“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
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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