-- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
Well, there is FLOC and the UFW, and there was the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (Hubert Humphrey's old base -- anyone remember Hubert Humphrey?), there was the Communist Party led union drive among black farmers in the 30s (see RDG Kelly's Hammer and Hoe) and there was militant socialist activism in Kansas and Oklahoma up through the Depression (Woody Guthrie's origins)-- Thomas Frank writes about this in What's The Matter With Kansas? But, basically, no, unions have not been strong in rural areas -- rural areas are hard to organize, white rural people since WWII have been hostile to collective action outside increasingly reactionary churches, and it's been, you'll excuse the expression, a hard row to hoe. This is what Marx would have predicted, and one reason he disliked the peasantry as a class. Of course we don't have peasants, but rural areas in the US share some characteristics with the 19th century European peasantry that make/made both of them hard to organize. In addition, in the US, you have the color line, and white supremacy and black oppression have made theSouth in particular especially resistant to uniosn. In its, er, glory days, the KKK was almost as hostile to unionism (anybody's unions) as it was to black people.
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Don't forget about the United Mine Workers though. They were very strong in the first half of the 20th century and most of their members lived in rural areas.
Greg gboozell at juno.com