"One Market Under God, and Heaven Help Us All"

[Jim heartfield]

I agree with Yoshie that the fifties are not much to write home about,
either in the US or in Britain.

In both cases the social contract meant consolidating the core of the
indigenous male working class into respectability and loyalty. This was
the resolution of the pre-war class conflict - incorporation of the
core, with the resultant emphasis on the exclusion of the periphery.

(Those who assert the common cause of organised labour with the
oppressed have to deal with the actual history of discrimination at the
worklplace.) 

However, the attitude to the mid-century is determined by the attitude
to the present.

For New Labour types over here, and I guess 'New Democrats' over there,
everything since is progress, so the mid-century compromise represents
everything that is wrong. If you endorse the present set-up, then it
stands to reason that it is superior to what it replaced.

I see things rather differently.

What has happened since is not that the excluded have been included, but
that the included white working class has been excluded.

The recessions of the early eighties and the early nineties dislocated
all the elements of the social consensus. The family wage was
effectively abolished. The intermediation of the labour movement between
labour and capital was dismantled. Representation in social democratic
parties was removed.

It appears that our own times are less discriminatory, and in a sense
they are. Racial and sexual divisions mean less because the relative
privilege of the core of the working class has been dismantled.

But that has not been through the elevation of those 'minorities' that
were excluded, but by the demotion of the white working class.

Nostalgists like Thomas Frank, Cornel West, Kevin Phillips etc have an
exaggerated view of the advantages of the prior dispensation because
they are unhappy with the present. However, they do have a point. The
boundaries of the socially included have been narrowed, not extended.

Has education improved? No, I suspect not. If Britain is anything to go
by, the university system has been reduced to a mechanism for reducing
youth unemployment. The multi-cultural syllabus is as awkwardly
ideological as the previous one, if not more so.

In message <v04210100b5a4db751f30@[140.254.112.107]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Try as I might, in my sympathy for cult stud Thomas Frank, I cannot 
>feel nostalgic for the mid-century "middle-class republic" of Truman 
>& Eisenhower, segregated lunch counters & valium-popping housewives, 
>the Korean War & the CIA coup against Mossadegh, etc.  The "social 
>contract of mid-century" did make the "family wage" possible for a 
>significant number of American working men, but the bargain involved 
>swindling women out of war-time gains, putting an end to union 
>organizing in the South, and swearing the loyalty oath to 
>anticommunism at home & abroad.  And what's ironic is that the very 
>success of the anticommunist part of the social contract eventually 
>helped to destroy the contract itself.  No more Cold War = no 
>necessity to sustain the expensive Welfare State; no more communism & 
>populism abroad = plenty of low-wage labor abroad; successful 
>capitalist showcases like Japan & West Germany (+ East Asian Tigers) 
>= increasing international competition.  The Third Way used to mean 
>Swedish-type Social Democracy, the NIEO, etc.; now the Third Way 
>means Clinton, Blair, & Schroeder.

-- 
James Heartfield

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