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Updated: June 17, 2025
The lure of "greenbackism" was that it offered an opportunity for self-employment. But already in the sixties, it became clear that the workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual, but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers' cooperation.
"The present demand of the Crispin is steady employment and fair wages, but his future is self-employment" was one of their mottoes. During the seventies they repeatedly attempted to carry this motto into effect.
In the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. The protagonist of this most interesting and most idealistic striving of American labor was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," which reached its height in the middle of the eighties.
While it continued to avow sympathy with the "anti-monopoly" aspirations of the "producers," who fought for the opportunity of self-employment, it also declared that the interests of democracy will be best served if the wage earners organized by themselves.
The Homestead law opened up the road to self-employment by way of free land and agriculture. But in the sixties the United States was already becoming an industrial country. In abandoning the city for the farm, the wage earner would lose the value of his greatest possession his skill. Moreover, as a homesteader, his problem was far from solved by mere access to free land.
That if one-half the money expended for charity during the past fifty years, had been used to promote co-operative self-employment, poverty, tramps and ignorance, would now be things of the past. "To the people of the republic at large, must be taught the significance of the contrast between the war-like competitive system, and the peaceful methods of a co-operative association.
The great revolution has shifted the human living place from rural to urban, replaced a large measure of self-employment by wagery, lifted large segments of mankind out of scarcity into abundance, led to widespread migrations across Europe and from continent to continent, expanded nations and built empires.
Under such conditions, the laborer himself, having more leisure and unexpended vitality, will be stimulated to increase his available resources by cultivating his brain capacity for invention, thereby largely increasing his power to produce. "After many years, the rank and file of the workers in the labor unions, have learned, that self-employment is the key to the situation.
The units of a co-operative society, are sound and healthy to the core. Co-operation, insures self-employment. Self-employment brings freedom, ambition, independence, self-respect, leisure and education; with all the comforts and refinements of life. With these insured, the co-operator cannot be bought or corrupted by wealth.
But it departed radically from the English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive establishments which were to follow. Consumers' cooperation was to be but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment.
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