On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 05:31 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> At 5:39 PM -0500 2/15/03, Steven McGraw wrote:
>> >What is the use of pitting the one against the other?
>>
>> I am not pitting anyone against anyone else. The professional and
>> the laboring class are already in competition.
>
> Not so, as the national labor market is segmented. If Martin Jay, for
> instance, had become a longshoreman, rather than a professor of
> history at US Berkeley, he would have been competing with other
> longshoremen, though in this trade competition would have been limited
> on the West Coast by one of the most powerful and left-wing unions in
> the United States. Longshoremen and professors of history do not
> directly compete with one another in the same segment of the national
> labor market. For the welfare of longshoremen and all other workers
> whose job requirements do not specify a PH.D. in history, it was a
> good thing that Jay and other professors of history did not choose to
> go into their trades.
>
> What competition exists between workers of different strata and
> segments takes place indirectly through the budget allocations of the
> federal, state, and local governments, often in times of recessions
> and cutbacks (like now). The power elite love to pit public sector
> workers (including college professors) against "taxpayers," as well as
> to pit all sections of the public sector against one another (e.g.,
> education vs. home care vs. garbage pickup vs...you get the picture).
> Rightist demagogues (whether or not there is a recession) often seek
> to cut state funding of all sorts by using a kind of populist-sounding
> rhetoric, in the USA and elsewhere. E.g., Let's not spend tax dollars
> on elitist works of art that offend ordinary Americans. Let's
> privatize public utilities in poor nations and charge user fees, as
> they do not reach the poorest of the poor anyhow. Etc. Falling for
> faux-populist demagogues only hurts us all, however.
> --
>
i also wonder how someone like david montgomery fits into this. montgomery was an old cp shop floor organizer, got black-listed, got a phd in history and is now arguably the greatest of american labor historians (pace foner), with tenure at yale. he also is one of the best rally/demo speakers i've ever seen in my life, and he takes his sabbaticals and goes around the world working with unions and other trade organizations. if half the rest of the yale faculty had a quarter of his conviction, yale TAs would have had a union years ago.
j