The Start, Not the End of History

In my work of building networks in opposition to authoritarianism, I often meet with fearful community leaders who view the threat of authoritarianism as a warning of an end of things; one after which all hope is lost. I understand the feeling. In moments I succumb to fear, too. But, I promise you, as I regularly promise myself, that nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that an authoritarian takeover means all hope is lost. In fact, seeing our struggle with authoritarians as a finite game that must terminate with a winner and a loser is a trap that has limited and will continue to limit our ability to win the democracy we want and deserve.

I tell people that building democracy is a never-ending process. When we view it as a finite game, we too easily end up, often beyond our notice, drawing our political bottom lines behind our own heels and in front of other people’s toes. And when this happens, democracy is the lesser for it, not just because of those it will fail to include, but because those failures will become avenues down which authoritarians will drive their agendas and compete for power.

But just saying this is often not enough. People, as I often say here, learn better from demonstration than they do from discourse. We require examples that begin with what is familiar to us, before we bridge to that which is yet unknown.

With that in mind, here is the example that does most to keep me seeking avenues and opportunities to get us to a more just and equitable future, even in fearful times.

In the generations before mine, many in my family worked in the Hawai’i sugar industry as laborers. They were paid next to nothing and subjected to dangerous and backbreaking conditions while living in densely packed, ethnically segregated labor camps. To enforce this system of exploitation, the bosses kept workers in debt to the only store in town, a store the company owned, and enforced order in the fields through the deployment of white men on horseback carrying whips, a coercive form of theater that rarely saw a lash fall on workers, but effectively chilled organizing for a generation.

Back then, Hawai’i was a banana republic ruled by a one-party, white dominated Republican oligarchy enriched by sugar and pineapple. Under the rule of oligarchs, the Masters and Servants Act was institutionalized in 1850, legalizing indentured servitude and the mass importation of foreign labor. Agricultural workers in Hawai’i were subjugated by means they could not have anticipated nor fully understood before they arrived.

Roads into traditional politics were completely closed to nearly all of the majority non-white population. If workers wanted power, labor organizing appeared to be the only answer, so workers, given no other options, fought for a union, and they did it believing that the wins they would score would benefit future generations, not their own. The way they fought, and how they learned from losing until they won, offers insights into what may lie ahead of us as we fight to preserve the democratic potential of the U.S.

The agricultural workforce was built on the foundation of recruitment from China, Japan, Korea, and eventually the Philippines. Workers were segregated by ethnicity and encouraged to compete across ethnic lines in everything from sports leagues to winning bonuses by outworking others, effectively suppressing cross-ethnic organizing. In this context, each new wave of labor recruitment from Asia threatened the one before as the newly arrived workers could be used to replace workers in the previous waves of migration if they were uncooperative.

When WWII broke out, Hawai’i sugar workers saw an opportunity in a crisis. The war caused repression to rise. Many in my family had to change their names, from Sumiko to Sue, Osamu to Sam, Kazue to Evelyn, in order to escape persecution. But the war also effectively shut down labor recruitment from the Asian markets bosses had been exploiting, making established immigrant laborers indispensable to the sugar industry. This was most clearly demonstrated by the fact that while some Japanese Americans in Hawai’i were interned during the war, they were not interned en masse. The sugar and pineapple industries couldn’t afford to lose workers to internment and, in fact, had to turn to enforced child labor as the war waged on and some immigrant workers joined the military.

These conditions inspired hope and kicked off waves of labor organizing leading up to great sugar strike of 1946. The organizing came together during the war, and ended in the strike which lasted for 79 days. It was the first successful farm labor strike in U.S. history.

The strike did not, by itself, bring the down the agribusiness-based oligarchy. However, it weakened it significantly and created avenues to social mobility that would eventually pay off for immigrant workers in more than wage and hour improvements. Increased wages helped the children of the strike generation to move up the class ladder and eventually become the keystone bloc in popular politics in Hawai’i, leading the way to more democratic expansion.

The fight to win a union wasn’t a one or two step process. Workers first needed to disentangle themselves from plantation dominated cultural dynamics that helped to support their exploitation. Chief among them was cross-ethnic competition.

Because of that competition, the first attempts to form a union were organized along segregated ethnic lines, with Japanese and Filipino workers forming separate unions. This leaned too far into the plantation's strategy of ethnic division and competition, and away from the fundamental class-based power imbalances that ethnic competition helped to strengthen.

But, living up to the credo, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, workers eventually crossed ethnic divisions to form what amounted to a race union. The binding agent was everybody not white against the whites. This evolved over time into a class consciousness supporting a class union that became stronger as it moved away from ethnicity because doing so allowed it to drive defections of Portuguese crew leaders (whose descendants are not considered white in Hawai'i today), and some Scottish managers from the plantation system. This, in turn, helped undermine the power of the plantation system and also happens to explain why my first name, Scot, is spelled with one “t," conceived in the hopes I would grow up to be like the Scotsmen who befriended my ancestors.

In order to win the strike, sugar workers needed to create alternative banking systems. These community banking collectives benefited the families most mired in debt to the company store, undermining one of the pillars of worker repression. They also created backyard garden collectives, community safety patrols, soup kitchens, and morale committees that organized hunting and fishing parties, dances, and other mutual aid and community building projects that built social capital, fostered unity in diversity, and made workers less dependent on the plantation system.

There's more to tell, but I'll stop there and let you simmer in this story. The legacy of the organizing of that time lives on in the contemporary culture of the islands and helps explain why, ever since statehood was won (the campaign for which was built on the foundation of labor organizing), the Hawai'i legislature has been dominated by the descendants of farmworkers. Today, only five Republicans hold seats in the Hawai’i state legislature out of a total of 76 seats in total.

The process of winning statehood, in turn, and statehood itself, won in in 1959, brought huge waves of democratization. The process was far from perfect. Most of the strike organizers whose children would become party leaders confined themselves to the realm of their own experiences on the plantation, limiting their spectrum of allies to those directly related to the plantation workforce. That excluded Native Hawaiians such that democracy is Hawai’i today is a fragmented experience, even under overwhelming liberal control.

Hawai’i is not a true democracy, but a middle class, settler-democracy in which indigenous people are among the most incarcerated, most houseless, and most impoverished ethnic groups, reminding us that winning a true democracy should be viewed as a never-ending process. When we think we’ve won, political bottom lines will form behind our own heels and in front of other people’s toes, no matter who we are, and this will open avenues for authoritarian competition.

Our story today is not the story of the sugar workers of 1940s Hawai’i. We are faced with different, far more complex challenges. But I view their story as a source of hope, of a group of people with very little power or opportunity to build it, using what they had, creating what was needed and scaling their efforts to the challenges facing them as they arose. They succeeded, not because they had all the answers at the start of the fight, but because fighting consolidated power teaches us about collective power and what it takes to build it. It also reminds us that when something must be done that has never been done before, allowing the lack of a comprehensive, detailed plan is conceding to defeat. We must, instead, be prophets of a future not yet known to us.

We all, dear readers, know that authoritarianism may consolidate across all branches of government in multiple states and even nationally. As it does, if it does, it’s up to us to decide whether it is 11:59 on the clock of democracy, or 12:01. I’m opting for 12:01. Movements form when people facing problems start looking in the same direction for solutions. That’s happening now at a massive scale. You can feel it in the anxiety and fear that is rising around us, making this time, perhaps, an opening for the kind of powerful, mass-based pro-democracy organizing that will finally allow us to reclaim the future.

Recommended reading: From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i, Haunani Kay Trask presents a different but related view of domination and control, and the struggle of a people to win sovereignty and rebuild a nation.