| dc.description.abstract | This study focused on one aspect of the rise of monopoly corporate capitalism, the labor ideology of employers. Between 1880 and 1910, a period when American social thought was consciously reformulated, a prominent capitalist elite exercised increasing material and ideological power over the remainder of society. The development of a skillfully articulated and forcefully promoted labor ideology provided an important tool for labor control and thus formed an integral part of the maturing process of capitalism. Through three case studies, the National Association of Manufactuers, the Pullman Strike, and the Taylor System of Scientific Management, this work demonstrated the historical development and social role of ideology as a mechanism of class rule in the U.S. It examined the class bias in the legitimating rhetoric of capitalist elites and the means by which that bias was pressed upon the laboring population and the larger society. In this period, employer labor ideology formed a great part of the social body of knowledge which served as an objective description of labor, provided the vocabulary, circumscribed the debate between capital and labor, and determined, in part, the consciousness of all members of society. | en_US |
