On 2011-07-13, at 12:56 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I believe Marv disagreed on this but what I think the last 40 years can be described as a period of unrelenting capitalist pressure to reduce the wage level.
I don't at all disagree there has been unrelenting pressure on US wages over the LAST three or four decades, in part due to outsourcing made possible by the opening of vast new pools of cheap labour in China and the fSU without which the "neoliberal" political offensive against the trade unions would have not have been as effective. My comment was with reference instead to the FIRST three decades of the postwar period, meant to illustrate that the relationship between rising and falling wage levels and rising and declining radical politics is not as strict as you've been suggesting. I wrote:
...the US working class became less rather than more of a threat to capitalism during the great period of rising properity which followed the Second World War. The long decline of the radical left passed both through a stage of rapidly rising wages during roughly the first 35 years of this period and then of "steady downward pressure (on them) over the past 35 years…"
I concluded that the lack of democratic rights was a more potent spur to mass protest by successive waves of trade unionists, blacks, women, and gays. The trade union upsurge of the thirties, for example, aimed at legalization of the right to organize and to bargain collectively - fundamental democratic rights which were seen as essential to improving working class wages and benefits. The recovery in jobs in the later part of the decade strengthened the industrial and political clout of the unions and won passage of the Wagner Act securing these rights and further wage gains. Taft-Hartley, which dealt a grave blow to the closed or union shop, and the purge of Communists and other radical trade unionists, occured in the context of rising rather than falling or stagnant wages.