Professional Documents
Culture Documents
"The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete", Arun Gupta
"The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete", Arun Gupta
"The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete", Arun Gupta
By Arun Gupta
April 11, 2011 "AlterNet" April 09, 2011 -- In an era of insecurity, we all
want security.
We want a decent home to call our own, healthcare to heal us when we are
sick or old, education to improve our minds and job prospects, healthy food
and clean water to nourish us, income to provide for all our needs and even
some affordable luxuries, a career to give us social status and a sense of self-
worth, and a pension for our golden years.
But today we are trapped in the fault lines of a violent global economy, and
these dreams seem as archaic as waking up at dawn with the grandparents,
children and cousins to milk cows, bake pies and plow fields.
Really? The contention that the middle class is suddenly under attack – and by
implication should be defended – is thoroughly flawed. For one, this trend
goes back more than 30 years to the savaging of private-sector unionism and
the social welfare state combined with deregulation, reloaded militarism and
tax breaks for the rich. The current attack on public-sector unions and the
remnants of welfare is just the latest stage.
Additionally, the attack on the public sector is by not an attack on the middle
class as a whole. After all, the Tea Party movement, the right’s shock troops,
is solidly middle class.
PARADISE LOST
The post-World War II ideal makes liberals like Paul Krugman mush-brained.
He writes in The Conscience of a Liberal: “The political and economic
environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional
episode in our nation’s history.” Krugman gets downright loopy when
reminiscing about postwar America: “It was a society without extremes of
wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity.” Apparently there
were no Rockefellers or Mississippi sharecroppers in his day.
It’s only time and a decayed vision that makes 1950s America seem like
paradise. To be sure, the working class benefited from rising productivity with
rising wages, incomes rose across the board, many African-Americans landed
good-paying factory jobs and social welfare expanded under Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society.
Yet the 1960s youth and counterculture rebellions were precisely in reaction
to the banality of the middle class. The New Left critiqued a society where
basic material needs seem to have been satisfied by American capitalism,
European social democracy and the Soviet’s “bureaucratic collectivism,” but
work was alienating, racism institutionalized, community nonexistent, sexual
mores repressive, and daily life atomizing, meaningless and suffocating.
Youth also revolted against the foundation of the middle-class lifestyle: the
warfare state that spawned the terror of imminent nuclear war and U.S.-
backed assassinations, coups, dictators and wars in the developing world that
forced down the cost of commodities – copper from Chile, bananas from
Guatemala, sugar from Cuba, oil from Iran, rubber from Indonesia and tin
from Bolivia – so as to subsidize American businesses and the middle class.
(Or to use a blunt term often employed in colonial studies, the United States
was engaged in plunder.)
Liberals conveniently forget that the unions which gave birth to middle class
were a full partner in the Cold War. The AFL-CIO worked with the CIA
through the American Institute for Free Labor Development to destroy
independent labor movements in the Third World.
Organized labor has mostly left behind this sordid past, though it did play a
role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela. Plus,
it remains reluctant to confront the military-security state that consumes about
$1 trillion in public spending even as public sector unions scrap for a few
more pennies.
By the 1960s the promise of prosperity for all, which defenders of the middle
class today harken back to, seemed within reach. Yet the consciousness of
workers as workers was being sapped by consumption. No longer was the
goal to transform social relations and bring forth the “New Man” (and
Woman), it was to get a new Pontiac, an in-ground pool, a bigger house, a
color television. When we identify as consumers, it leaves little space for
workplace solidarity or worker identity. Today, it is almost impossible to find
working-class culture or life beyond the market and corporate media.
When we struggle for better wages and benefits and more social welfare, what
is the goal?
ROSE-COLORED POLITICS
When liberals, labor leaders and even some leftists issue a call to the
barricades to defend the middle class, they romanticize the postwar boom in
other ways.
The social compact between labor and capital was premised on McCarthyism:
purging communists socialists and anarchists by the thousands from unions.
Labor’s Faustian bargain increased wages and benefits, but it sowed the seeds
of its destruction. Without a mass-based anti-capitalist left, labor became the
junior partner to capital. Once the social compact outlived its usefulness by
the 1970s, capital ditched it, but organized labor is still unable to construct a
real alternative. Capital was then free to exploit the low wages and lack of
regulation in the Third World that the AFL-CIO had helped maintain.
Starting with the New Deal, the prevailing political order was corporatist –
government brought together major bodies such as labor and business to help
them strike mutually beneficial agreements. After World War II, as long as the
Bretton Woods financial order prevailed (which put some limits on the flow of
finance capital), U.S. corporations were tied to the domestic market and other
nation states could not compete with American business, organized labor had
the power to extract concessions from corporations.
What changed since then is industrial and merchant capitalists (and foremost
financial capital) have largely escaped geography. Sure they need factories,
roads, electricity, docks, airports, warehouses and perhaps stores, but their
ability to jump from one low-cost region to another means American unions,
in their current form, have little leverage over capital.
Yet corporatism was uncritically, and unconsciously, embraced by gooey-
eyed liberals and lefties who backed Obama in 2008. A “New” New Deal was
based on the fallacy that we could re-create a national capitalism by spending
trillions on green jobs and energy. Obama would bring together capital and
labor to fund and build the factories that would manufacture electric cars,
solar panels, green homes, wind farms, hi-speed rail and a nationwide smart
electrical grid.
We would all drive a Prius into the sunrise of a new middle-class prosperity
based on hi-tech manufacturing jobs, generous social welfare, skilled and
educated workers, and strong unions.
The UAW fell into the corporatist trap after the government took over GM
and Chrysler in 2009. With a White House proclaiming, “Fuck the UAW,” it
hammered labor in the interest of capital. The result was a contract forced
down the throat of autoworkers that cut wages by 50 percent for many new
hires and even some existing workers, putting them on par with non-unionized
workers in foreign auto plants in the United States. Meanwhile, Obama’s “pay
czar,” whose job is to ensure that executives of bailed-out corporations are not
excessively rewarded, approved GM CEO Dan Akerson’s $9 million
compensation package for 2011.
Moreover, in an age when finance circles the globe continuously seeking any
comparative advantage, trying to return to an age of national capital is folly.
Just look at GM; its top market is now China, having surpassed sales in the
United States in 2010, and these vehicles tend to be built in union-free plants
right in China. So much for saving jobs by accepting 50 percent pay cuts.
Similarly, proponents of green jobs say the Obama administration should have
used the stimulus along with influence over bailed-out banks to retool defunct
auto factories to manufacture windmills, solar arrays, electric batteries, hybrid
cars, hi-speed trains and tracks, and electrical infrastructure. Except firms in
Spain, Germany, South Korea and most of all China are far more advanced in
manufacturing such goods.
Subsidizing U.S. firms that generally lack the technical, manufacturing and
skill base to produce these goods would have probably sparked an
international trade war because it would have meant blocking sales from
foreign firms that are building better products at lower prices.
INFRASTRUCTURE OF DISSENT
The free-market ideology is a cover for the Republican and corporate goal of
destroying unions so as to destroy the infrastructure of dissent. That is, they
want to eliminate organized labor’s ability to organize any sort of resistance or
alternative. Yet labor leaders seem unable to grasp the implications of this.
For three decades, labor leaders have accepted market logic of givebacks: the
pie is shrinking, we all have to share the pain, givebacks save jobs and help
make American business more competitive. But concessions don’t save jobs
they only increase profits. Unions have known this for decades, but are unable
to formulate an alternative. In 1989 one labor leader told the New York
Times, “The whole history of wage concessions since 1979 pretty much
proves that they don't preserve jobs.” In a world with capital unbound, many
regions have lower wages, fewer benefits, less regulation and higher profits,
meaning one round of givebacks leads inexorably to the next.
The same logic is now being applied to the public sector. Wisconsin labor
leaders capitulated on all wage and benefit cuts, begging only to save
collective bargaining that was then eliminated in short order. If you accept
market relations as the natural order and that the role of workers is to make
firms more competitive or produce value for them – as we shall see some
unions explicitly do – then there are no limits to givebacks.
Indeed, the whole war is based on a simple, brutal principle: capital wants to
put the entire cost of social reproduction back on to workers. You should be
entirely responsible for housing, food, healthcare, retirement, education, and
don’t expect anything from the rest of society. It’s the ownership society, a
matter of personal responsibility and if you end up homeless, jobless,
penniless, sick, it’s because you were lazy, immoral and failed to take
advantage of the opportunities afforded you. And while the plight of the poor
may tug at our heartstrings, to redistribute the rightful earnings of disciplined
hard-working Americans is to encourage sloth and sin (this is strikingly
similar to Thomas Malthus’ argument against giving aid to the poor).
In agreeing to the next round of givebacks, labor accepts and reinforces this
logic. Unless unions counter with a powerful idea – such as “labor creates all
wealth” – they will remain stuck in a downward spiral. (Not that this idea, the
labor theory of value, is unproblematic, but it does possess tremendous
ideological, rhetorical and political force in the war with capital.)
REALIZING UTOPIA
The protests from Cairo to Madison have been inspiring, even beautiful. In a
revolutionary moment, we realize our desires to be better people, for an ideal
community and for a just world. Our utopian ideas take form in new social
relations. In Tahrir Square, Egyptian women experienced themselves as
human beings with full agency and free from sexual harassment. In Madison,
protesters in the Capitol building occupation lauded the camaraderie,
peacefulness and collective labor on display there.
This is symptomatic of labor’s deeper malaise in which it can’t see beyond the
market, the middle class and electoral politics. By some estimates, in the last
two election cycles, organized labor poured more than half-a-billion dollars
into the Democratic Party with disastrous results.
What if organized labor had poured one or two hundred million dollars into
organizing the unemployed? This could have created a mass popular force on
the left, but its politics might have been more radical than middle-class
conformism. That’s because we have entered the jobless future. The market
cannot provide for the 25-30 million Americans who are unemployed or
underemployed. The high level of unemployment is not an effect of the crisis,
but a goal because it allows capital to force down wages and slash any and all
benefits.
And that has been the goal for decades. Alan Budd, an economic advisor to
Margaret Thatcher, once explained that “in Marxist terms” higher
unemployment was “an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of
the working classes … which re-created a reserve army of labor and has
allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”
The exchange of dues for services raises a profound contradiction at the heart
of organized labor. It is perhaps no surprise that a movement which tries to
accommodate itself to capital – by serving as a compliant junior partner, by
adopting a middle-class mentality, by subsuming its interests to those of a
party ruled by Wall Street – has taken on the shape and relations of a capitalist
enterprise.
One result is that over decades, many unions have shrank or eliminated
internal education and downsized the number and role of shop stewards, who
are on the front line fighting against arbitrary management practices,
conducting political education among the rank and file, and mobilizing them
for various campaigns from elections to strikes.
One union that critics say has adopted the form and function of a corporate
enterprise is the 2.2-million-member Service Employees International Union,
for which the notion of a working class appears passé. In 2007, then SEIU
President Andy Stern told the Wall Street Journal “we try to be partners with
our employers … and understand their competitive issues and try to add value,
not create problems.”And, “We want to find a 21st century new model … that
is less focused on individual grievances, more focused on industry needs.
A few years ago, SEIU embarked on an expensive and so far disastrous effort
to use call centers where “grievance representatives” replaced much of the
work of stewards. It is part of SEIU’s strategy of creating huge centralized
locals that can pool resources and cut costs, but which is also aimed at
suppressing rank-and-file democracy. Combined with its tendency to
cooperate with employers, SEIU has become hard to distinguish from a
corporation. (An excellent account of the SEIU strategy, turmoil within the
labor movement and other paths for organizing is Steve Early’s book, The
Civil Wars in U.S. Labor.)
One final note. Labor long ago abandoned the poor. In today’s political
discourse the poor are largely invisible. If labor is not acting out of real
solidarity by fighting vigorously for everyone who is dispossessed, then
different social groups will be demonized and pushed into low-wage work that
can supplant union jobs. This happened with “welfare reform” under President
Bill Clinton, with thousands of welfare recipients forced to take low-wage
jobs that were previously decent-paying union jobs with benefits. And this is a
major factor behind the vanishing private and now public sector unionism,
particularly the betrayal of international solidarity starting with the Cold War.
After decades of being battered, it’s tempting to say our options are limited by
historical forces. Except the electrifying revolutions and uprisings in the
Middle East, North Africa, Wisconsin and elsewhere shows that we have
historical agency. That means making carefully thought-out political choices,
and a good place to start is by rejecting the middle-class opiate of
consumption for the human ideal of liberation.