> On May 6, 2016, at 7:50 PM, Eugene Coyle <e.coyle at me.com> wrote:
>
> Marv,
> We’re not that far apart in terms of the big picture. Part of it may be the difference in our ages — what we’ve lived and remembered — and I’ve no doubt lived longer and probably remembered less.
> I was working with the Boilermakers in the early 1950s (and later) and was educated on the job by a co-worker about how Taft-Hartley meant the end of union power. I didn’t then grasp the implications but now I think he was right, though as you point out, it took years to play out. Labor didn’t say “Oh, Taft-Hartley passed, let’s give up.”
>
> This is a useful discussion. Nathan Tankus makes a very good point when he says that capitalists kept at trying to reassert power and finally succeeded. Lots of historical points and Michael Meeropol mentions one. Michael Perelman a few years ago pointed out — which is echoed in Nathan’s post — how the memo from the lawyer later on the Supreme Court — stirred up investments in rightwing think tanks.
>
> One idea I want to reassert: technological unemployment ran wild from 1900-1929, obscured by the exports and loans made to Europe as it prepared for WWI, then US mobilization of its own, then great demand for exports selling to a devastated Europe after WWI. Recall that Keynes used the words "technological unemployment” circa 1929 in his essay for Our Grandchildren. The US agriculture collapse of the 1930s was a technological one, as the ability to supply soared and dwarfed demand which shrank after losing the exports.
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> I’m with the Monthly Review analysis that capitalism’s default state is stagnation and it fell into that state in the late 1920s and ‘30s due to technological unemployment played out against the background of loss of the war related European demand. And then the productivity gains you, Marv, point out becoming apparent again as a factor in the 1980s — different this time, digitization and all that, rather than electricity and internal combustion from the earlier period — but the same in the sense of eliminating work but not eliminating people looking for work.
If I were writing a history of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries I would very broadly divide it into three sections, recognizing of course there would be a certain overlap between them.
1. The period of illegality, when unions were banned and democratic rights for workers virtually non-existent. Lacking legal channels to organize and express themselves, workers in factories, mines, mill, and ports necessarily had to adopt militant tactics and were radicalized by the repression, often violent, of the employers and the capitalist state. The social weight and confidence of the proletariat was expanding in line with the rapid development of industrial capitalism, and its demands for social change were reflected in the growth of Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist currents within its ranks.
2. The period of reform, when the growing social disorder prompted the bourgeoisie in the strongest imperialist countries to introduce democratic and social reforms, most notably the extension of the universal franchise and the sanctioning of unions and collective bargaining. The reforms were made possible by the resilience and profitability of capitalism which, despite its recurrent crises, did not result in increasing immiseration and its imminent overthrow, as the early Marxists anticipated. The reforms stimulated the formation of mass parties based on the unions, and within these institutions the appearance and ultimate hegemony of a social democratic wing which sought to reform capitalism by peaceful, gradual, electoral means.
3. The “neoliberal” period, the one we’ve lived through most or all of our adult lives. It’s seen the expansion of capitalism into new “emerging markets”, new forms of technological and organizational change in the predominantly service economies of the West, and the corresponding whittling away of the social and democratic gains which constituted the “welfare state”. Rather than the steady growth of trade unions and improvement in living standards which marked the preceding periods, this one has has seen declining or stagnant real incomes, widening inequality - and, especially since the financial crisis and unusually weak recovery - growing discontent with capitalism, especially among the youngest cohort of the working class.