>When people think it’s relatively easy to find or keep a job, they’re more
>likely to kick up a fuss.
yes....
>Yes, it’s true there was all kinds of political ferment in the
>1930sthough in places like Germany and Italy it took a rather uncongenial
>form.
whooooops! are we doing the fascism has it's roots in working class thang here, ignoring the research regarding the role of the landed elite and the rising professional/managerial classes? i'll admit that gunter remmling warped my brain on this topic, so pls enlighten.....
the problem is that folks on the left think that there will be some sort of uniform response, that the contradictions we note otherwise will somehow dissolve and that people will see things in their *reality*. and that, as you know, is a lacuna in marxist theories of ideology. obviously, this sort of thinking derives from marx who argued, basically, that when you have nothing to lose but your chains......
for me, personally, that was true to my experience. i spent a portion of the 1980s living in a community in which there were utterly no jobs. nada. the only thing the paper had to advertise was, "seeking work" ads which they ran for free as some sort of community boosterism b.s. i stood in huge unemployment lines, worked for places that shut down without warning and saw factories board up their doors, knocking 2000ppl out of work in one fell swoop. i even got to be homeless for awhile (tho in good american fashion, i blame myself for that, telling myself that had i just done this or that..)
that kind of experience certainly did something for me, tho i was already moving in that direction earlier: in high school my history teacher showed us a cartoonish film (anyone ever see it; it was done in blues/grays and geometric figures like the one on the afl-cio site thta max linked to the other day?)/ it was about marxism/communism/socialism and it was, apparently, innocuous enough for me to say, in response to the utopian vision it presented, "hey what's wrong with that?!" he never answered. so, i was somehow predisposed even before the film, in part b/c of a teacher's strike. one of my earlier history profs was ranting about how students today were all apathetic and students in his day would never have sat still for the strike. so, i organized a sit down strike in support. why? id on't know entirely, except that that teacher played a part, as did the wider cultural milieu in which protests of the sixties were commodified in such a fashion that it seemed like the thing to do. (an argument *for* the positive aspects of the commodification of insurgent politics which some here won't appreciate. hell, even i don't appreciate it. but, fact is, virginia slims ads had something to do with my budding post-feminism!
the problem, i think, with the argument that you present is this. yes, it's true that when people's expectations are on the rise, a dose of reality will make them say, "wait a minute. this isn't how it's supposed to work. the economy is flush, where's my piece of the pie? i tightened my belt during hard times for you, boss, but now it's your turn."
such thinking depends on the promulgation of the claim that there is a social contract that underwrites the relationship b/t labor-capital, that the relationship is one of reciprocity and equality in the exchange relationship.
a good example is one i encountered while doing interviews with people who'd lost their jobs and who were enrolled in community college as part of the benefits extended to displaced workers. unemployed Seneca Army depot workers found out about my work. they literally asked me to interview them. heck, they even started suggesting that i do my research on them or change my angle to address them. (dig this: that experience is why i don't buy the argument that people social scientists work with are passive sheep who can be swayed by the opinions of the social scientists)
the form .mil workers were ticked. when you're raised in a rural working class community, you're generally told that the thing to do is 1. get a factory job, unionized or not they're are/were considered better than other kinds of jobs 2. get a job with the gov't. or 3. go into the service. those were, when i was growing up, the kinds of jobs our parents told us to go after, since, for them, that was a step up on the ladder. so, the Seneca Depot employees were ticked b/c their assumption about the stability of gov work were torn to shreds.
this is an example of the kind of response amg workers who, during the good times, realize that the "social contract" is a myth. an especially acute realization when it comes to .gov since the .gov isn't supposed to even operate according to the laws of the market.
the problem is, i think, that the attitudes and demands that result from such events is a kind of reformism.
i don't see how the 1950s and 1960s saw some sort of unproblematic set of events one way or another. that is, during the good times, there were a swath of people writing about America's Century and The End of Ideology and how we'd achieved the best of all possible worlds. that kind of intellectual work certainly laid the groundwork for the response: "america, love it or leave it" yes?
True, there were undercurrents of dissent: red diaper babies, the beats, people like john updike and truman capote writing about the slow brew of pathologies that swirled beneath the surface of the American psyche, and so forth. True, the end of the 60s saw a profound rise in labor militancy, a movement that was beginning to address the racial divides.
But the predominance of "it's the best of all possible worlds" sentiment, i think, overrode any *real*, *radical* (as in getting to the root of) criticism.
i guess i think that the problem is that these positions, posed as grand/either or's, seem to view the economy and the terrain of work as *the* deciding factor.
i suspect that it's best to look at the economy as playing a role as catalyst in terms of whether or not it will spark greater labor militancy and political/cultural criticisms and demands for more than reformist change.
i think we also need to historicize marx. and not just by saying so, but by actually doing the empirical work that is required. enough historians have shown us that part of the insurgency agst the rise of industial capitalism was founded on a kind of romanticization of life prior to the rise of the factory and time-discipline.
but that's not what motivates people today. what people are motivated by today is the romanticization of entrepreneurial capitalism, as you are pointing out in a different way. (which is why i find these conspiracy theories of the illuminati exceedinlgy interesting, tho no time to pursue my thoughts here.)
i know from my own research on unemployed blue collar and managerial/professional workers that the question of whether folks will become critical of the system is very complex. one of the reasons i started looking at managerial workers were some offhand comments form "survivors" of downsizing about the need for unions. comments like that knocked me off my pumps! here were the "survivors" conceding that unions might not be such a bad thing after all!
but, when i spent a year with the unemployed and then a year with "survivors" at NCR, that sentiment was one among many. the ppl at NCR were ticked off. they saw many of their downsizings result from the buy out of NCR by ATT--a fiasco that scored some peoplle a lot of dough and cost thousands of others their jobs. there was a cultural of criticism amg mgrs that was easy for them to engage in b/c even managers have bosses. as such, they often, as john k noted very humorously, blame the boss for their problems. in this case, it's a discourse in which they blame CEOs and BoD's for their idiotic decisions, idiotic precisely because CEO and BoDs aren't in the trenches like they are. (ha. always made me laugh to hear them spew that!)
people held these contradictory thoughts together rather tenuously and when pressed to explore the contradictions, they were at a loss for words-- people who had no trouble articulating themselves on a variety of topics otherwise.
the downsized one might expect would be even more ticked about everything than the survivors. not necessarily so. they were all very capable of explaining the structural reasons for their plight. they largely blamed the economy as well as the short term, screwed up rationality of "stock market management".
rationally, they could sit down and tell you all about the various economic/political factors that led to their downsizing and why it was something that was beyond their control/not their fault. in the end, however, they blamed themselves. despite their capacity to explain their situation in terms of the macro/structutral operations of an economy that they clearly understood as working the way it worked because it's *supposed* to work that way, they couldn't not move beyond the tendency to prosecute themselves and others on behalf of the "myth of merit" which we all hold dearly, but mgmt particularly so since they wouldn't have gotten to the level of head of HR or head of R&D were it not for their firm commitment to that ideology.
so, any critical capacity they had was dashed on the shoals of individualism.
so, you have wider cultural ideologies to contend with. but you also have immediate political manifestations of those ideologies which play in and through and with them in complex, sometimes contradictory ways. i have come to see the management ideologies spawned by folks like Tom Peters as, in part, laying the ground work for the rise of the contemporary "new rules of work" ideologies. to put it simplistically:
1. the social contract once existed and it was good. 2. it was also bad. 3. the social contract is dying/dead. 4. it's a good thing too, since it meant bloated bureaucratic and inefficient capitalist organizations and slow growth. 5. we need to get back to the future and resuscitate some of the older rules of the entrepreneurial, can-do spirit of early capitalism before big bad .gov mucked things up. 6. voila! the new rules of work.
with that sort of thing swirling all about the downsized managers i spent time with, it was exceedingly difficult fro them to hold to any budding structural analysis of their plight. in the end, they saw the problems they faced as individual and organizational level problems that could only be addressed at that level. there was nothing to be done about the operations of a complex global economy, save for latching on the new rules of work in one way or another. and so they did.
well, that was a ramble.
my point is, again, i think that economic conditions are better seen as a catalyst that can push structural analyses forward in various degrees or, of course, simply laterally and even backward.
ick! that last statement sure reveals the eschatology i harbor!
kelley