> "They've allowed": What in the hell does this mean? All 280+million
> u.s.
> workers got together in a big field and voted to let the capitalists do
> as they please? This is just a variation on the old Trotskyist
> explanation of "sell-out leaders," and explanation which explains
> nothing since it itself needs explanation.
Hey, comrade! Chill out! What is it in what I said that betrayed the sinister influence of the Goateed One? Or are you just looking for "Trots under the bed" these days? (Besides, just because a proposed explanation E1 of a fact F also needs an explanation E2 of it doesn't mean that E1 is disqualified as an explanation of F. The sun's heat is a perfectly good explanation for plants growing on earth, even though we need also to explain why the sun is hot. We can't explain everything at once.)
I don't think there is any point any more in denying that American workers just haven't been successful in managing to build and sustain a conventional-style workers' movement. Whether it was sell-out leaders, the rank-and-file, or sinister influences of aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy, it just hasn't worked out.
Just yesterday, NY Times columnist Bob Herbert pointed out the latest piece of evidence, at <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/opinion/05HERB.html>:
"The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University: 'The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003.'
"Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: 'This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent.'
"The study said: 'In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation.'
"In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners."
This couldn't possibly have happened if there were a functioning labor movement. Perhaps the time has come to "think outside the box," as the capitalist boys and girls say -- come up with an entirely different kind of labor movement, with an entirely different approach from conventional union organizing.
> Many have noted how class-conscious the u.s. ruling class has been from
> the beginning: See James Madison, Federalist No. 10. (I think but it's
> been a while since I read it, that Federalist # 51 is also
> illuminating.) But that is a generalized fact, and probably different
> explanations are needed for it at different times in u.s. history.
>
> A pure speculation: The U.S. ruling class has always "felt" itself to
> be
> in a more precarious position than have other ruling classes on the
> whole. _If_ this were the case, then one would need to start looking
> for
> what in the dynamic of u.s. history would be the material grounds for
> such a consciousness. I'm not a historian, and I wouldn't even make a
> guess at that, but perhaps some historian has???
I think they have, although I am by no means an expert in this field. Perhaps the lack of a feudal historical background, which is often cited as a reason for the absence of a strong socialist movement in the U.S., has also made U.S. capitalists feel insecure about their dominance of the country. At any rate, if I were them, I would be feeling pretty secure at this point, at least about my dominance of the domestic working class. Current events in Iraq, though, might make me a bit nervous.
BTW, just recently I've been revisiting a tome that has been gathering dust in my library, _The Divided Left_, by Milton Cantor (published in 1978). Here's a passage that bears on this topic, I think:
"Still another fact merits a final mention: working-class indifference or hostility to the New Left, indeed to radicalism generally. In explaining the reasons for the Movement's disappearance, it bears repeating that radicals were deprived of what was always thought the essential revolutionary base. America's union bureaucrats enjoyed the sun at Miami Beach, and making capitalism work more efficiently governed their strategic vision. Much like Gompers then and George Meany today, they believed in a fundamental identity of interests between business and labor, and endorsed goals of liberal capitalism: anti-Communism, social welfare, democratic practices; and both worried over workplace insurgency. Nor did it cease in the 1960s. Rather, labor's resistance to management practices intensified. Usually it took the form of controlling the pace of work, combating unsafe conditions, establishing production-output quotas, organizing slowdowns, evading speedups, sabotaging machinery, and comparable forms of resistance, rather than direct confrontation with corporate power. But such tactics, such fitful working-class dissidence, should not suggest revolutionary restlessness. Labor was not even nominally socialist. It lacked the insurrectionary voice which, given the opportunity, would--like E. P. Thompson's yeomanry or Richard Cobb's artisans of pre-revolutionary Paris--prompt rebellion. True enough, its most depressed elements, such as farm workers and coal miners, did have a real sense of class identity, but class antagonisms were only infrequently expressed and they were articulated, as Gramsci noted, 'within the existing fundamental structure.' Hence even those elements within the labor movement which had a sense of their identity were contained. Their goals were mediated and formulated--to some extent reformulated, adapted to their situation--by the dominant class ideology and its complex network of values and institutions.
"Labor's tactics, to be sure, indicated a declining respect for the work ethic, which reflected a comparable decline in society at large. [Parenthetical note -- that may just have been a phenomenon of the '70s, when Cantor was writing. I'm not sure that the "work ethic" in the U.S. hasn't recovered somewhat since then. But maybe the term "work ethic" is too vague to be able to say for sure. -- JJ] But this did not produce class solidarity or a challenge to the dominant social ethic. It failed to threaten a value system which measured class divisions primarily in terms of income and material possessions. [Another parenthetical note -- I think this is a very important key -- JJ] By the 1960s, there were obvious changes in the occupational structure of American capitalism--with the sharp growth of white-collar and service workers as well as the rise of a 'new middle class' of salaried wage earners--unlike an 'old middle class' of self-employed small entrepreneurs. But the changes in class structure reflected the growth, not the breakdown, of capitalist economic organization. These changes possibly rendered some dominant cultural forms obsolete, but the interaction between structure and consciousness was uninterrupted. Consequently, middle-class ideology, while undergoing adjustments, remained relatively stable. It still transmuted labor's values, consciousness, and institutions. The result: the self-legitimizing capacity of industrial capitalism went on apace and radicals over the last decade [and in the intervening decades up to today -- JJ] became more isolated from the work force than at any other time in our history." (pp. 221-2)
> To sum up: The questions being asked in this thread are improper
> questions _unless_ it is recognized that no 500 word answer is even
> going to provide a start in answering them. We can speculate, & note
> various small patches of the elephant, but it is obscurantist to
> attempt
> to offer a full answer in an e-mail post.
I think we recognize that we can't answer this kind of question in a few hundred words. I don't think Ulhas was asking us to write a book to answer him -- there have been tons of books already written on this question, and he can look them up as well as we can. I think he was prodding us to think about the subject and make up our own minds -- get those brain juices flowing. And I think we are responding.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt