Posted on March 13, 2011 by Christopher Carrico
full text here: http://asitoughttobe.com/2011/03/13/insurgent-anthropologies/
For the domestic scene in the United States, one factor that Andrew Levine [i] does not mention that grew out of the Reagan Revolution, is the longer-term trajectory of the disappearance of a middle class. Alternatively framed, he does not address the longer-term disappearance of a large, relatively prosperous fraction of the American working class. These are the concrete material conditions that now show the potential to make possible in the United States the movement of coalitions and class alliances that remained largely matters of theory rather than of practical and sustainable alliances during the 1960s. The worker-student alliance that Levine mentions, for instance, now has conditions which make it a potential that can be realized in practice and not just posed as a theory.
Levine emphasizes the fact that a student-worker alliance was impossible in the 1960s, in part because of the ‘counter-cultural affinities’ of the student movement, and because the American working class, in large part, was not supportive of the student anti-war movement. Unlike the labor-capital pact that supported the military industrial complex of post WWII America, many more working people in the US today see a connection not between military spending and their livelihoods as workers in the military-industrial complex. Rather, the experience of today’s working class and poor is that spending on never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has created a federal debt crisis in the US that the government attempts to partially offset through dollars saved by the destruction of what remains of a social safety net and basic social services. The same class fraction that once formed the American “labor aristocracy” now, incredibly, has begun to see the truth that Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, articulated in the U.S. during the late 1960s: that the anti-war movement, and the movement for social and economic justice in the United States, are indeed a part of the same struggle and the same fight.
At the other end of the student-worker convergence, we see students in the United States and elsewhere faced with the harsh reality that, in spite of their higher level of education, they have no reasonable basis by which to believe that they will do better, or even as well, as their parents generation did economically. Richard Wolff has pointed out that this is the first time in American history, as far back as statistics have been kept on these matters, that the American working class has not experienced long term rising prosperity in comparison to workers of the past. This generation has experienced the end, in effect, of the American dream – the dream of perpetual progress towards ever greater wealth and prosperity for the majority of its citizens. Something of this same realization lies behind what has driven the recent student movement in the UK. Sparked in part by drastic tuition hikes put into place by the new Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition government, one interesting fact about the UK movement was the widespread participation of secondary school students. This is perhaps because the tuition hikes end the illusion of a meritocracy, and signal that even those poor and working class students who worked hard and achieved high test scores will increasingly be locked out of tertiary education. Locked out of the possibility of rising above their class by way of higher education, poor and working class students face a bleak future, with dwindling opportunities for employment without further education, accompanied by dwindling opportunities for advancement by pursuing diplomas and degrees through the university system.
Simultaneous with the convergence of the material interests of students and workers, there has been, at least at the rank-and-file level, the emergence of a genuinely multi-cultural/multi-racial labor movement in the United States. While much of established white labor only came on board with the goals of the Civil Rights movement slowly and begrudgingly during the 1960s, the old slogans of “same struggle and same fight” have actually become a part of the lived reality of a greater part of American labor, and have become an institutional reality at the level of rank-and-file union membership during the years of the hegemony of Reaganism. The attack on private sector unions having largely been successful, and the greater representation of people of color in the ranks of the public sector unions, combined with the gradual realization on the part of labor leaders that a large part of the hope of recruiting new union members and reviving the labor movement lie in organizing some sections of the working class where African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants and people of color generally are disproportionately found. These are the low wage service sector, the remaining low wage agricultural and industrial jobs, and the public sector.
While there may be a significant contingent of the non-white middle class, that believes, along with Barack Obama and Bill Cosby, that the United States has largely become a “post-racial” country, the lived experience of the majority of African Americans, Latinos, and other oppressed minorities tells us a different story. What establishes the basis for recognition of real common material interests is the fact that the white working class, the old labor aristocracy, has largely been decimated, and has also experienced, albeit to a lesser degree, declining material conditions during a time with capitalist elites are richer and more powerful than ever.
Furthermore, at the level of its leadership, trade unionists in the United States have gradually recognized that adopting an anti-immigrant stance is counter-productive, and that labor’s goals should not be to fight against the immigrant worker, but rather fight alongside these workers against the common enemy of the transnational capitalist class. Shared reasons to oppose NAFTA were perhaps one turning point here. This recognition by trade unionists, however, has not yet had the sufficient power to challenge anti-immigrant ideologies that we see spreading like wild-fire among some fractions of the American working class, leading them to vote against their real material interests as they hear right wing populists and nationalists falsely blaming the decline of the material prosperity of the American working class on the competition it receives from immigrant labor and from the relocation of industrial production to the developing world.
The Tea Party faction of the Republican Party, which came to power electorally during the mid-term elections of 2010, has been making some of the last moves in the “Endgame of the Reagan Revolution”. It came to power on the basis of thinly veiled racism against a black president. It came to power on the basis of xenophobia, nationalism, and anti-immigrant sympathy. It came to power by appealing to cultural wedge issues that obfuscate what is at stake for working class people economically. Portraying themselves as the representatives of, and counting on the continuous support of, white, working class Middle America, once in power their main actions are aimed at stripping away what remains of a degree of hope and dignity on the part of working class Americans. As they are really the representatives of the most reactionary factions of big capital, the Tea Party cannot operate in any other manner than to shed pretenses, to take off its mask, and bring the illusions of Reaganism to an end. They can no longer wear Ronald Reagan’s happy face. They must reveal themselves finally as what many of us argued they were from the start: corporate goons, creeping Fascists in sheep’s clothing. And they came first for the trade unionists.
[i]Andrew Levine, 2011 “Why Madison Matters: Endgame of the Reagan Revolution”, *CounterPunch* <http://counterpunch.org/>, Vol. 18 No. 4, pg. 5-6.
full text here: http://asitoughttobe.com/2011/03/13/insurgent-anthropologies/