The balance of forces: why are popular movements so weak?

Stanley Aronowitz, a U.S.-based left thinker, has a very stimulating analysis of the political effects of the crisis, and on what to think of the Obama administration. Unfortunately though, this essay, Facing the Economic Crisis, seems to have no inkling of the peer to peer movements that are profoundly transforming social practices and structures.

Stanley Aronowitz, an excerpt:

“After eight months in the White House, the new administration has demonstrated, to the disappointment of even some of its fervent supporters, that it has virtually no plan to address the growing jobs crisis except through a program of “trickle down.” The most it has done is to extend unemployment benefits beyond the statutory 26 weeks limit, and supplement the food stamps program. Either the Obama administration actually believes that the huge sums handed over to financial institutions and the car industry will, over time, pull us out of the recession or, lacking a genuine protest movement from below, it simply experiences little pressure to do anything different. I suggest that the latter is the case and even some of Obama’s supporters are beginning to come to that realization – witness Krugman, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow’s increasingly critical public comments. The administration obviously believes it has enough breathing room to await an economic turnaround without sacrificing its political standing or directly confronting the large financial corporations with proposals to shift funds in order to directly assist the unemployed and those facing foreclosure. Under these circumstances, its economic advisors have accepted the conventional wisdom that we are in the midst of an ordinary recession which will peak at 18 months to 2 years. Although this length of time is somewhat longer than the last three recessions—2001-2002, 1990-91, and 1982-1983—they believe it is well within the range of normalcy. Skeptics, notably Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and NYU professor Nouriel Roubini have cast some doubt on this prognostication – but to little effect since all of them generally support the administration’s economic strategy and merely fault it for not being bold enough. On August 21, 2009, Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, looked into his crystal ball and opined that the recession was bottoming out—about the fifth time he made such a statement that year. The statement appeared to be geared to the stock market and intended to assuage popular fears that the recession was damping home sales and creating more uncertainty in the labour market. Few in the public debate and certainly nobody in the ranks of policy-makers has heeded the warnings that persistent job loss and lackluster consumption were weighing heavily on the prospects for economic recovery. In fact, in numerous statements, the president himself has warned that unemployment would grow well beyond the declaration of official recovery, a tacit acknowledgement that substantial Federal jobs and income support are not on the horizon.

Obama’s poll numbers declined in summer 2009, a reflection of growing disappointment with the performance of his administration on the economic crisis, health care reform, and the accelerated war in Afghanistan. But polling is only an indicator of public sentiment. As “progressives” fret, the organized opposition to Obama’s programs still comes mainly from the Right. Liberals are divided between those who, in fear of Right-wing putschism (which recently displayed its strength in a plethora of town meetings on health care reform), are clinging to the administration and those who wring their hands and voice their disappointment more loudly. But neither the labor movement nor the mainstream of the civil rights, feminist and environmental movements are prepared to openly oppose a Democratic administration on a broad range of economic issues.

The seriously divided labor movement regularly issues statements calling for a jobs program but has, until now, shown no political will to mobilize its own still vast membership (16 million)—as it did during the 2008 elections when it handed $250 million to the Democrats—to demand a share of the trillions that the Bush and Obama administrations have given or lent to a few key Wall Street banks and insurance companies. Progressives in the main liberal organizations, intellectuals and the AFL-CIO and Change to Win leaderships have replied to criticism that they are willing to give Obama “the benefit of the doubt” and have stood idly by as joblessness spreads. Until Spring 2009, Organized Labor’s main legislative priority was Congressional passage of the Employees Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have required employers to recognize unions on the basis of card-checks rather than a mandatory secret ballot election. When the administration and the Democratic Congressional leadership pronounced the bill “dead”, the unions – notwithstanding brave words to the contrary – folded their tents and followed the administration’s call for rapid passage of health care reform. But at no time in the first year of the Obama administration did they put the dire economic situation facing workers at or near the top of their agenda.

The reasons for the unions’ passivity, even as their membership and economic power continues to wane, should not be sought in conspiratorial theories of perfidy or complacency. According to such views, union leaders have simply lost their edge. That is, they sit on top of a bureaucracy that tends to inure them from rank-and-file suffering: while workers are straining under the burden of job losses, stagnant wages, employer demands for “furloughs” and wage reductions, and rising food and health costs, their leaders seem to have other fish to fry. While there is some truth to such perspectives, they fail to address the deeper causes of labor’s organized passivity in the economic crisis. Perhaps the least noticed among these is the degree to which the unions—and the social movements that arose during and after the 60s—have become what C. Wright Mills once termed a “dependent variable” in the political and economic “set ups”: the unions—and the movements—lack autonomy from either the state or the corporations with which they bargain; they experience themselves as subordinate to and dependent on these institutions. While these relationships can easily be characterized as instances of “class collaboration”, what often remains unexplained are the origins of this situation and the forces that maintain it. In what follows I would like to venture an informed speculation.

Since the 1950s, Organized Labor has hitched its fate to capital. During the Cold War it shed all of its socialist ideas and a good number of its militant socialist and communist activists as well. In fact, union leaders have come to believe that capitalism is in their and their members’ best interests and that full-blown systemic opposition is tantamount to political and economic suicide. This attitude was already encouraged during the heyday of the New Deal, but reached its apogee during the Cold War – when the permanent war economy and US global economic power enabled key sections of the American working class to achieve an unprecedented degree of job and income security. Of course, a major element in the new perception that workers were an integral part the corporate capitalist order was the initiation by the state and its financial partners of an extensive credit system that permitted working-class people to borrow money with which to own their homes, send children to college, go on vacations, and regularly update their cars. After the defeat of Congressional legislation that would have established a National Health Service and the stagnation of the social security (pension) system, unions in key industries (such as steel, auto, coal, electrical, communications, oil and transportation) negotiated a “private” welfare state with their employers, thereby taking the air out of efforts to enact a publicly-financed universal health care program and extend the welfare state. The bare truth is that since the passage of the Wage-Hour law of 1938, the only major extension of the welfare state was Medicare, passed in 1966. While the unions can take considerable credit for its passage, they were moved only to apply the necessary pressure after they found that “their” corporations refused to insure retirees.

These deals were of a tri-partite nature. In most cases, the health and pension contributions were paid in lieu of wages and to private insurance companies, even where the union administered the services. Since 1955 many major unions have become “partners” with some of the leading insurers who provided benefits in return for fairly substantial fees. Moreover, the provision of benefits under the union contract rather than under public authority allows union leaders to claim credit for health and pension improvements and so gave them a political base (needed for reelection to union office) that would not have been available under socialized medicine. In some instances, the traffic between unions’ health and welfare staff and these private insurers was fairly heavy. Many unions hired consultants from Wall Street firms to advise them on how to handle their benefits programs. During the fiscal crisis of 1976-77 these consultants actually acted as intermediaries between the union leadership and city officials in New York, Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere who successfully persuaded the unions to grant concessions, most of which are still in effect.

In 1975 union membership was about a quarter of the labor force. This was down from 35% in 1953, but organized labor was still driving wages and benefits levels for all workers. Having organized millions of public sector employees, the AFL-CIO was not only a powerful fraction of the national Democratic Party, but was also able to name many of the party’s candidates at the state and local level. But the “rational” basis of Labor’s close alliance with capital began to vanish in the 1970s. The last thirty years have witnessed the massive deindustrialization of America and a profound decomposition and recomposition of the working and salaried middle classes. Except in the public and health care sectors, union organizing slowed to a crawl. By 2009 union membership was only 7% of the private sector labor force and slightly less than 12% of the entire labor force. Today, what was once an industrial union base of 7 million members has been reduced to less than 2 million. And the composition of that membership has radically changed: public and private sector service and transportation employees are now, overwhelmingly, the majority of union members.

In the main, having bowed to the view that globalization and technological innovation are engines of “progress” and that workers’ pain was temporary, the unions accepted the inevitability of these losses. After conducting a fairly vigorous campaign to defeat the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, the bulk of Organized Labor has settled for crumbs at the table of capital. When some auto, meat packing and steel workers locals protested capital flight or refused to accept concessionary bargaining, the national leaderships ruthlessly suppressed these movements, sometimes by agreeing to plant migrations used by corporations to thwart militants. For example, the UAW leadership looked benignly on as the big three auto companies removed plants from the Detroit area and Flint—the heart of the union’s traditional strength—to the American South and to rural areas. Belatedly, they took something of a stand against outsourcing auto parts production to Mexico, China and other developing countries – but they presented their objections in the form of crass “Buy American” slogans.

The union leadership—and a considerable portion of its members—are suffused with fear that if they conduct a determined struggle against wage freezes, pension and health care reductions and plant closings, they will lose everything. They are facing capital without weapons that they believe can win. The past thirty years of steady retreat is a tale of collective worker anxiety as much as corporate boldness in testing workers’ resolve to protect their hard-won gains. The so-called Treaty of Detroit, whereby the Auto union all but ceased its shop-floor militancy in return for regular raises, early retirement with a substantial pension, and a reasonably good health benefits program, has been dead for almost thirty years now. The bare truth is that the UAW and other unions have no strategy that takes into account to counter the fact that the post-war era’s tacit “treaty”—in auto, steel and other major industries—between labor and capital of the post-war era was abrogated by management and that capital has no interest in a new accord that would constrain its room to maneuver. In the face of a situation where they have no place to turn except to their families and their communities, workers have beat a steady retreat, forever setting up new rear-guard positions until the ground appears to have completely shifted under them. It is no exaggeration to claim that the United States working class has become invisible in the public sphere and to itself as a class. Workers now often seem , often despondent, seem caught in a sado-masochistic relationship with not only with capital and but also their own their union leaders who are often indistinguishable.

We have witnessed several generations of labor’s dependence and at least a generation of workers that have never experienced a victory over capital. The political defeat of the unions has reverberated throughout the entire society. The basis of this broader effect of labor’s decline should be fairly clear: apart from the Churches, the unions remain the largest, most resource-blessed and visible force in the modern liberal camp. Their demise has reduced the prospects for the less organized sectors of society that remain relatively unprotected from the vicissitudes of the economic crisis. In the absence of meaningful struggle at the level of civil society and the workplace, millions have turned to electoralism in the hope that government can solve their problems, i.e. to a Democratic Party taken over by neoliberal interests and ideology. The 2008 Obama victory was based on these hopes but is already in the process of producing widespread disillusion.”

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