The assault on the labor movement is generally associated with the conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher. But it is worth noting that it was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, who initiated deregulation in the airline and trucking industries and tapped Paul Volcker to run the Federal Reserve. And in Britain, it was Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan who opened the door to Thatcherism by essentially declaring that Keynesianism was dead. It wasn’t the subsequent set of policies, summarized as neoliberalism, that created working-class weakness. Rather, those policies exposed the already existing limits of the labor movement and increased the confidence of elites in further exploiting the movement’s long-standing weaknesses. What followed had an impact on working people far beyond individual living standards. The frustrations of austerity didn’t generally lead to radicalization, but only increased pressures on working-class families to maintain as much consumption as they could. Absent collective solutions, they found other ways to support themselves, with profound implications for undermining the development of the working class as an oppositional class... The ironic outcome of these forms of survival was that they contributed to reproducing the very neoliberal zeitgeist of individualism that has so damaged working class lives. As Mimmo Porcaro has distressingly observed, “the more class position determines people’s lives, the less people think of themselves as members of a class.”... The most profound defeat of the past three decades has been the retreat of the socialist left and the consequent lowering of both social and political expectations — both in what we hope for and what we believe we can collectively achieve. The idea of socialism has been sidelined as pie-in-the-sky. But what is really utopian is the promise that a better life within capitalism is around the corner. The radical must increasingly declare itself the practical.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 23:52:57 +0000
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