labor union has become far more difficult and a first contract much harder to win. We’ve seen precisely the hardening of the “castes” that Carnegie warned of long ago.