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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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