💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › james-herod-loss-of-anti-capitalism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:19:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Loss of Anti-Capitalism Author: James Herod Date: April 1998 Language: en
Review: Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social
Reconstruction of America. Edited by Seven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman,
Houghton Mifflin, 1997, 273 pages.
Not one word about destroying capitalism! That is the most striking
thing about this book. Not one word about abolishing wage-slavery. In
fact the concept of wage-slavery is completely absent from this book.
Instead, the assumption throughout is that working at a job for a wage
is all there will ever be, the only issues being the conditions under
which this work is done, its rewards, and the extent of state sponsored
amelioration. Such is the depth to which the opposition in America has
sunk, such is the thoroughness of the defeat of anti-capitalist forces,
that radicals themselves now accept the permanence of the system of
employers and employees, bosses and workers, buyers and sellers of
labor-power. What a far cry from the blistering indictments of the boss
system at the beginning of the century by Haywood, DeCleyre, Debs, and
Goldman. You would have thought that at least Norman Birnbaum, Frances
Fox Piven, Eric Foner, or Manning Marable, socialists all, could have
spared a sentence or two for the ultimate goal. Not so however. Maybe
they have lost sight of it.
The book contains 21 short essays (plus an introduction by the editors),
presented at the "Teach-In with the Labor Movement" held at Columbia
University in New York City in October, 1996. The conference brought
together "leading American intellectuals and labor movement activists"
(according to the jacket blurb). Seven of the 21 represent labor; six of
these are with AFL-CIO, one with AFSCME. Of the intellectuals, twelve
are professors and two are writers. One of the editors is a professor
and the other is executive editor at Houghton Mifflin. Thus the book is
in no way representative of either labor activists or intellectuals,
especially those not affiliated with large institutions.
A glance at the table of contents gives a hint about what we might be in
for. There are articles on women and labor, Asian-Americans and labor,
black leadership and labor, whiteness and labor, intellectuals and
labor. We might surmise from this that identity politics has swamped the
labor movement just like it has swamped the universities and the
opposition movement in general, eradicating class analysis everywhere.
But perhaps there is hope. There is an article on "Beyond Identity
Politics." But we'll come back to this.
First let's take a look at the union bureaucrats. John Sweeney, in
"America Needs a Raise," bemoans the passing of the boom days after
World War II. "For employers back then, decent wages and benefits and
high standards of corporate responsibility were seen as good business
and good for business. And our leaders in government, business, and
labor understood what President Kennedy said best: "A rising tide lifts
all boats." Back then "We (my italics) were concerned with raising the
standard of living for all Americans, not just accumulating wealth for
the fortunate few." And things did improve -- "...a fair portion (my
italics) of the newly created wealth was distributed among the American
workforce (my italics)." But the "Corporate irresponsibility became the
strategy of choice in our new winner-take-all economy ...." "Even
employers with proud histories of doing right by their workers joined
the rush to speed up work, freeze wages, slash benefits, and eliminate
pensions."
Sweeney documents the tremendous hit the American working class (he
never uses this term however, saying instead "workforce", "working
people", "American workers", or "employees") has taken over the last
twenty-five years, and he wants to stop it. The way to stop it is to
rebuild unions. Then you could make corporations stop exporting jobs,
invest in America, provide training, and raise wages, and you could
force the government to reform the tax laws, stop corporate welfare, and
restore the safety net. "Our idea of a just society," says Sweeney, "is
one in which honest labor (my italics) raises the standard of living for
all, rather than creating wealth for just a few."
Of course there is zero analysis of why the boom ended, why the welfare
state is being dismantled, or why factories are being moved overseas.
The problem for Sweeney is "corporate irresponsibility," not the normal
functioning of capitalism. His dream is to live permanently in the
biggest boom, in the richest country, in the history of the capitalist
system (which he completely accepts). This is the leader of organized
labor in America speaking. His speech is so pathetic it's painful to
write about it.
Robert Welsh details AFL-CIO's program for rebuilding unions. It sounds
like a good initiative, provided your only objective is to "get a raise"
for "workers."
Jose La Luz discusses new educational strategies to empower workers "to
transform the existing power arrangements in order to improve the lives
of working men and women." Nothing here about abolishing workers as
workers and creating a society not based on, and entirely free from, the
"employment" of "workers."
Mae Ngai outlines an informative short history of Asian workers in
America, a history of exclusion primarily, and discrimination, linking
this history to current debates about immigration. Once again though,
the absence of anti-capitalism is obvious. "The real solutions," Ngai
writes, "to workers' economic problems lie elsewhere [than in policing
immigrants], in union representation, in living wages, in the
enforcement of labor and environmental regulations, in higher workplace
standards and in the retention of jobs in the United States." Isn't the
real solution to workers' economic problems the abolition of capitalism
-- the destruction of the wage-slave system, the destruction of the
labor market (the buying and selling of labor power), and the end of
exploitation? How can there ever be a 'real solution' short of this?
Karen Nussbaum presents a standard discussion of the role and position
of women in the labor market, and discusses recent organizing efforts.
Her goal though is merely "... to restore balance in our world --
between the rich and the rest, between work and family, between men and
women...." Balance? Between the rich and the rest? Under capitalism?
Give me a break.
Saddest of all though is Ron Blackwell's piece on "Globalization and the
American Labor Movement." Blackwell complains that corporations "have
escaped the reach of public authority and are pursuing their private
objectives at the expense of the rest of society." Have they ever done
anything else? He seems to think the problem "is not globalization
itself but the irresponsible actions of corporations in regard to
workers, unions and other social movements, and to governments ...."
"Without countervailing power," he writes, "from other social forces
[e.g., unions] or effective governmental regulations, there is no way to
make private corporations fulfill their public responsibility ...." Well
why not just get rid of private corporations? "Without effective
regulations, corporations pursue profit with no regard for the wider
social or environmental impact of their activities." "The challenge to
the American labor movement is not to stop globalization but to restore
a balance of power between workers and their employers and to make
corporations accountable again to government and the people." Well golly
gee! I must have been asleep to have missed this golden age of
capitalism when corporations were accountable to the people. When was
it? Even during the heydays of the post WWII boom, most countries of the
world were being gutted and impoverished, toxic dumps were being laid
down by the thousands, native and peasant cultures were being destroyed
everywhere, whole nations were inflicted with artificially induced
famines, whole huge sections of the working class were living on
subsistence wages even in the rich countries, hundreds of millions of
acres of land were being grabbed, the commodification of everything was
proceeding at a furious pace, militarism was rampant, tens of thousands
of species were being exterminated, rain forests obliterated, oceans
polluted. When have capitalists ever behaved responsibly? Tell me that.
This essay is so preposterously naive, so thoroughly unaware of the
fierceness with which capitalists defend, on a daily basis, their
mechanisms of theft, so completely ignorant of the structures of
capitalist rule through five hundred years of murder and plunder, that
it is a shame the piece was ever printed.
Now let's take a look at the academics. First Todd Gitlin's "Beyond
Identity Politics." Any hope we might have had that Gitlin would return
to class analysis is quickly dashed. Gitlin likes identity politics; he
just thinks it has reached its limits of effectiveness. Far from seeing
it as having helped eradicate class analysis from the American left, he
thinks it has accomplished a lot. That he sees "workers" as just another
identity betrays his deep embeddedness in identity politics. He thinks
it's time to add this identity, that of worker, to the others: women,
blacks, gays and lesbians, Native Americans, Latinos, and so forth. This
identity, of worker, gives us a new "commonality" he says, and will help
us overcome "poverty" and "inequality."
But of course "worker" is not an identity category. It does not refer to
a personal characteristic like gender or race, nor to a cultural
characteristic like language or ethnicity. It is an analytical concept
used by radical theorists to dissect capitalism. It is inextricably
linked with capital -- labor and capital -- as the two poles of the
profit system, "worker" being a name for one location in this system. It
is a relationship, not an identity. And it is a relationship of
subordination and exploitation, whether workers are aware of this or
not. But it is only rarely that workers have been conscious of
themselves as workers, let alone as wage-slaves. This consciousness was
more widespread in the nineteenth century. It can be argued that this
was because capital then had not yet fully colonized the consciousness
of the working class. Workers then were still in possession of cultures
predating capitalism, and still retained some non-commodified relations.
Be that as it may, workers have long since stopped thinking of
themselves as workers. It is questionable whether this consciousness can
ever be revived, or whether it is desirable to even try. Capital itself,
as part of its ideological defense, has destroyed this consciousness.
Also, however, I believe that workers themselves have sloughed it off.
Who wants to think of themselves as just a worker, a wage-earner? We are
more. We are human beings, or at least citizens. Working at a job is
something we have to do to survive, but it is not us. We have lives of
our own to lead, and many interests outside work. So this can be turned
to advantage in the anti-capitalist struggle. The original goal after
all was to abolish workers as workers. So we have sloughed off the
label, but we are still trapped in the relationship, a relation of abuse
and slavery. It is this bondage that has to be sloughed off now. And it
can be.
But Gitlin says none of this. His goals are merely "shorter work weeks,
work-sharing, democratic controls over corporate policies [sic], health
care, worker protection, [and] a reversal of the thrust toward
inequality." Gitlin is a New Leftist who never made it to a class
analysis and an understanding of capitalism, but remained encased in the
old liberal, pluralist theory of democracy, which he then, along with
thousands of others, imported into the radical movement and renamed
identity politics.
The only sustained discussion of class in the book is in Lillian Rubin's
"Family Values and the Invisible Working Class." This essay is a plea
for keeping the category of "working class" and not lumping everyone in
the middle class. But once again the pernicious influence of mainstream
social science is quite evident. For Rubin, class is a matter of income
or occupation level, not a question of your relation to the accumulators
of capital, that is, of whether or not you have to sell your labor-power
to live. So although she believes that there is still a working class
(contrary to popular belief), she also believes that most Americans are
in the middle class. Actually, income has nothing to do with class. That
is, it is the source of income that determines class, not the amount.
Workers who sell their labor-power for $100,000 a year are still in the
working class. They can only escape the working class if they use some
of that money to buy real estate, stocks and bonds, or profit-making
enterprises, and thus begin to live off rent, interest, dividends, and
profits, rather than wages or salary. But if they spend it all on
houses, cars, boats, vacations, clothes, and entertainment, they remain
workers, although rich ones. Many thousands of middle level managers
have learned this all too painfully in recent years as they have been
fired from their good jobs, and, unable to find another buyer of their
labor at a similar price, have rapidly lost everything, ending up on the
unemployment line or on welfare. They learned the hard way that they are
workers who, in order to survive, have only their labor to sell.
The closest anyone comes in this book to rejecting capitalism is Norman
Birnbaum, in the following sentence: "The subordination of the market by
the nation and the extension of citizenship to the workplace remain the
unfulfilled tasks of American democracy." This is a rejection of
capitalism only for those who realize: (1) that the "subordination of
the market" implies the destruction of capitalism, since that is
precisely what capitalism is -- the domination of the market and
commodified relations over all realms of life; and (2) that democratic
citizenship in the workplace is incompatible with capitalism since
capitalism by definition is precisely the monopolization of the means of
production by the accumulators of capital. But how many are going to, or
can, read between the lines like this? And the statement is marred in
other ways, by his reliance on "the nation," for example, as if creating
the nation-state system wasn't how capitalists managed to set up the
market in the first place, and send its tentacles out over the entire
world. Also, for a radical scholar to be still speaking of "American
democracy" is very disheartening.
All the authors included here hope for the revival of the labor
movement. What they seem to have forgotten is that for over a hundred
years, from the 1830s until World War II, labor struggles were rooted in
an anti-capitalist working class culture. Of course, there were
reformist unions, what we now call business unions, from the very
beginning, but they were surrounded by communists, anarchists,
socialists, and anarcho-syndicalists. All this anti-capitalism has been
swept away. At some point the term 'labor movement' was substituted as a
euphemism for communism and anarchism by unionists who wanted to
disassociate themselves from their more radical comrades, choosing
instead to agitate only for small gains within capitalism, rather than
for its overthrow. Can the "labor movement" be revived in the absence of
anti-capitalist sentiments? Will workers fight again just for a raise? I
have my doubts. I think we have passed through the welfare state phase,
never to see it again. Workers, and their associations, will have to
become revolutionary again, that is anti-capitalist, before they can
hope to organize anew and fight effectively. A raise is not enough.
Freedom, from drudgery and bondage, will have to be desired.
There are moments of relief in the book. Piven (and also Fletcher, the
best of the labor pieces) offers a detailed and informative analysis of
how recent legislative changes in Social Security, Medicaid, food
stamps, welfare (especially AFDC), etcetera, are forcing millions of
people back onto the labor market, thus expanding the "reserve army of
labor" and weakening the power of labor vis-a-vis capital. She focuses
especially on "workfare" and shows how this program is undermining
unions and undercutting organized labor. Fonder and Birnbaum both
present very interesting thumbnail sketches of the history of
intellectuals and labor. Rorty reminds us that workers' struggles have
not all been sunshine and flowers but usually have been rather brutal
and bloody. Marable analyzes the differing strategies black leaders have
adopted, stressing alternatively race or class, in trying to improve the
conditions of African-Americans.
So there you have it. In short, there is not one audacious thought in
this whole book.
If ever there was an urgent need for the infusion of anarchist ideas
into the American left it is now. The total bankruptcy of statist
strategies, whether Leninist or Social Democratic, could not be more
glaringly apparent. Fortunately, there are revolutionary currents not
noticed by the essayists in this book. The burgeoning anarchist movement
in many countries, the autonomia in Italy and elsewhere, native and
peasant uprisings like the Zapatistas in Mexico, the rediscovery of
anti-Bolshevik communism, the continued development of autonomous,
non-sectarian marxism, the still active anarcho-syndicalist
organizations, mass anti-statist communists parties in India, localist
movements in Africa, the regionalism of radical environmentalists, plus
revolutionary theorists like Ellen Meiksins Wood, Colin Ward, Cornelius
Castoriadis, Antonio Negri, David McNally, Carole Pateman, Immanuel
Wallerstein, Silvia Federici, Harry Cleaver, David Noble, Selma James --
all these point the way to the renewal of the anti-capitalist war and
the liberation of humanity from the bondage of wage-slavery.