File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-31.063, message 21


Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 18:34:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Does the Labor Movement Have a Future (Post #2)


It would be incorrect to believe that the future of the labor movement
hinged simply upon political economy. Unfortunately labor's difficulties
run much deeper. To use Gramsci's famous phrase, capitalism is a
"hegemonic system." It infiltrates all aspects of our lives, including the
most personal, with the logic of exchange. If there had been a vibrant
alternative culture throughout the post-Second World War period, it would
have been difficult to keep that culture alive. The fact that there was no
such culture gave capitalism the field to itself. The results have been
inimical to the growth of the labor movement. 

Suppose that we consider a typical working class neighborhood in 1935.
Workers lived in close proximty to one another, and most of them worked
close by. They got their news from newspapers, and perhaps radio, and
there were a good many newspapers, some aimed directly at them. Few of
them had cars, and all of them worked too hard for too little pay (or were
unemployed) to have been obsessed with consumption. The Depression had
struck them ferociously, obliterating many of the subtle economic
differences which previously had marked them. Of course, they were sharply
divided by race and sex, but even these seemingly insurmountable
differences showed signs of weakening in the crucible of depression
suffering. In such circumstances it made sense to speak of a working class
"outlook" if not yet a working class "consciousness." 

In my hometown, fifteen years after the end of the Great Depression, it
was still the case that most people thought of themselves as working
people, and they knew that their employers were not the same as they. When
people left work, they went to their bars and their clubs and talked among
themselves. Everybody was pretty much in the same boat, and those who did
not share a working class outlook were looked upon with suspicion. Nothing
could be worse than being thought of as a "company man." No wonder that
the CIO electrified entire communities and organized at a dizzying pace.
In my mother's town, a small and poor mining village, people were ready
for the UMW, Here was an organization which galvanized their deepest
feelings and no amount of propaganda could defeat it. 

Turn the clock back ahead to 1995. There is a glass factory near
Meadville, Pennsylvania, and some of the employees there want a union. The
plant is located in an isolated area, and the company has taken pains to
hire people from a widespread area. When the shift ends, workers scatter
in their vans and trucks to their rural and suburban homes. There is no
sense of community. The typical worker does not consider himself or
herself to be working class. In fact, the company has begun a team concept
program and quite a few workers are pleased to be designated as
"associates." The new distinction which the employer promotes among the
workers do not face the near unanimous disdain which they would have
encountered 60 or 30 years before. The younger workers especially do not
think of the union as I would have when I was their age. They are
interested in themselves and little else. The do not have any clear idea
of why things are the way they are or how a union might improve their
lives. The union which tried to organize them did all of the right things,
but despite its best efforts, it could not convince these young workers to
vote union. 

The suburbanization of the white working class after the Second World War
and the increased working class consumption which accompanied it, both of
which encouraged by capital and the state and ironically made possible by
the successes of the labor movement, have create lifestyles and modes of
thinking which preclude critical thought and radical action. Capitalism
commodifies everything from the media to religion; life is literally
organized around the marketplace. The social relationships which comprise
our economic system are thoroughly masked, and all that matters is our
relationship with the things we buy. No one encourages us to look beyond
the market to grasp the relationships of unequal power which ultimately
underlies it.  The market is the whole of life; all that we can do is
conform to its dictates. 

(From "Does the Labor Movement Have a Future" by Michael D. Yates in the
February 1997 Monthly Review) 


Louis Proyect





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