IS DEPRESSION—the inevitable culmination of ancient Anunnaki domination ideology—UPON US AGAIN?

CHRIS HARMAN interprets the Depression as a systemic crisis of capitalism itself.

THOM HARTMANN emphasizes the struggle between concentrated corporate wealth and democratic government—between organized money and We the People.

JANET KIRA LESSIN & I add another dimension to contextualize the Great Depression of ’29.  We employ the lens of the dichotomy between the PARTNERSHIP framework developed by RIANE EISLER, the work of MERLIN STONE, and the Ninmah-centered framework I have developed at here on EnkiSpeak.com. We view class struggle as part of an ancient contest between DOMINATION CONSCIOUSNESS and PARTNERSHIP CONSCIOUSNESS.

In our interpretation, domination consciousness finds ancient expression in hierarchical traditions we associate with Anunnaki rulers such as ENLIL/YAHWEH and with later authoritarian religious structures.

Partnership consciousness, which we associate with GREAT ANUNNAKI PRINCESS NINMAH, asks human beings to organize society around cooperation, nurture, mutual responsibility, and shared power.

1. 1870s–1928: ROBBER BARONS BUILT THE FIRST GILDED AGE

After the Civil War, American industry exploded. Railroads crossed the continent. Steel mills rose. Coal mines descended into the earth. Oil derricks pierced the landscape. Banks financed industrial empires. Workers created much of this wealth. But ownership concentrated it.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER built Standard Oil into a petroleum colossus.
ANDREW CARNEGIE constructed a steel empire.
J. P. MORGAN assembled financial and industrial combinations. Railroad corporations accumulated immense economic and political influence.

Workers faced another reality: long hours, industrial injuries, arbitrary firing, wage cuts, child labor, company spies, strikebreakers, private guards, police, militias, and sometimes federal troops. The workers did not simply submit.

Railroad workers struck in 1877. Haymarket became a symbol of the fight over the 8-hour day; my granduncle, Ben Kaplan, a vice president of the International Garment Workers’ Union, participated in the struggle.
Homestead steelworkers fought Carnegie’s company in 1892.
Pullman workers struck in 1894.
Miners, garment workers, railway workers, farm laborers, and others organized despite blacklists, injunctions, arrests, and violence.

The conflict crossed racial and ethnic boundaries but did not erase them.
Employers could exploit racial divisions, immigration status, religion, language, and competition for jobs.
White workers sometimes excluded Black workers and immigrants rather than joining them.
Racism thus served not only as prejudice but also as a weapon that divided people who might otherwise bargain together.

THOM HARTMANN interprets this era as one in which corporations accumulated extraordinary power and the Robber Barons increasingly penetrated American politics.

ROBERT REICH emphasizes a related economic process. By 1928, the richest one percent received nearly one-quarter of American income. When purchasing power concentrates at the top while ordinary households lack sufficient income to purchase what the economy can produce, workers compensate through longer work, additional family earners, or debt. That process cannot continue indefinitely.

CHRIS HARMAN argues that competition and accumulation are built into capitalism: each enterprise must accumulate, expand, cut costs, and compete or risk destruction by competitors. The system consequently contains a contradiction. Workers produce. Owners compete for profits. Production expands. But workers collectively may lack enough purchasing power to buy what they have produced.

DOMINATORS SAY, “Competition made America great. I invested the capital. I own the factory. If you refuse my wage, another worker will take it. If your union interferes with production, I will hire replacements. Property requires protection. Wealth belongs to those strong enough to accumulate it.” COOPERATOR COUNTER, “Your fortune, Mr. Bigshot, rests upon thousands of hands. Workers mine your coal, pour your steel, lay your rails, operate your machines, and purchase your products. We bargain together because individually we possess little power against a corporation. The economy exists because people cooperate.” 

1929–1932: WALL STREET CRASHED—WORKERS AND VETS PAID THE PRICE

Then the financial structure broke. Stock prices collapsed in 1929. Banks failed. Credit contracted.

Businesses closed. Factories reduced production. Employers fired workers who could no longer buy the goods factories produced.

Families lost wages. Farmers lost markets. Homeowners lost houses. Tenants lost rooms. People who had worked throughout their lives stood in breadlines.

The Depression spread across borders because capitalism had already created an interconnected world economy. International lending contracted.

Trade collapsed. Governments raised barriers.
Commodity-producing and colonial economies suffered when markets for their exports disappeared.

When most economic gains flowed upward, ordinary people lacked sufficient purchasing power.
Debt kept consumption going temporarily.
Wealth concentrated at the top poured into speculation. Eventually, debt and asset bubbles broke; monopoly capitalism could not restore equilibrium.

By 1932, American industrial production had fallen catastrophically, and unemployment had reached mass proportions.
Government faced a choice: Protect the existing structure and wait—or intervene.

President HERBERT HOOVER did intervene, but millions of Americans saw his measures as grossly inadequate to the scale of their suffering.

HOOVER SICCED MACARTHUR ON THE VETS FOR DEMANDING PROMISED BONUSES IMMEDIATELY

Republicans denied demands for relief.

In 1932, thousands of World War I veterans—the BONUS ARMY—came to Washington demanding early payment of bonuses promised for their military service.
They built camps and petitioned their government. Congress refused their demands.
Hoover ordered their removal. General DOUGLAS MACARTHUR led troops against the demonstrators.
Soldiers on horses attacked the vets with tear gas, bayonets, and tanks. MacArthur burned their camps.

Cooperators called out the controlling class: These veterans fought. Their children need food. A government that can protect banks and property should protect them and the rest of us too. This argument helped shape the 1932 election.

1930–1934: WE THE PEOPLE ORGANIZED

The phrase “We the People,” whom the Declaration of Independence declared should enjoy life and the pursuit of happiness, had, from the getgo of the Constitution, been perverted by America’s domination-obsessed elite into a pursuit of property.

When the last Depression the Wealthy created hit, the unemployed did not simply wait for Franklin Roosevelt to rescue them.

—They organized.

–Unemployed councils resisted evictions.

–Neighbors sometimes carried furniture back into homes after authorities removed it.

–Workers demonstrated for relief.

–Farmers organized against foreclosures.

–Veterans marched.

–Socialists, Communists, labor organizers, religious reformers, progressives, and unaffiliated citizens demanded action.

These movements differed sharply about what America should become. Communists sought revolutionary transformation.
Socialists demanded public ownership and economic democracy in varying forms.
Labor organizers sought collective bargaining. Populists and agrarian movements demanded relief from debt.
Reformers sought to make capitalism answerable to democratic government.

Their disagreements mattered. But so did their combined pressure.

Then 1934 erupted. Workers staged approximately 1,856 work stoppages.
Toledo auto-parts workers fought for collective bargaining.
Minneapolis truck drivers waged a militant strike.
West Coast longshoremen struck, helping produce a San Francisco general strike.
Hundreds of thousands of textile workers walked out.

Workers were demonstrating the power they had created themselves.

And something remarkable happened in the cotton South.
Black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers—people whom the racial caste system had been designed to keep apart—created the SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS’ UNION in Arkansas in 1934.
Socialists including H. L. MITCHELL helped organize it.

Black farmers joined white farmers.
White farmers joined Black farmers.
They discovered that the plantation owner who benefited when they hated one another had reason to fear what might happen when they recognized their common interests.
That is PARTNERSHIP expressed as political action.

Dominators denounced the democratic developments, declaring, “Keep them separated.
Tell the white worker the Black worker threatens him.
Tell the citizen the immigrant threatens him.
Tell one religion another religion threatens it.
A divided workforce bargains cheaply.”

Cooperators contested the dominators’ declaration.
The cooperators contended, Landlords collect from everyone, businesses break all our budgets, hunger hits us all.
Let us organize, synergize, and disempower the privileged.

The Depression was teaching Americans a lesson that elites throughout history have understood:
ISOLATED PEOPLE CAN BE CONTROLLED. ORGANIZED PEOPLE BECOME POWER.

 

1929–1941: RACE & CLASS DIVIDED WORKERS—AND WORKERS FOUGHT BACK

Black Americans entered the Depression already burdened by Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, lynching, discrimination, and exclusion from many unions and occupations.
In 1930, only a tiny fraction of Black industrial and transportation workers belonged to unions.
Some AFL unions excluded Black workers altogether.

FDR DID NOT SIMPLY GIVE BLACK AMERICANS A VICTORY; ORGANIZED BLACK AMERICANS FORCED THE PRESIDENT TO ACT

The emerging CIO increasingly challenged that practice by organizing mass-production workers across racial and ethnic boundaries.
It did not abolish racism, but industrial unionism created spaces in which Black and white workers could discover that the same corporation employed—and exploited—both.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans faced another assault.
During the Depression, authorities encouraged or coerced hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican origin to leave the United States.
Some people expelled to Mexico were United States citizens.
Workers who had been welcomed when American employers wanted their labor became unwanted when unemployment made their presence politically convenient to attack.

Amerindians confronted another legacy: generations of conquest, land seizure, forced assimilation, reservation administration, and the allotment system.
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 reversed important elements of the allotment policy and encouraged forms of tribal government and self-government.
Yet even this “Indian New Deal” operated through a federal government that retained enormous authority over Native nations.

Pressure continued from below. One of its greatest practitioners was A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
In 1941, Randolph threatened a massive march on Washington unless the government confronted discrimination in defense employment.
Roosevelt resisted. Randolph persisted. The threatened march grew.
Roosevelt finally issued EXECUTIVE ORDER 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries and federal defense employment and establishing a Fair Employment Practice Committee.

Dominators automatically responded with the ancient Anunnki shiboleth: Wait. This is not the proper time. Do not disrupt national unity. Accept gradual change. Those in authority will decide when you are ready.
Cooperators, champions of Great Goddess Ninmah (though probably ignorant of her contribution to their partnership-orientations, responded, We have waited. We work in this country. We defend this country. We belong to this country. If you refuse to hear us separately, we will arrive together.”

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT won the presidency in 1932 amid a national economic emergency similar in its inception to the current Trump Depression we have entered.

Banks were failing then; will they fail now?
Unemployment devastated communities: will AI accelerate unemployment?
Farmers faced ruin, as they do nowadays.
The political legitimacy of the existing economic order had begun to crack, as ours is now.

Roosevelt brought experimentation

He closed banks temporarily while the government stabilized the financial system.

HIS CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS put young men to work.

The TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY brought public investment, electricity, flood control, and development into an impoverished region.

Emergency relief expanded.

Agricultural programs attempted to raise farm prices.

The federal government accepted responsibilities that previous administrations had often treated as matters for individuals, charities, states, or markets.

FRANCES PERKINS

One indispensable figure stood beside Roosevelt: FRANCES PERKINS.
Perkins had witnessed the aftermath of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
She became a labor reformer and, in 1933, the first woman to serve in a United States Cabinet.
As Secretary of Labor, she helped make workers’ security a federal responsibility.

ROOSEVELT RELEASED RESTRAINED REFORM 

FDR was neither the solitary author of the New Deal nor a revolutionary overthrowing capitalism.
Roosevelt’s New Deal acknowledged that capitalism could no longer manage the crisis without systematic state intervention.
Although he limited his intervention, he stabilized and reorganized capitalism rather than replacing it. Nonetheless, his reforms helped create conditions under which prosperity could become more broadly distributed and government could become a counterweight to concentrated corporate power.

Partnership Partisans, drawing on the ancient Anunnaki counter-ideology of cooperation to balance competition, commented, The political center moved because organized people moved it. Roosevelt was a leader—but he was also a politician responding to pressure. But saving banks is insufficient. Save families. Employ people. Feed children. Protect workers. Build what communities need. FDR increasingly chose the second path—but never completely.

Dominators demanded that the government restore confidence in business, so commerce could again command the economy.

 1934–1938: WAGNER & CARMAKERS DROVE WORKER POWER INTO POLITICS

Senator ROBERT F. WAGNER pushed the NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 1935, creating the National Labor Relations Board and protecting private-sector workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively.

CIO UNION BEAT FLINT’S CARMAKER BOSSES

The CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO) of workers on assembly-line steelmaking operations, rubber manufacturing, packinghouse processing, and electricity maintenance used the Wagner Act to beat the elite who controlled automaking.  

On December 30, 1936, General Motors workers occupied Fisher Body Plant No. 1.
They sat down inside it.
That prevented General Motors from simply replacing them with strikebreakers and restarting production.

Families and supporters outside supplied food.
Women organized support and emergency activities.

Police attempted to intervene.

The conflict spread.
For 44 days, workers occupied crucial GM facilities.
Then General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers.

One of the largest corporations on Earth had been forced to negotiate with people who, individually, could have been fired at will.
Collectively, they had stopped production. They lived solidarity.

Car maker bosses blasted out their Anunnaki propaganda: We own the plant.  We own the machines. Leave my property. I can replace every one of you.

The CIO scolded the car makers: You own the machines. But machines do not build automobiles by themselves. We supply the labor that turns property into wealth. If you bargain as a corporation, we shall bargain as a union.”

The balance of power shifted because workers organized enough power to make negotiation necessary.

The New Deal created institutions that transformed American life.

SOCIAL SECURITY established federal old-age insurance and other protections.

PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT built roads, schools, parks, bridges, public buildings, and infrastructure.

FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE AND MAXIMUM HOURS STANDARDS for many workers. 

The original Social Security system excluded large categories of employment, including agricultural labor and domestic service.
Those exclusions disproportionately affected Black workers and other marginalized populations.

New Deal agricultural policy hurt people at the bottom when programs intended to raise crop prices gave landowners incentives to remove acreage from production and displace tenants and sharecroppers.
The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union arose from this contradiction.

Native peoples gained a partial reversal of allotment and assimilation policies but not full freedom from federal paternalism.

Mexican and Mexican-American communities endured repatriation and deportation.

Black Americans obtained jobs and relief through New Deal programs while simultaneously confronting discrimination, segregation, and political compromises with the Jim Crow South.

Women who performed unpaid household labor remained largely invisible in economic measures centered on formal wage employment.

THE NEW DEAL EXPANDED DEMOCRATIC ECONOMIC POWER BUT LEFT OLD HIERARCHIES STANDING

Unemployment remained enormous, and the economy suffered another severe downturn in 1937–1938.

Full recovery depended upon the massive state spending and industrial mobilization associated with World War II.

The New Deal changed who government protected, what government attempted, and what citizens could demand, even if it did not independently abolish unemployment or capitalism’s crises.

8. 1930s–2026: CAN ORGANIZED PEOPLE COUNTER ORGANIZED WEALTH?

Is depression—the inevitable culmination of Anunnaki domination ideology—upon us again?

Today’s multinational corporations, financial institutions, technologies, global supply chains, immigration system, unions, social programs, central banks, and communications systems differ profoundly from those of the first Gilded Age. But the questions remain:
Who owns productive wealth?
Who receives productivity gains?
How much political influence follows concentrated wealth?
Can workers organize?
Can employers retaliate?
Who bears the cost of tariffs, financial crises, unemployment, and economic restructuring?
Are immigrants blamed for conditions created by employers and economic policy?
Do racial and religious divisions prevent workers from recognizing common economic interests?
Does government serve concentrated private wealth—or discipline it?
Does economic freedom mean primarily the freedom to accumulate unlimited private power, or does it include ordinary people’s freedom to obtain housing, health care, education, food, employment, security, and a voice at work?

REICH warns us to watch income distribution. His historical comparison between 1928 and later peaks of inequality asks, What happens when purchasing power drains away from the broad population while debt and speculation expand.

HARMAN tells us not to mistake the misconduct of particular billionaires for the whole problem.
A competitive economic system can force accumulation, cost-cutting, consolidation, and recurrent crisis even when individual capitalists behave legally.

HARTMANN asks the democratic question: DOES THE ECONOMY SERVE THE PEOPLE, OR DO THE PEOPLE SERVE THE ECONOMY?

FDR eventually pushed the question still further.
In 1944, he proposed an ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS—including the right to useful employment at adequate pay, decent housing, medical care, education, protection from economic insecurity, and opportunities for farmers and businesses free from monopolistic domination.

OUR NINMAH–EISLER–STONE–LESSIN SYNTHESIS carries the query beyond economics.

For millennia, domination systems have taught people to arrange themselves vertically:
RULER OVER SUBJECT.
MASTER OVER SERVANT.
OWNER OVER WORKER.
MAN OVER WOMAN.
CONQUEROR OVER CONQUERED.
ORTHODOXY OVER DISSENTER.
ONE RACE OR CASTE OVER ANOTHER.

The historical question before us remains observable: Do human beings prosper best by concentrating power—or by sharing it?

The Great Depression provides one answer.

The Robber Barons accumulated.

Banks speculated.

Workers borrowed.

COMPERSION, COOPERATION AND PARTNERSHIP OF WE THE PEOPLE CAN FREE US FROM THE RECURRENT DEPRESSIONS DOMINATION DEMENTIA DELIVERS

The Anunnaki domination ideology that we Earthlings have had imposed upon us from our beginnings is challenged by a counterforce: compersion- empathy for all people, beings, and the planet.

The Anunnaki hero Ninmah and Earthling prophets like Gautama, Jesus, and AOC champion a challenge to domination consciousness.  These heros champion the partnership of WE THE PEOPLE.

We the People echo the cause of the unpaid Colonial soldier, Shays.  Shays’ modern counterparts re-appeared in the spirit of the vets challenging the Republican Oligarchs of their day.

Our World War I vets fought the dominators.

Tenants resisted.

Farmers organized.

Black and white sharecroppers formed unions.

Mexican and Mexican-American workers organized.

Industrial workers occupied factories.

Women sustained strikes and pushed reform.

Socialists, labor organizers, civil-rights leaders, and reformers forced ideas once dismissed as radical into national debate.

Frances Perkins carried workers’ demands into the Cabinet.

Robert Wagner converted labor demands into federal law.

A. Philip Randolph demonstrated that even a sympathetic president could be forced farther toward justice by organized people.

Franklin Roosevelt learned that presidential leadership could harness movements rising beneath him.

CAN THE PEOPLE FORCE AMERICA TO EMBRACE EMPATHY & PARTNERSHIP?

Dominators demur: Compete. Accumulate. Obey. Blame the person beneath you. Fear the immigrant. Fear the other race. Fear the union. Worship wealth. Trust the ruler. Leave economic decisions to those who own the economy; Partnership partisans reply, Organize. Bargain. Vote. March. Protect minorities. Welcome differences. Share knowledge. Restrain monopoly. Reward work. Protect the vulnerable. Build institutions that make freedom possible for people who possess neither fortunes nor armies.”

Ninmah’s partnership principle asks the question with which we began this post: WHO DOES THE ECONOMY SERVE?

If our answer is We the People, history tells us that saying the words are insufficient.

People must organize enough economic, political, and cultural power to make power to the people a reality.

The New Deal did not complete that project.

IT WAS PROOF THAT ORGANIZED PEOPLE COULD BEGIN IT.