Archive for November, 2009

How America went from a nation of producers, to consumers. Part IV: Revolutions against neo-colonialism, run-away production, and the US worker becomes disposable.

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

(To read this in order, you have to scroll down the blog to get to the earlier parts. It reads from the bottom up, the way democracy also should read).

In the early 1970s, many of the trends of the 60s took new directions. By the mid-1970s it seemed that much of Africa, southeast Asia, and Latin America was in the throes of revolutions against neo-colonialism. Much of this took the form of variations on the Cold War–proxy wars fought on behalf of the USA and its allies, or the Soviet Union and its allies. In Africa, guerrillas fought in Morocco, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Namibia, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo, along with other countries taking a less violent leftward course such as Zambia and Tanzania.

In Latin America, liberation struggles had broken out in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and across the Panama Canal in Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. With the coming of the military to power first in the 9/11 coup in Chile in 1973 and then in Argentina in 1976, a curtain of darkness seemed to have fallen over the southern cone countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. For workers in trade unions, leftists and even moderate socialists, there was hell to pay until some time in the 1990s. You can imagine how this repression might have worked to the advantage of the United States corporations that were conducting mining operations in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and other South American countries.

In Africa, the 1970s’ struggles against neo-colonial regimes often took the form of “proxy” armies funded and supported by the Soviet Union, which appeared to be at its height of power but as we now know, was already weakening and deteriorating from within. Many of the regimes that came to power with at least some Soviet support in the ensuing years–Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, comes instantly to mind–would over the years degenerate into frank dictatorships even worse than what they had replaced.

Meanwhile, the mining of minerals continued, and continues to this day, without a shred of democracy having been established in many of the countries that had struggled so hard against neo-colonialism. The same is true of food extraction from the African, Latin American, and Asian countries where revolutions against colonialism were attempted. Thus, we still have slave-produced cocoa from Africa, bananas picked under the harshest conditions imaginable for the workers, and rice produced in Myanmar under near-slave conditions.

While Richard Nixon had fully supported attempts to undermine left-wing regimes in Chile and other places, after Nixon’s resignation it seemed that the CIA and US military was on auto-pilot, really accountable to no one. Certainly Gerald Ford exerted little effort to stop the ongoing US meddling in all the countries engaging in some kind of revolutionary activity.

Jimmy Carter inherited the wind with his inauguration in 1977. Within a couple years, the Sandinistas had succeeded in toppling Somoza in Nicaragua, and the US support for the Shah of Iran (including Carter’s failure to cut the Shah loose even when the writing was on the wall) led to his fall from power in Iran in 1979. Guerrilla groups were operating in dozens of countries, again often with Soviet blessing if not funding.

The 1970s were also, you’ll recall, times of severe inflation in the US currency. The cost of living became a major issue that had showed up on the radar screen under Nixon and proceeded to get much worse following the Yom Kippur War conducted by Israel against a grouping of Arab states. With the US standing by Israel, the Arab oil producers conducted an oil embargo against the US which drove gasoline prices to new unheard-of levels. Meanwhile, the US economy was stagnating. The term “stagflation” was coined, meaning stagnation in the midst of inflation.

My personal opinion is that the height of US labor unions’ power–both in bargaining and in politics (with their unfailing support of whoever the Democratic Party selected to be the candidate, at any level of government)–was reached late in the Carter Administration, and that power fell off a cliff with the ascendancy of Reagan. I can recall being on shop bargaining committees in the late 1970s and one period when we negotiated back-to-back almost 10% wage increases, including a factory-wide re-evaluation of a number of labor grades that added 10% or more for the lower-paid categories. To my knowledge, that sort of bargaining environment never again occurred in American labor.

If US workers were about to lose significant status and purchasing power, and see their real wages begin a gradual slide which continues to the present, how then could big capital maintain this workforce as a nation of consumers? I doubt that any group of wealthy and powerful conspirators was holding seminars and secret conferences to answer that question. To attribute too much cohesiveness and conspiratorial power to the rich and powerful is to give them too much credit. On the other hand, a way might have been found to keep a weakened US labor force consuming: to give them too much credit with which to buy the newly-outsourced goods.

From 1979 to 2009, it took three decades for a weakened US labor force to see its standard of living reduced to that of today, when one in seven people doesn’t get enough to eat, something like 45 million have no health coverage, and something like 50 million live at or below the poverty line.

With the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, labor war was declared on the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, and that union broken within a year. Other unions fell under the withering effect of massive run-away shop movements to the US deep south, to Mexico, and to parts of Asia which were just opening up to US sweatshops.

Recessions are useful to big capital because they allow “rationalization” of the production process. The huge recession which drove down workers’ and poor peoples’ living conditions in the early 1980s facilitated the new, leaner workforce. Two-tier labor structures became the rage, with young entry-level workers earning far less than the older workers who were soon going to be forced out or bought out. Non-union shops in the deep south held labor conditions down until the further move abroad could be made. Real wages were in freefall.

Indeed, by the mid-1980s, a wave of homelessness had struck the US working class. I can recall working in Philly in 1985-1986 with an independent labor union which had an alliance with the Homeless Union of Philadelphia. Part of the agreement was mutual support–urging homeless workers not to cross picket lines, and urging employed workers to assist the homeless union in meeting its political demands.

We also visited with and offered support to workers who were organizing under COTA out in the vegetable farms and orchards of South Jersey. These workers, mostly from Latin America, faced near slave-labor like conditions. I was appalled at the conditions that farmworkers faced in modern-day New Jersey at the time. There was no one in Washington, D.C. who cared about those workers, nor the homeless union members in Philadelphia. We were on our own, literally.

The US worker was becoming increasingly disposable. We heard the term “The Rust Belt” for the first time, describing the old industrial belt running from Milwaukee through Chicago, along the southern tier of the Great Lakes, up to Buffalo, N.Y. We were told that the “Sun Belt”–where wages were low, unions few and far between (and weak), and job growth was still happening–was the new place to be for US corporations and the people who worked for them. Almost three decades later, it was the “Sun Belt” where the mortgage industry collapse wreaked the most havoc, ironically enough.

As the decade changed from the 1980s to the ’90s, strange things were happening, as the Soviet Union broke apart and what was seen as a monolithic, formidable system of big socialism was revealed to have been hollowed-out and weak at the core. Ronald Reagan is often credited with having hastened the demise of this Soviet system. But a deeper investigation in history would reveal, I think, that the flaws in Soviet-style socialism were there from the beginning, and that the historic conflict with fascism all through the 1930s and World War II prevented that system from ever becoming a grass-roots democracy in which means of production actually belonged to the workers.

Next, Part V: The Reagan (Counter)Revolution begins race to the bottom

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How America went from a nation of producers to consumers, Part III: Cheap food, agriculture, and keeping the farmer down

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

(To read this in order, you have to scroll down the blog to get to the earlier parts. It reads from the bottom up, the way democracy also should read).

In Part II I briefly mentioned the relationship between US food-oriented corporations and foreign policy. It’s not a stretch to say that maintaining unfair trade, especially in food, was one of the major purposes to which the US military was mis-directed over the past century and a half. In 1954, the role of United Fruit Company in encouraging (directing?) the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Arbenz in Guatemala is very well documented.

Likewise, when the Castro brothers, along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and a small army finally overthrew Batista in Cuba in 1959, one of their first acts was nationalizing the lands of that same United Fruit Company. Once again, United Fruit went into action, encouraging (directing?) the US CIA to intervene, and a hastily-organized disastrous invasion of newly-liberated Cuba occurred at the Bay of Pigs–sometimes called the “Bay of Pigs Fiasco.”

(The CIA was very busy in 1954, also staging the overthrow of the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, a blunder that the USA is still paying for dearly in the form of the extremely distorted course of events in the Persian Gulf region. But that topic is covered under Part IV on national liberation and beginning of the end for neo-colonialism.)

I would argue that the role of cheap food is crucial in shifting the USA from a producer base to a consumer base, where we are now dependent upon a global economy for meeting the needs of our outsized spending habits. If the manufacturers of all sorts of consumer products wanted to move more of these products, food would have to become a much smaller part of each household’s budget, in order to allow that household more wiggle room in buying other products flooding the market.

Examples of these other products might be: the house they lived in, all its furniture, home electronics, fashion that had to be discarded each time “back-to-school” rolled around in August, automobiles, gasoline, vacation trips, second homes in vacation hot spots, later computers, monitors, Nintendos, cell phones, digital cameras, printers, disk drives, iPhones, mp3 players, PDAs, GPS devices, XBoxes, Wii games, electronic toys of all sorts, a boat to go fishing, an ATV when you’re not fishing, a snowmobile to play in the snow, trailers to haul all that, storage sheds to store it all, a second, third, fourth automobile for the spouse and two teens, plus all the credit cards needed to buy all that stuff, not to mention the insurance to cover it all.

So, food went from being approximately 19% of the typical US household budget, down to about 9% in around 2005, while these other products filled up the remaining 125% of the household budget.

Someone would have to pay for this easing of the burden of food on the household. Ah, the farmer.

First, as we mentioned, the farmers who were unlucky enough to live in those countries that grew things the USA coveted had to be dispossessed of their land, then re-hired as plantation workers to pick coffee, bananas, cocoa (and coca), pineapples, and ever more exotic fruits as the American palate got more and more exotic in its tastes. Thus, the “Banana Republic” was born. Countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, the Caribbean islands, Colombia, and on and on became home to some truly evil dictatorships, all to assure the flow of cheap luxury food to the USA.

In the USA, it was necessary to keep the farmer in check, but this was easily done through oligarchic control over the pricing of farm produce. A series of enormous food corporations came into being which managed the flow of foods and somehow miraculously ensured that farmers were getting sometimes a little more, sometimes a lot less, than their costs of production.

Occasional attempts by farmers to organize themselves into something analogous to labor unions in the factories, mines and mills were made. There was the Grange movement. There was the Farmers’ Union. There was National Farmers Organization. Efforts were made to restrict production–the sometimes violent milk strikes of Farmers’ Holiday Association and other groups in the 1930s and other efforts to push prices back up. All to no avail.

The fundamental problem always facing farmers was that they “owned” their land and operations (with guidance from their bankers), and hence, were always by nature in competition with the neighboring farmers. When a group of farmers is trying to hold out for higher prices, they can only hold until the first one caves in and accepts the lower price. Given the high debt load farmers have always faced, caving in doesn’t take long, and prices paid farmers are kept low. You don’t need to see a vast capitalist conspiracy in this arrangement; it’s just the way “Mr. Market” works.

The process of letting Mr. Market remove farmers from their land gained speed with the first Great Migration of rural blacks to the north, ca. 1910-1930. It progressed apace with the coming of the Dust Bowl in the great plains breakbasket states of Oklahoma and Texas, Colorado, parts of New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, and other places where food staples had been grown. This led to the first wave of environmental refuges inside the United States, headly mostly west toward California, where the formerly independent, self-reliant farmers were transformed into wage-laboring, largely homeless farmworkers working for large landowning food corporations. Then came the Second Great Migration of southern black rural folk going north to work in the factories, most never to return to the land, instead rearing a new generation of completely urbanized Baby Boom African-Americans.

In the 1950s, the rural brain drain continued slow but steady, as it did in the 1960s. And the 1970s. Don’t forget the ’80s. In the 1980s, here in Wisconsin, we faced a severe small farm crisis, and the Wisconsin Farm Unity Alliance arose to attempt to deal with the crisis. Too small to change the course of events, such a movement could still contribute to the ongoing national discussion about what to do with those farmers–everything except assuring them reliable parity pricing for their crops.

Two people who perhaps understood the importance of parity pricing for farm crops, from the “left” and “right” directions perhaps, were Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and Charles Walters, author of Unforgiven, and founder of the magazine Acres, USA. Parity pricing could be called simply “fair trade for farmers” as the basic idea was that farmers should receive a price for their products that would provide a parity, a level equal to that enjoyed by other prosperous classes in society. In the 1950s and 60s, that might have meant being on parity with the highest-paid trades union workers, the middle-class professionals or others earning a living able to sustain a family without fear of financial ruination.

In this current era, we are in uncharted waters. It is difficult to know with whom farmers might achieve parity, with the entire US middle class of professionals on the brink of financial ruination, with the labor unions decimated and powerless to improve worker wages, and with farmers themselves once again selling products at prices dangerously below the cost of their production.

At this point, the drive to push down real wages for workers in the USA has come round to backfire on finance capital. What seemed to have been an application of Naomi Klein’s concept of “shock doctrine” in the fall of 2008 now seems to have taken on a life outside the control of finance capital, domestically or globally. Events seem to be spiralling out of their control.

Once you have driven down the standard of living of your domestic market–US workers, farmers, and the middle classes–you find yourself with a shrinking market to sell all those outsourced goods to. Without continuing high levels of government direct payments, at this stage it seems that the economic downturn will continue on toward some unknown level of ruination. While I may have argued that finance capital had wanted to weaken the farm sector to the point where cheap food would not compete for household dollars with all the other junk from southeast Asia and China steaming its way toward the US ports, now the very productivity of US farmers seems in jeopardy, if massive farm bankruptcies follow this downtrend in the economy.

Likewise, with the specter of mass hunger in the USA, the very health and productivity of the next generations of workers needed to maintain at least some skeleton-crew level of staffing of the US domestic economy is in peril. Capital has gone too far, the shock doctrine has backfired, and we are all in uncharted waters here.

Next Part IV: Revolutions against neo-colonialism, run-away production, and the US worker becomes disposable.

Readings

Peter Chapman, Bananas! How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, Canongate US, 2008.
John C. Culver, American Dreamer: A life of Henry A. Wallace, W.W. Norton, 2001.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, Montly Review Press, 25th Ann. edition, 1997. Yes, this was the book given to Barack Obama by Hugo Chavez at their meeting in South America, 2009.
Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Thomas Kriger, The 1939 Dairy Farmers Union Milk Strike: The Story in Words and Pictures, Journal for Multi-Media History, 1998.
Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (New York, 1973), pp. 15-27.
Charles Walters, Unforgiven, Acres USA 2nd edition, 2002.

Posted in Co-operation, Economics, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peace, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, globalization, subcultures | No Comments »

How America went from a nation of producers to consumers Part II: The 60s confluence of three rivers of social change

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Late in the year 2000 I attended some Green Party meetings in Milwaukee, at a time when there was quite a bit of momentum remaining from Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. I was struck by the number of young people in attendance, students from UWM, the MATC technical college, and some city high schools. These young people seemed to have a very progressive worldview concerning the issues of globalization, an attitude of anti-consumerism, a consciousness about avoiding sweatshop-produced products and engaging in fair trade.

It occurred to me that this new youth movement was in some way a sort of echo of an earlier one from the late 1960s–the counterculture, the hippies, the back-to-land movement, various labels that were applied to the youth subculture that resulted when millions of Baby Boomers came of age at the same time and began to exert their influence on the USA.

But the counterculture was only one among many rivers of social change that were converging at around the same time. There was also the emerging peace movement attempting to put an end to the US involvement in Vietnam. And there was a civil rights movement raging, which had begun by 1965 to take an increasingly insurrectionary, violent, unpredictable course which threatened the whole social order which those in power had established. As these three rivers of social change ran together, you had what is somewhat amorphously seen as “the 60s.” An additionl stream of social change was the impact of rising national liberation and revolutionary movements in the “third world” — movements against neocolonialism, the new form of colonialism in which countries were still fully under control by US and European powers, yet had nominally independent governments. These movements would play a larger part in the 1970s.

The US by the late 1960s was at the pinnacle of its days as a producer nation. There was full-scale industrial production to fuel the war on Vietnam. US oil production was nearing its all-time peak, reached in 1970. Food production was hitting new highs as the policy of the post-Henry Wallace US Department of Agriculture played out: farmers should “get big, or get out” as Earl Butz later summarized as US policy toward farmers.

(You could probably argue that globalization began with trade in food, going all the way back to the British empire moving tea, coffee, sugar and other food commodities all around the globe, quite profitably to the British corporations. Oh, and as Jim in the UK points out, also opium. Lots of opium run by the British drug cartel.
(The US corporate sector was quick to realize that secure access to certain foods would be an important part of its emerging consumer society. Even as US domestic staple food and fiber production kept ramping up, decade after decade, there were commodities such as fruits and vegetables, sugar, coffee, cocoa and so on that could be locked-up for US consumption. Thus, the USA intervened early and often in affairs in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. US meddling in Nicaragua began in the early 1850s, and the adventures of William Walker in that country assured an enduring US footprint in Nicaragua that continues to this day, even under the leftist Ortega presidency. Part III deals with cheap food, agriculture, and keeping the farmers downpressed.)

Yet this pinnacle of US power as a producer left the younger generation cold. And it left the black and Latino workers out in the cold, not to participate in the best-paying segment of labor. This situation set the stage for the separate, but rarely intersecting, paths of the youth counter-culture and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. They began to intersect during the years of peace protests aimed at ending the Vietnam war, however.

Youth counter-culture took on an anti-consumerist, simple-life living, back-to-land worldview as tens of thousands of mostly white Baby Boom youth attempted to cut the cord binding them to “straight life” (before that took on a different meaning). They attempted to “drop out” as the term was used. It was a time of great experimentation with forms of social organization, as co-operatives, community farms, Ashrams, “communes” and a range of other, usually loose, organizations tried to take root out in the country. There was also a large urban component to this social experimentation, as a survey of the Minneapolis-St. Paul co-operatives scene would have revealed circa 1970.

Many of these social experiments were aimed at reconnecting with the land, in order to provide a livelihood for the young folks moving out to these small towns and rural townships. However, youth would soon find out that the powers that managed the ever-expanding global economy did not really want a lot of young people reconnecting with the land and becoming producers with some degree of self-sufficiency and sustainability.

To impose a consumer society, it was necessary for big capital–whether industrial capital, retail and distribution capital, or finance capital at its highest level–to continue breaking the connection of independent producers with their means of production–be it land, or small artisan shops, or artisan food processing, or anything else that would threaten the oligopoly that now reached into every aspect of modern life.

Nowhere was this assault on autonomy and self-sufficiency felt more harshly than in the black and Latino working-class communities. Black small farmers and sharecroppers in the south never enjoyed what you’d call prosperity. Always living on the edge with the threat of violence and a kind of down-home fascist repression in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, black workers and farmers in the south needed relief from oppression. And the coming of World War II in a way provided this relief.

What came to be known as the “Second Great Migration” of African-Americans northward into the industrial cities where war production was gearing up, took place between ca. 1940 and ca. 1970. Black workers had two paths to choose as the War began: enlist in the armed forces, or go to work in a factory doing industrial production for the War. Both of these paths contributed to the civil rights movement that began after the war’s end.

In the factories of the north, and the industrial cities where they were located, blacks had to contend with the need for at least minimal worker unity, whether it took the form of joining a union or not crossing picket lines during a strike, or in rare cases, rising to some position of leadership and authority in a union. This was a world apart from living in fear of an unprovoked racist attack in a small town in the deep south.

Nelson Peery described the process he and tens of thousands of other blacks inducted into the military underwent during World War II as “the journey of the African-American soldier from second-class citizen to first-class soldier.” Upon returning to one’s hometown after this transformation, not many young blacks wished to return to “second-class citizenship.” You can view Peery’s account of the role of the black veteran in the emergence of the civil rights movement on this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S33j7YdrCOc&feature=related

This perspective shows the role of the rank-and-file worker, soldier, or citizen in social change. As with all movements, attention is often absorbed by a few prominent people and the story of the movement is written into history as the achievements of these individuals, rather than the grass roots movement that they rode into the history books upon.

Similarly, the history of the counter-culture is often absorbed by a few pages on the likes of Timothy Leary, or Steven Gaskin and “The Farm” or perhaps Ken Kesey or even an Abbie Hoffman. The lives of the millions of others involved in these social movements are of no consequence as the story is later told. This approach to history accommodates the needs of a consumerist society, where the average person is just a sort of spectator to the latest social trend or American Idol craze, and perhaps harbors secret aspirations to get up on that stage and show what they can do, and pray for a launch into stardom. Since one’s life as a producer of average, everyday stuff of life is so devalued, this escape route to consumerist stardom beckons to millions.

For the black and Latino worker, the life of the counter-culture held little appeal. One black worker on a factory floor once told me over a couple of sandwiches, sitting next to a milling machine, “why would brothers want to drop out into that hippie lifestyle of voluntary poverty, when we haven’t even had the chance to experience what that other life is like?”

Likewise, for the Chicano farmworker out in the California Central Valley, life in the “country” was not so appealing, as it usually meant back-breaking, unsafe work, poisoning by ag chemicals, lousy wages, no job security, and if you were here illegally, the likelihood of being rounded up by La Migra and shipped back over the border.

There were chances for idealistic young whites from middle-class backgrounds to provide support and solidarity work to the civil rights movements: help with the farm products boycotts launched by the United Farmworkers in the 1970s (again, “Cesar Chavez’s movement”), or traveling to the south to assist with civil rights work, voter registration, and other avenues of support. Sometimes, people went back and forth between roles: activist to counter-culture farmer, or vice-versa.

Certain points in time were pivotal. I would argue that spring, 1970 was one of these for many people involved in these parallel paths of social change. There were the killings of students at Kent State; there was increasing participation of blacks, Latinos, and American Indians in the anti-war protests that were growing increasingly large and vocal. One peace march I attended in St. Paul in spring, 1970 included a Black Panthers member, Dennis Banks from American Indian Movement, student leaders, senior citizen leaders, feminists and a host of others. There was the first Earth Day, which attempted to provide a nationwide stage for the emerging environmental movement to challenge the entire consumerist basis of what America was becoming. There was a nationwide student strike that spring, when students attempted to shut down their campuses in order to have a massive nationwide “teach-in” about ending the war, about social justice, about a lot of things gone wrong.

As the 1970s unfolded, what many people didn’t realize was that the ground underneath their feet was shifting and the foundations were being undermined. The great “guns and butter” economy of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” where war could mix with consumer abundance, poverty could be fought like another war, and justice for all at last achieved, all was about to begin to deteriorate.

Next Part III: cheap food, agriculture, and keeping the farmers down.

Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, United Electrical Workers, self-published, 1955.
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Prager, 1975.
Steven Gaskin, Monday Night Class, revised ed., Book Publishing Company of TN.
Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 2nd edition, South End Press, 1998.
Nelson Peery, Black Radical. New Press, 2007.
Nelson Peery, Black Fire. New Press, 1995.

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How America went from a nation of producers to consumers. Part I: Post-war

Friday, November 20th, 2009

“What has happened is that, in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer; and all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance. The way it is.

“We used to be a producer–very inflexible at that–and now we are consumers and finding it difficult to understand: Natural resources and minerals will change your world.” –Gil Scott-Heron, “B Movie,” ca. 1981.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56ipWM3DWe4&feature=related

——————————-

How did we get from being a nation that produced things, that made things, to being a nation of consumers, hugely indebted to China, who saw our economy start to crumble in fall, 2008 when the overdebtedness finally caught up to us? Will our heyday of easy consumption ever return? Will we ever become once again a nation of producers?

World War II seems to be the main inflection point in this process. With the end of World War II and the stimulative effect it had on the industrial producer economy, came the threat of a return to the depression. Returning veterans were not immediately able to find work. All those “Rosie the Riveter” women who had helped build the warmaking machinery had to return to the home, capital decided, in order to avoid unemployment-induced disruption. A series of severe labor conflicts broke out as the US economy struggled to get onto a peacetime footing.

It was during the labor conflicts from 1946-1949 that the US labor movement was mostly derailed onto the tracks of supporting industrial capital instead of confrontation with capital. The left-wing union leaders who ascended to leadership in the 1930s were gradually red-baited and hounded out of positions of leadership, in favor of a leadership more amenable to a “pork-chop” style of unionism (seeking more pork chops rather than more workplace power). The great Allis-Chalmers strike of the late 1940s here in Wisconsin was a microcosm of this process. When it was over, the left-wing leaders were out of power.

In the late 1970s, I worked with a group of workers in a big electric motor plant in Minneapolis, under union contract with I.U.E., who could remember many of these fratricidal struggles in labor, particularly between the left-wing United Electrical Workers (UE), which moved outside the AFL-CIO, and the International Union of Electrical workers, which took the path of labor peace with management, under a much more right-wing leadership.

This process of co-optation of labor leadership in some ways paved the way toward the consumer society that finance capital envisioned for the USA. With labor peace assured, workers could feel confident in going out and buying houses, buying automobiles, and buying all the stuff to fill up the houses. The massive movement to the suburbs on the part of mostly white, better-paid workers and professionals began in the early 1950s and has only begun to come to a halt with the mortgage crisis of late 2008.

My own family was a case study in this process of moving from producerism to consumerism. My dad returned from his tour of duty in the Navy and found that the textile mills of Rhode Island, where he and his brother had worked in the pre-war days, were beginning the process of shutting down to move to the deep south of the USA, almost universally non-union factories that paid far lower wages and rode the workers much harder than in the union north.

This was the first of what I believe were three major phases of what labor came to call the “run-away shop” or that we now call “outsourcing.” Phase I was the move to the deep south. Phase II was the maquiladora movement to the region just inside the Mexican border. Phase III was when finance capital discovered an even cheaper labor force in China and southeast Asia generally. I believe that Phase III is probably the final phase of the search for ever-cheaper labor, the phase that ends with the process of de-globalization, the crumbling of the global economy itself.

The Baby Boomers were born and grew up in that period between the wars–from 1946 to the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The world of rampant consumerism was their world. The period of unrest of the late 1960s marked the turning of a segment of this young cohort of people against the very consumerism they had grown up with. It also marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the USA as a producer nation.

We moved from the woolen mill towns of Rhode Island down to the Jersey Shore, where commuting 45 miles a day to north Jersey was the preferred lifestyle. I remember my dad explaining how we bought things “on time” and he worked something called “time-and-a-half” (overtime pay) at Western Electric to pay for all the stuff bought “on time.” We were supposedly living the high life as the USA approached peak producer status. Along with a whole generation of other people across the nation doing exactly the same thing.

Next: Part II, The 1960s convergence of three rivers of social change.

Sources:

Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, United Electrical Workers, self-published, 1955.
Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Prager, 1975.
Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 2nd edition, South End Press, 1998

Posted in Economics, Peace, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, Uncategorized, globalization, subcultures | No Comments »

Wisconsin Makes Top Ten!

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

…list of states with severe and growing budget problems, that is.

Ilargi tweeted: AutomaticEarth 10 States Face Looming Budget Disasters – http://bit.ly/1fSDt8 (What, not all 50?)

( Story also here)

As for politicians of either major party, they’re still clueless as to what is actually happening, much less what to do.

I would say the symptom of “Miracle Thinking” is a growing, national cognitive problem afllicting both those in the top castes as well as the lowest.

There’s a classic humorous flowchart in which a complicated maze of decision boxes and tangled arrows leads to one big box off by itself that reads: “And then, a miracle happens.”

That must be the process inside the think tanks of both Republican and Democrat leaders both in Madison, and in D.C. The Republican miracle is labeled “Tax Cuts and Spending Cuts” and the Democrat’s is labeled “More Stimulus.”

This calls for thinking not only outside the box, but outside the warehouse where the box has been sitting for many years.

b.g.

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Reality check

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

“…The trouble with self-delusion, either in a person or a society, is
that reality doesn’t care what anybody believes, or what story they put
out. Reality doesn’t “spin.” Reality does not have a self-image problem.
Reality does not yield its workings to self-esteem management. These
days, Americans don’t like reality very much because it won’t let them
push it around. Reality is an implacable force and the only question for
human beings in the face of it is: what will you do? In other words,
it’s not really possible to manage reality, but you can certainly choose
to manage your affairs within reality. We won’t do that because it’s too
difficult. This harsh situation leaves the public increasingly with
little more than bad feelings of discouragement and persecution. It’s
astonishing that all the smart people around the president don’t get
this…”

by Chris Case, over in Japan

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Comment on the Stevens Point School District Referendum vote

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Executive summary: current school funding system creates intramural class warfare amongst the working classes, for instance, poor workers against professionals like teachers. Economic crisis demands that the wealthiest segment of society, and the corporations which they own, must have wealth expropriated to support a school system on which their prosperity depends.

Here’s an important point to remember if you read this blog all the way thru: The term “jobless recovery” is like Orwellian doublespeak, a propagandist term that means nothing, but is picked up by wire services and spread like a virus.

When we look at an event like the Stevens Point School District Referendum being voted down, it’s important to realize that “jobless recovery” is meaningless. The US economy is still in deep crisis, and probably poised to enter a deeper crisis. This means that all forms of public funding are in jeopardy.

On the blog The Automatic Earth, Ilargi and Stoneleigh detailed the depth of ongoing the crisis facing state budgets. In the piece entitled States of Disbelief, they detail the prevalent mindset throughout the USA on both sides of the ossified political spectrum–denial of how big the problem is, and how intractable it is.

Republicans and conservatives are unable to apprehend the reality that confronts them because the stream of events is filtered through a thick mat of ideology–mental constructs, memes if you will, a world model. Democrats and liberals are unable to apprehend the reality that confronts them because the stream of events is filtered through a thick mat of ideology–mental constructs, memes if you will, a world model.

It seems likely that the pattern of the State of Wisconsin being unable to collect as many taxes as once projected from the newly unemployed and newly impoverished workers (and professionals) will continue. This will mean that state aid to local school districts will likely continue to be pinched for the next number of budget cycles.

Likewise, county governments have this one main source of revenue–collecting taxes from the newly unemployed and newly impoverished workers (and professionals) and this problem will continue to dog county governments.

Similarly, city governments have this one main source of revenue–collecting taxes from the newly unemployed and newly impoverished workers (and professionals) and this problem will continue to dog city governments.

And, of course, school districts also have this one main source of revenue–collecting taxes from the newly unemployed and newly impoverished workers (and professionals) and this problem will continue to school district governments.

Since there is no such thing as a “jobless recovery” (it’s Orwellian doublespeak, you’ll recall), this means that there is no recovery in tax revenues anywhere in sight for states, for counties, for municipalities, nor for school boards.

I would suggest that everyone who is involved in some sort of sustainability study group consider taking up the topic: what if the economic crisis really is “different this time?” What if there is no possibility of recovery back to the familiar, if much despised, exponential economic growth (which would at least leave state, county, municipal and school board budgets able to be increased)? I think we often wish we could have it both ways: a totally sustainable rapacious capitalism based on exponential conversion of natural resources into consumer goods and ultimately, trash; along with imperialism and war. The Lyndon Johnson “Guns and Butter” glory days.

Its highly probable that we won’t be recovering to those days.

When we talk about a new paradigm for the economy, do we really mean it, or is that just a cool-sounding rhetorical device meant to simply lead back to the old liberalism-vs-conservatism world of the past, based on capitalism and its eternal exponential growth?

There are plenty of right-wing demagogues out there ready to exploit the class differences amongst working people. You’ll hear them on our local AM/FM talk radio propaganda machine, bashing the teachers and urging defeat of school referendums. Liberalism somehow has to find the backbone to demand a new school funding formula that supports schooling not from the property taxes on aging, newly-impoverished workers, but instead, on the richest 10% of the population, and the corporations that enrich them. Simple as that.

If we really mean it, then there will have to be a new model of how to provide public services, with a new way of paying for them. I’m not a conservative, and I’m not a liberal either, so I’m eager to see us get on with building this new model.

Bobby G.

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