[Peace-discuss] Labor's Failure ?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Comments on this Labor Day article? You may also want to see the  
comments about it at

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/03/3579/


Published on Monday, September 3, 2007 by The Boston Globe
Labor’s Failure
by James Carroll
Labor Day can seem like a holiday that belongs to another era. That  
is not because the trade union movement is no longer relevant, nor  
does the impulse to honor work and workers ever lose its importance.  
But the word “labor” once defined an entire culture, with its “names,  
battle slogans, and costumes,” in Karl Marx’s phrase. Where did it  
go? The labor movement had its symbols, from politically charged  
clothing to badges to the holidays in May and September; its  
structures, from picket lines to unions to worker-owned insurance  
companies; its rhetoric, from the manifestos of agitators to the  
leaflets of organizers to the songs of Woody Guthrie; its ethic,  
defined as solidarity.

Millions continue to hold membership in unions, which continue to  
protect the rights of workers, but the triumph of the labor movement  
consisted in its becoming a feature of a social landscape that is  
taken for granted. It was nifty when workers’ apparel - blue jeans -  
and equipment - pick-up trucks - became items of upper class fashion,  
but the shallow victory implied a substantial defeat. Labor stopped  
being a force for political change, much less for social justice.  
What happened?

The 19th-century dream of a workers’ vanguard leading to a better  
world was both betrayed and realized, and in each case, labor was  
undercut. The betrayal occurred when tyrants, in advancing the cause  
of “the people,” actually advanced themselves. The “dictatorship of  
the proletariat” turned out to be mere dictatorship. Yet the  
discrediting of the vision of Karl Marx by the 20th-century  
communisms that claimed him does not vitiate the original vision.  
Echoing what Mahatma Gandhi once said of Christianity, Marxism has  
yet to be really tried.

The realization of the workers’ dream occurred, across the same  
decades of the 20th century, when regulated capitalism made its  
adjustments, and a vast population of working people was able to lay  
solid claim to the middle class. But affluence had an inherently co- 
opting effect, as was powerfully displayed during the American civil  
rights movement, when the labor virtue of solidarity was trumped by  
racism, and union members mostly found themselves on the wrong side  
of history. The curious phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” saw workers  
recruited into a reactionary political movement that undercuts their  
own interests.

Meanwhile, the human significance of work was undergoing a massive  
cultural mutation, as traditional industry gave way to high  
technology, skill to mechanization, manufacturing to information, and  
economic nationalism to globalization. Marx worried about the control  
of the means of production, but what is control when the factory is  
replaced by the keyboard as the center of invention? For 200 years,  
“capital” was decisive, but then along came “intellectual capital.”  
Goodbye borders. Goodbye regulation. Welcome to the free market, a  
free-for-all that destroys freedom. The very conditions of  
transcendent inequality that gave rise to the labor movement in the  
first place are now being rapidly re-created on a global scale, with  
unions reduced to the role of sputtering kibitzers.

In the United States, the most revealing failure of the labor  
movement to live up to its foundational ideal involves labor’s role  
as a pillar of the military-industrial complex. The engine of the  
American economy is defense spending. For two generations, but  
especially since the end of the Cold War, the nation has cannibalized  
itself by investing its best minds and most of its treasure in a  
profoundly counterproductive military establishment.

Usually this is blamed on the so-called “iron triangle” of  
corporations, Congress, and the Pentagon, which keep trillions of  
dollars circulating through the unbroken loop. But the labor movement  
has long been an essential part of this corrupt system, with union  
lobbyists playing their crucial role in keeping the lucrative defense  
contracts coming.

What would have happened at the end of the Cold War, when the  
expected “peace dividend” might have rescued education or rebuilt the  
nation’s infrastructure, if union leaders, backed by the grass-roots  
labor movement, had demanded an end to the Pentagon boondoggle? The  
conversion of a military-based economy, serving no real purpose  
beyond its own enrichment, to an economy of authentic productivity  
would have transformed foreign policy in the nick of time (no war in  
Iraq), and provided resources for homefront infrastructure (no failed  
dikes in New Orleans, or collapsed bridges in Minneapolis).

It did not happen, for a lot of reasons - one of which is the  
hollowed out commitment of a movement that should have known better.  
What this nation needs is a revitalized reason to celebrate Labor Day.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© 2007 The Boston Globe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20070903/43af854a/attachment.htm