CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Thanks to Trump, the Cruel Hand of Exploitation is Invisible No More

The First Troops in Homestead. Thure de Thulstrup, Public domain, via Wikimedia.

We’ve always had inequality. Go back to feudal Europe — the peasant bound to the lord’s land, the serf who could not leave, the villager whose labor fed a castle he would never enter. The hierarchy was absolute, brutal, and barely concealed. But it was also local. The feudal lord and the peasants he exploited breathed the same air and walked beneath the same trees. Even the most distant king knew that peasants had pitchforks, because kings had felt the sting of them. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England. The Jacquerie in France in 1358. The German Peasants’ War of 1524. The powerful have always, eventually, been reminded that proximity to the people they exploit carries consequences.

The Industrial Revolution moved that relationship indoors. Factory owners and workers shared, at minimum, the same building, even if management looked down from a balcony onto the production floor. The Gilded Age robber barons — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick — were despised figures whose names and faces were known. When Henry Frick sent Pinkerton agents to break the Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania in 1892, it was a brutal and very visible act of class warfare. The strikers fought back. People died on both sides. The relationship between power and the people it ground down remained, however cruelly, clear.

Then came the great distancing. Globalization moved the factory floor to the other side of the world. Financialization, in the 1980s and 90s, moved the source of wealth out of production entirely and into instruments — derivatives, hedge funds, leveraged buyouts — that no ordinary........

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