======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n06/steve-fraser/thanks-to-the-tea-party
Thanks to the Tea Party
Steve Fraser
* Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for
Finance in the 1970s by Judith Stein
Yale, 367 pp, £25.00, May 2010, ISBN 978 0 300 11818 6
* Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working
Class by Jefferson Cowie
New Press, 464 pp, £19.99, September 2010, ISBN 978 1 56584
875 7
Half a century ago it would have come as no surprise to find
demonstrating workers from both the public and the private sectors
occupying the state house in Madison, Wisconsin along with
students, community organisations and church groups. And it isn’t
only in Wisconsin – much the same is happening in Ohio and Indiana
and elsewhere. Legislative action in Wisconsin has come to a halt
as the Democratic Party minority in the state senate, in sympathy
with the public workers, has fled the state to make it legally
impossible to conduct business. Again the same thing has happened
in Indiana. Southern Wisconsin’s Central Labor Council has taken
the first steps towards calling a general strike.
It is the Tea Party that has effectively brought the unions back
to life. Newly elected Republican governors in the Midwest,
catapulted into office thanks to the Tea Party insurgency against
Big Government, have launched a no-holds-barred assault on public
sector unions. They don’t just threaten to slash wages and
benefits and eliminate jobs: they want to deprive the unions of
their right to exist. The response has been electric. Sympathy
rallies have erupted across the country, calling on their own
state and local governments to stop scapegoating public sector
workers for problems that originated on Wall Street.
The economy started going wrong in the 1970s – Tom Wolfe’s ‘me
decade’. Frivolous and self-regarding, the 1970s were also
profoundly grim. It was in this decade that the American (and
global) economy embarked on its fateful transformation from
industrial to finance-driven capitalism and that the American
working class underwent a makeover that would soon render it
virtually invisible. And it was during this decade that the labour
question was asked for the last time.
As Judith Stein observes in Pivotal Decade, the 1970s was the only
decade except for the 1930s during which Americans grew poorer. By
the late 1960s, around a quarter of all new investment by US
companies in electrical and non-electrical machinery,
transportation equipment, rubber and chemical manufacturing was
being made abroad. As the new decade began the US suffered its
first trade deficit since 1893. By its end productivity had slowed
and turned negative; the US share of the world market for
manufactured goods shrank by 23 per cent. America’s share of world
steel production shrank from 50 to 20 per cent. Only the UK had a
lower rate of gross capital formation as a percentage of GDP.
Stein argues that this was a fundamental structural crisis, not
merely a low point in the economic cycle. Core sectors of American
industrial capitalism could no longer compete: plant and equipment
were increasingly antiquated; productivity was declining compared
to European and Japanese producers, whose revival had been made
possible by Cold War imperatives. Trade, currency and other
measures favoured Western Europe and Japan even when that meant
loading American industry with burdens it couldn’t bear: this was
the price of empire. At the beginning of the decade members of a
still powerful labour movement, deploying the leverage it enjoyed
thanks to Vietnam War-generated full employment, went on strike in
numbers not seen since the wave of strikes that followed World War
Two. But the administrations of Nixon, Ford and Carter weren’t
particularly moved by the industrialists’ troubles. Later, the
double-dip oil shocks that followed the Opec embargo of 1973 and
then the Iranian Revolution of 1979 served to ratchet up the costs
of production in an increasingly oil-dependent economy.
Profit rates shrank as the nominal value of US industry’s assets
greatly exceeded their real worth in the international
marketplace. Capital began flowing elsewhere, not just into Europe
but also into select parts of the Third World, and into
non-industrial sectors – finance especially but also real estate,
retail and service businesses – and into an increasing array of
leveraged speculations in corporate and government securities. So
began the deindustrialisation of America, the shutting down of
what had for a century been the engine house of the economy. A
whole way of life was headed for extinction.
It is not merely in hindsight that we can see this as a structural
crisis. Pivotal Decade makes it quite clear that remnants of the
New Deal coalition, including the trade unions and labour
liberals, recognised that something other than conventional
postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy was called for. Even
the sclerotic bureaucracy running the major trade unions pressed
hard for industrial and even national economic planning: a full
employment bill that would legally oblige the government to
guarantee jobs, either by creating them in the public sector or by
encouraging private investment; a new development bank to help
steer capital to ageing sectors of American industry and to help
new ones get started; government sponsorship of regional and
infrastructural development, and more.
None of this happened despite some political and business support.
Keynesian orthodoxy had long since abandoned any serious interest
in structural economic reform, government planning or frontal
attempts to redistribute wealth and income. What began as a
political decision aimed at warding off postwar Red-baiters had
evolved into an intellectual conviction sustained by postwar
prosperity. Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a policy of
demand management through the manipulation of tax rates and
government spending. Nixon ventured furthest from orthodoxy when,
after the devaluation of the dollar in 1971, he toyed with wage
and price controls, a risky and quickly jettisoned foray into
‘command economics’. Once conventional Keynesianism collapsed the
result was stagflation, with simultaneous postwar highs for
unemployment and inflation, a combination once thought to be
impossible. The old liberal order was discredited and the
organised working class blamed for the mess.
Revolution inside the Democratic Party – played out first on the
streets of Chicago in 1968 – left it even less prepared to respond
effectively to industrial and working-class decline. The New
Politics embodied in George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign
was deeply estranged from the labour liberalism of the party’s New
Deal wing. McGovern’s core constituencies – anti-war and
counter-cultural youth, minorities and middle-class social
liberals – were interested in identity politics rather than class
politics, in individual rights rather than collective ones.
Moreover, they had come to perceive white working-class men as the
enemy: racist, patriarchal and jingoistic, fatally tainted by
‘white skin privilege’. The trade-union bureaucrats were just as
hostile to McGovernites and refused to endorse their candidate.
The triumph of the New Politics opened the door to the later
capture of the Democratic Party by neoliberalism, a confection of
social liberalism and free-market individualism that consigned the
labour question to the party’s attic.
The collapse of the New Deal coalition opened another door as
well. Through it walked Richard Nixon. Stein examines the strategy
that aimed at making the Republicans the party of the white
working class. It was an audacious political move that took
advantage of the racial, nationalist, religious and patriarchal
resentments and fears unleashed by the 1960s – civil rights, black
power and ghetto insurrections, women’s and gay liberation,
anti-war protest and defeat in Vietnam, the War on Poverty,
affirmative action and busing – and used them to transmute class
grievances into cultural ones, resulting in a white working-class
version of identity politics. The attempt to win over the white
working class – given real impetus by George Wallace’s campaigns
for the presidency in 1964 and 1968 – was well underway by the
time of Nixon’s first victory, but given the downward arc of the
economy in the 1970s the strategy was invaluable. With a political
economy of scarcity supplanting one of abundance, Republicans and
their allies in big business could have anticipated a quite
different – and dangerous – reaction from the working class.
The conversion of working people into ‘values’ voters – concerned
with pride rather than power – didn’t entirely succeed, however,
and often left Nixon and his inner circle caught between their
traditional business and middle-class constituencies and their
newly discovered fondness for blue-collar America. How, for
example, do you drive down construction union wages through wage
and price controls (and government-mandated affirmative action on
publicly financed projects) while also persuading the hard hats to
come out en masse in support of a war most of the country had
grown sick and tired of? How do you remain the party of business
and a party of the majority when, as David Rockefeller complained,
‘people are blaming business and the enterprise system for all the
problems of our society’? How to finesse the passage of regulatory
legislation in the areas of occupational health and safety, the
environment and consumer protection while assiduously cultivating
ties to new institutions like the Business Roundtable, which aimed
at restoring the political clout of free-market capitalism?
Stayin’ Alive covers much of the same terrain as Pivotal Decade,
but it’s a very different kind of book. It is focused not on the
elite, but on the masses, and is more gracefully written, though
less coherent. Jefferson Cowie brilliantly dissects the
disappearance of working-class identity in American political and
cultural life. He tells a tragic story of missed opportunities and
lost illusions which begins in the early 1970s, with militants
shutting down steel, coal, meatpacking and car plants, as if in a
return to the glory years of the unions; and concludes with the
emergence of the ‘Reagan Democrat’, consorting with his class
enemy, fuelled by patriarchal, racial and revanchist emotions
encouraged by plutocrats masquerading as populists.
The working class’s fall, in Cowie’s account, is mainly a
consequence of its own contradictions and historic limitations.
Like Stein, Cowie takes note of what was happening elsewhere:
deindustrialisation, the Keynesian dead end, the assault carried
out by a reorganised and re-energised business class. He even
blames the ‘rights revolution’ of the New Politics, although with
some ambivalence, for abetting the free-market assault on
collective labour rights. But Cowie’s central argument is that the
organised American working class committed social and cultural
suicide.
No one could have predicted that when the decade began with an
eruption of working-class militancy. Cowie exaggerates when he
compares this to the massive postwar strike wave of 1945-46 –
these later walk-outs lacked the programmatic ambition,
co-ordination and national political significance – but observes
correctly that they were largely initiated by a rebellious rank
and file. These strikes were inherently anti-authoritarian,
concerned as much with the dehumanising quality of work as with
its material rewards. This was a new generation of workers: they
wore beads, had beards and long hair, smoked pot, and weren’t keen
on the Vietnam War. Here, then, was a historic opportunity to
build an alliance between blue-collar rebels, anti-authoritarian
black activists and white middle-class progressives involved in
the civil rights and anti-war movements.
The opportunity was squandered. The strikes made no lasting impact
nationally, and hardly registered politically. Soon enough the
trade-union movement returned to the status quo ante. Union
leaders made one last, unsuccessful push to reform the nation’s
labour laws, hoping to open up the South to unionisation and to
eliminate the crippling disabilities that had hobbled the unions
since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act at the height of the
Cold War (the act proscribed secondary boycotts, sympathy strikes
and other forms of working-class solidarity).
During the early 1970s, though, the labour question lived on.
Rebelliousness and independence, pride in work (especially in
manual labour) and mockery of white-collar snobbishness and
paper-shuffling sustained a populist, albeit culturally
conservative, working-class identity which found heroic if debased
expression in the macho violence of Dirty Harry and the forlorn
attempt to hold on to or restore an image of the working-class
male as a protector of the underdog. As Cowie points out, the
right grabbed hold of these notions, while the left turned its
back on them. Country rock, the music of Dylan, The Band, Jackson
Browne and others might have seemed to hold out the possibility of
a reconciliation between working-class collectivism and the rights
revolution. But their music was shaped by rebellion against the
norms of suburbia, materialism and family values which so much of
the working class subscribed to. Easy Rider and All in the
Family’s Archie Bunker came closer to capturing how provincial and
even malignant much of this world had come to seem to the new
middle classes.
By the second half of the decade, the game was up. This is the
world of Saturday Night Fever, where the only solution to being a
working-class dinosaur, ignored and shamed, left to roam the
Staten Island reservation, is to escape into Manhattan’s precincts
of cool self-invention. ‘By the end of the decade,’ Cowie writes,
‘working people would possess less place and meaningful identity
within civic life than any time since the industrial revolution.’
Was this fated? Cowie never quite says so but much in the book
suggests that he thinks it was. He stresses the inherent fragility
of the New Deal moment. An extraordinary outburst of militant
class solidarity established the modern industrial labour movement
and provided much of the social energy for the political reforms
that helped define the New Deal political order for half a
century. But, according to Cowie, this ran against the American
grain. After that exceptional – Cowie calls it ‘unique’ –
démarche, the social vision narrowed and historic racial, ethnic,
occupational/skill and gender divisions reasserted themselves. The
trade-union leadership succumbed to the iron law of bureaucracy,
becoming estranged from the rank and file and beholden to the
Democratic Party establishment. By the time things fell apart in
the 1970s the Popular Front enthusiasm of the 1930s was a fading
memory.
What Cowie fails to consider is the impact of the Cold War and
especially of domestic anti-Communism. A series of fateful
decisions made during the five years following the end of World
War Two permanently crippled both the social democratic wing of
the New Deal and the labour movement itself. The shadow of
anti-Communism did away with any thought of universalising the
welfare state, establishing state economic planning, or an
institutionalised role for the labour movement in the distribution
of national income and the day to day management of the economy,
finally cracking the non-unionised South, or mounting a frontal
assault on the South’s racist political economy and its outsize
influence on national politics. Anti-Communist hysteria split the
labour movement down the middle and led to the purging of some of
its most militant industrial unions. Intimidated into abandoning
its role as champion of the working class, it tried instead to
create a privatised version of the welfare state through
collective bargaining with big industry, cutting itself off from
the unorganised black, immigrant and female workers in other
sectors of the economy. The politics of fear became an essential
part of the repertoire of postwar liberalism, driving every
alternative underground.
Cowie doesn’t supply this historical context, but if you don’t
explain the anti-Communist and anti-labour origins of the
Taft-Hartley Act, it’s hard to understand why people failed to
feel any sympathy for badly treated workers. Cowie notes that
there was really nothing uniting Nixon with the construction and
other unions except anti-Communist patriotism, but since he
doesn’t explore the origins of the American Federation of Labour’s
support for the Cold War, we are left to conclude that this
jingoism is just part of the genetic code of the American male
working class. When Cowie describes the heroic failure to unionise
the Farah clothing company in Texas in the mid-1970s, he tells us
how rabidly anti-union the South remained and how susceptible it
was to the blandishments of the Republican Party in the matter of
‘states’ rights’ (code back then for the segregationist status
quo). It would have been more useful to point out that the labour
movement’s last great effort to unionise the South just after the
Second World War collapsed as a result of persistent Red and
race-baiting.
Early and late in his book, Cowie refers to America’s two gilded
ages: the one that garishly lit up the late 19th century, and the
one that began with the rise of Reagan and the financialisation of
the economy. These bracket what Cowie sees as the New Deal
parenthesis in the longue durée of American history. Before and
after that detour the country combined a commitment to
self-seeking individualism with a myth of America as the world’s
first classless society, an environment hostile to any instinct
for collectivism and a graveyard of class consciousness.
But the first Gilded Age, when the country’s ‘leisure class’
openly masqueraded as an aristocracy, doesn’t conform to this
picture, as Cowie admits. During this period, as American
industrial capitalism was rapidly expanding, a long wave of
strikes, uprisings, boycotts, political rebellions and other forms
of insurgency raised fears of a second civil war. These protests
often crossed lines of ethnicity, religion, gender – even race –
and embraced whole communities, towns and regions. In defiance of
the traditional American fear of government meddling, they looked
to a revivified democratic state to get their robber baron
overlords under control. They were preoccupied with the ‘labour
question’ and sometimes backed anti-capitalist ideologies:
socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, trust-busting and what the
Populists and Knights of Labour called the ‘Co-operative
Commonwealth’. Together they comprised a society-wide reaction to
the damage caused by primitive accumulation. Foreclosed
homesteaders, craftsmen, immigrant peasants, industrial artisans,
subsistence farmers, small businessmen, ex-slaves – a galaxy of
refugees from pre-capitalist ways of life went down the rabbit
hole of proletarianisation. Before they did so they cried out
against an alien future, imagining alternatives to wage labour
borrowed from their diverse pasts or extrapolated from the
technological and organisational breakthroughs of industrial
capitalism. Primitive accumulation, so essential to the strength
of the American economic behemoth, was also the source of enormous
oppositional energy.
Cowie’s ‘unique’ moment can be seen as the culmination of, rather
than the exception to, a great wave of resistance: the ‘long
strike’ that lasted for a hundred years between 1870 and 1970. The
labour liberalism of the mid-20th century has it own distinctive
historical contours, more proletarian in character than earlier
upheavals. However, by transforming outcasts into citizens of a
reformed industrial republic, it helped bring that era of
resistance to an end, closed down alternatives, calmed energies
that once threatened to breach the borders of the capitalist
order: Cowie refers to the ‘golden cage of postwar industrial
relations’. But what he so richly describes could be seen as the
marginalisation, disinheritance and dispossession of those
descendants of industrial democracy’s pioneers. Primitive
accumulation drove the first Gilded Age: self-cannibalising powers
the second. The shift in the centre of gravity of the political
economy from industry to finance has bred a demoralised politics
of economic underdevelopment, social decline and malignant
cultural fantasy. The New Deal moment made a great noise, but it
is the near-acquiescence of our own era which is more exceptional.
Indeed, without trying to read too much into the events in the
Midwest and elsewhere, it is not inconceivable that the second
Gilded Age is reaching its limit. Demonstrators around America
have not been shy about mentioning Tahrir Square in the same
breath as Madison. Why long-lived acquiescence suddenly gives way
to resistance is always a bit of a mystery. But it happens.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com