We live in a dangerous time when large corporations and the super-rich are restructuring the nation’s economy. There is a crisis for most Americans, but not for the elites who dominate the political economy of the country. Unfortunately, organized labor can be as much of an obstacle as it is a solution to mounting a movement for social justice that might reverse this trend and offer hope for the future.

Unions have the money, members, and capacity to organize, build, and fuel a movement designed to challenge the power of the corporate elite. But despite the fact that thousands of dedicated members, leaders, and staff have worked their hearts out to rebuild the labor movement, unions are just big enough—and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure—to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed.

Campaigns challenging corporate power can’t be held in check by institutions with too much to lose. Unions with hundreds of millions in assets and collective bargaining agreements covering millions of workers won’t risk their treasuries and contracts by engaging in large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of non-violent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures.

This isn’t an abstract or theoretical problem; we are already living it every day:

• In city after city, a project labor agreement—or a collective bargaining agreement covering a small percentage of a corporation’s total workforce—can make a union want to veto any demonstrations and actions that might upset its relationship with a particular employer.
• A recent demonstration in the Northeast—against corporations that damage the economy by not paying taxes—ended up taking place in an isolated area, where nobody could see it, because a number of unions feared that a more visible site would offend an employer.
• In Ohio, a set of unions actively worked against a recent multi-state mobilization at a JP Morgan Chase shareholder meeting. The unions said the planned demonstrations seemed “too anti-corporate,” with the potential to turn off independents and buoy conservative fundraising efforts. They feared all of this would undercut the passage of a ballot initiative to regain bargaining rights for public employees.

And what was so anti-corporate? In the case of the Ohio demonstrations it was the demand that JP Morgan and other big banks stop foreclosures, pay their fair share in taxes, and renegotiate toxic loans that are bankrupting cities and states. These issues are critical to building a broader movement that engages tens of millions of people from across the political spectrum. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to connect efforts to destroy public employee unions with the broader economic problems caused by the Big Banks (and the resulting loss of jobs and revenue in Ohio), the unions unnecessarily chose a narrow path that weakens them in the short and long term.

If our goal is to offend no one, we’re in danger of doing next to nothing. It is understandable that unions don’t want to risk their own relationships with certain employers or politicians. But that shouldn’t restrain a broader effort to hold those corporations and politicians accountable. Unions continue to act as though they represent 30 percent of the private sector workforce and that bargaining for those workers drives wages for the whole economy. Decisions are made based on how to protect the 7 percent of private sector workers who are unionized (instead of the 93 percent of private sector workers who aren’t in unions). The last thirty years prove that this strategy doesn’t make sense for the remaining unionized workers or the overwhelming majority of workers who aren’t in unions.

As the stakes are raised and the intensity of campaigns increases, these problems will be magnified. The solution isn’t to try to defy institutional gravity by convincing people to do something they aren’t willing to do. Instead, we need a different model. We need to develop a movement-based organizational model that taps into and builds on union resources—both financial and organizational—but denies unions’ “veto power” over campaign activities. Unions should support, help set up, launch, finance, and ultimately engage directly in campaigns based on their comfort level—but they shouldn’t have the ability to control or shut down activity because of legal risk or pressure from an employer or politician.

If our strategy is to turn the tables so workers and regular people feel more secure, hopeful, and powerful—and so the elite feels less sure of its control over the country’s politics and the economy—we can’t tamp down momentum when someone wins a victory or gets pressured to back off. As a practical matter, if unions cede control and are not able to exercise veto rights, they are able to resist political and employer pressure. Taking it a step further, if unions have contributed money in advance to community organizations, they lose the ability to shut down activity later. Far from being a threat to winning smaller fights and victories, open-ended escalating activity that can’t be shut down is exactly what will force powerful corporate interests to make real concessions. This doesn’t mean individual unions or organizations shouldn’t make settlements that arise in the context of bigger battles; they just can’t shut down the broader fight.

With the SEIU’s 2006 janitors’ strike in Houston, we built incredible momentum—a Houston-based mini-movement—by tapping into issues that went way beyond the specificities of the strike. We won the strike because it was seen as part of a bigger fight that scared the hell out of Houston’s business elite. If we had taken it a step further—engaging and supporting other organizations with the capacity to expand the fight beyond janitors—the movement would have grown (instead of having dissipated) when the strike settled.

So what sort of movement-based model might address these issues? What does recent activity suggest about how to take advantage of the resources that only labor can offer, without allowing those resources to restrain the civil disobedience, radicalism, and creativity necessary to challenge the corporate elite?

One example is what happened in Madison, where the work of the teaching assistants and students was critical to launching, sustaining, and expanding the campaign. Along with community groups, they led the occupation of the state capitol building, which helped define and propel the campaign. The student and community activity inspired unions to take bold actions that probably never would have been launched if the decisions had been made at a traditional labor coalition table.

A movement-based model should welcome the energy, creativity, and nimbleness of existing and emerging social justice groups, newly activated students, as well as people and organizations steeped in non-violent direct action. While it is not yet clear when (or from where) the organizations and people that can potentially lead and drive such a movement will emerge, we do know that more people, communities, and organizations have been impacted and politically marginalized by the reorganization of the economy than at any time in recent history.

We need to take a leap of faith. During past surges of activity in the civil rights, peace, women’s, environmental, and gay rights movements, new leaders, formations, and organizations emerged, accomplishing things that previously seemed impossible. By avoiding the pitfalls that stifle the creation of movements, we can help generate conditions that increase the likelihood of new activists, leaders, and organizations propelling us forward.

Protesters spearheaded more than eighty street blockings, lobby occupations, flash mobs, and other creative activities in the days leading up to the twenty-thousand-person May 12th New York City march to Make Big Banks and Millionaires Pay. This has led to discussions, among a number of unions, about the potential of engaging both their members and the public around a different set of tactics organized to address a broader set of issues.

Instead of a one-day march, corporate players—including all the major banks, the Koch brothers, and key private equity and hedge fund operators—were confronted by angry citizens on a daily basis. The march broke other patterns as well. Groups gathered in ten different locations, according to their focus on a particular constituency or sector damaged by economic reorganization (i.e., there were groups centered around students, housing, transportation, human services, education, people facing foreclosure, the unemployed, and those at risk of losing health care and other critical services). We saw this march as something bigger than a labor rally—it painted a big picture about who is responsible for the economic crises our families face.

Instead of listening to hours of speeches, each group hosted a teach-in before taking to the streets and converging into one giant march that shut down much of the Wall Street area. Organizers combined the mass turnout of union members with the direct-action approaches—i.e., lobby occupations and street blockings—that had been used earlier in the week. This series of marches and actions offers a window into how to think about a movement model of activism that builds on, but isn’t limited to, what unions are comfortable with, while creating conditions that expand their comfort zone.

The Make Big Banks and Millionaires Pay approach illustrates that there may be three concrete ways to resolve the contradiction of “We can’t do it with unions and we can’t do it without them”:

Prolonging protest. We need to commit ourselves to the idea that intensive escalating activities—designed to challenge and disrupt unfair corporate abuses of power—are needed. These activities shouldn’t be limited to one-day marches or rallies—they must go on for weeks, growing in size and intensity like the protests in Madison.

Weeks of creative direct action and activities. Just as unions escalate from one-day symbolic strikes to longer strikes that have a real impact, so must we expand from one-day marches and demonstrations to weeks of creative direct action and activities. There are two potentially overlapping ways to do this. The first is to build these kinds of longer and more involved protests around students and community groups that have the energy and willingness to take time off from their day-to-day lives to engage in more intense activity (which includes the risk of getting arrested). Secondly, unions must revive (and reinvent) the strike. Strikes consistently bring thousands of people together in full-time action mode. During Justice for Janitors strikes (i.e., in Boston in 2002 and in Miami in 2006) workers became full-time activists and organizers. Instead of just picketing, the strikers led escalating actions with a creative intensity that disrupted the status quo and led to political crises for building owners and their political friends. Imagine combining traditional, short-term strikes with larger-scale, ongoing community mobilization efforts that continued (and escalated) activities on broader issues even as the strike settled.

Labor support without control. Unions need to help finance and launch these kinds of activities with the explicit agreement that they won’t control or call them off because of outside pressures. There are national and local organizations with bases that can move thousands of people; but they lack the financial resources to do so on a sustained basis.

Teamwork

Unions need to explore creative ways for their members to organize, mobilize around, and engage in these activities. While it will be unnerving for many unions to allow and encourage other organizations to engage and mobilize their members, this is a key ingredient to scaling up activism. Unions could encourage their members to join partner-community organizations, with the intent of sharing membership lists and enabling community groups to recruit and mobilize union members. Many community-based organizations fighting local battles like foreclosure are not tied to collective bargaining relationships—so they’re in a stronger position to organize and lead the escalating activities that are needed to challenge corporate economic and political power.

The mass mobilizations we’ve witnessed in Wisconsin, Ohio, on Wall Street, and across the country can’t just be a flash in the pan. Ordinary Americans understand that the economy is rigged against them. They are angry, and ready to mobilize and engage in ways we haven’t seen in generations. Unions can help make this happen, and their greatest contribution may be to support—not control—a new wave of direct action and mass activity. Only then can we rebalance power and start winning again.

As an academic beginning to engage with the labor movement, if there was one point on which everyone was clear, it was this: you absolutely, positively cannot get involved in the internal politics of the labor movement.

I disagree. If we are to study and work with labor at all, we almost inevitably are involved in its internal politics. Even if it were possible to avoid doing so, I don’t think it would be desirable.

Reasons to Stay Out of Unions’ Internal Politics

Before presenting my position, let’s consider some of the (quite sensible) arguments against intellectuals getting anywhere near the internal politics of unions—reasons that are usually taken as obvious:

1. We all have experience with the academic who has not himself (or, more rarely, herself) done any actual organizing, but who does not hesitate to tell everyone else, most especially people in labor, all the things they’ve done wrong.

2. For those in labor education programs, or those being paid to do research for unions, staying out of internal union politics is a simple matter of survival. To take sides is to lose access to, and funding from, the side you are opposing.

3. There’s the issue of knowledge: do we know enough to be involved? For disputes within labor, there may well be good people and good arguments on both sides; not being in the thick of things, we may have a hard time judging what is really happening, how the workers feel, and the unstated consequences of particular positions. With the best of intentions, even if we think we are fully informed, we can operate in ignorance and make serious mistakes. In such a situation, it is better to stay out of the conflict.

4. There is a good chance that we will be manipulated for factional purposes—union leaders schooled in rough-and-tumble politics will take advantage of naïve academics who don’t understand what they are getting into.

5. Battles within labor will become the focus of outside attention, and our involvement increases that likelihood. A thousand good things that labor does will be ignored, and all the focus will be on the one problem we address.

Responses to These Objections

1. I totally agree that academia is filled with people who feel free to give (self-satisfied) advice from afar. This isn’t about academics and internal union politics—it’s about people and behavior that is pretty insufferable at any time.

2. One of the most important reasons that people stay out of internal labor battles is that a non-trivial proportion of labor-engaged academics are working in labor education programs or receive funding from unions for research projects. For those people, taking a stance on internal union politics runs a very real risk of being cut off from some of their constituencies or risking a multi-year research project. That’s a risk that someone like me—who’s not based in a labor center, who (at worst) would have to switch to a new research topic—doesn’t run.

The risk to labor-funded faculty is real and should be considered in any decision to get involved; but, in many ways, it is a bad faith argument. In just about every organizing campaign, leaders of the campaign are subjected to serious psychological pressures, risk their relationships with co-workers, and run the non-trivial risk of being fired or discriminated against at work. We constantly ask workers to run those risks. If workers don’t take risks, there is no labor movement. How could a labor-oriented intellectual, in good conscience, operate on the basis of: “it’s important that workers take risks, but I’m not willing to do so”? If you are encouraging others to do that which you are unwilling to do, you should get out of labor education, since your own example undercuts your message. At an absolute minimum, labor centers should be sponsoring debates on these disputes; many are unwilling to do even that.

3. I think the same basic point applies to a lack of knowledge: if the issue is important, we should learn about it. We never have “all” the facts, but we still need to engage with ongoing struggles. Not knowing enough may be an opening position, but only on the basis of: “I need to learn about this, and soon, so I will know enough to take action.” Our ignorance is not a long-term reason to stay uninvolved; it’s a demand that we learn.

4. It is absolutely true that we may be manipulated by internal factions; I myself have been burned by this. We should be hyper-aware of this reality. Many internal union disputes are primarily factional struggles about which group will hold office; those we want to avoid. But other internal union struggles raise important issues about values that matter to us; they bring to the fore precisely the reasons we care about labor and want to engage with it. If we avoid those issues we are shirking our responsibility and are, in fact, weakening the labor movement. In the real world, important principles and personal advancement are often mixed, so we need to make decisions about the relative importance of the two, and about our ability to intervene in ways that will advance our principles rather than advance someone’s basically apolitical quest to hold office. But this problem is inherent in most real world politics; to avoid all such situations is to withdraw from struggle.

5. Yes, anything that makes labor look bad is going to get disproportionate media and public attention; and, yes, things that we say may be quoted (fairly or out of context) as part of the attacks on labor. We should be very careful about what we say and write, and always bear this in mind. But if we believe that some key union, or leader, is beginning to travel down a road that will seriously damage labor, and we say nothing, is that helping to build the labor movement? We should remember as well that even if we say nothing critical, that will not prevent union leaders from savaging each other, as the SEIU’s recent disputes make clear.

The Case for Engaging in Internal Union Politics

The most important reason to engage with internal union politics is that doing so is inevitable if we are to be union-involved. In effect, the “stay out of union internal politics” adage means “always support the group in power, never support the opposition.” If there is any level of internal opposition, and the group in power asks us to write a report, do research needed for a contract campaign, help educate workers, sign a statement of support, or write an article about a recent union success, by doing so we are (probably) taking sides. If we do these things for those in power but not for the opposition, or for some unions but not for others, we are definitely taking sides.

Not only that—anytime we write to make a case for or against a policy that is disputed within labor, we are involved in the internal politics of the labor movement. If you are convinced that the national labor movement needs to support immigrant rights, or abjure protectionism, or stop demonizing China, or that construction unions need to practice aggressive affirmative action strategies, and you write a hard-hitting argument to that effect, there will be people in the labor movement who think you shouldn’t be interfering in their union’s internal politics. If we can’t write about key policies, we lose much of our ability to help labor, but anything we write is an intervention in the internal politics of labor.

This Issue in Practice: Recent Conflicts

Most recently, these issues have forcefully arisen around disputes between the SEIU’s national leadership and other union leaders. I was significantly involved in the dispute between the national SEIU and its large California health care workers local (UHW). (The most complete coverage of these disputes can be found in chapter 8 of Steve Early’s The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor.)

When the leadership of the 150,000-member UHW local broke with the national SEIU leadership, many of us felt that it was highly likely that the SEIU’s national leadership would trustee UHW, removing its elected officers, seizing its assets, and taking control of its operations. Bill Fletcher, Jr., one of the most perceptive analysts of labor, said that the SEIU trusteeing UHW would be like the United States invading Iraq—easy to do, profoundly damaging to both sides, and creating a quagmire that would cause pain for years. To help prevent that from happening, I (among others) organized a letter, signed by one hundred labor-engaged intellectuals, urging President Andy Stern not to trustee UHW.

I’ve always thought that the letter was in the best interests of both the national SEIU and UHW, but it led to the sorts of problems that are pointed to by those who argue that academics should stay out of internal conflicts in labor. With any letter put together in a hurry—something like two weeks from start to dispatch—confusion reigns and disparate understandings flourish, especially since the signatures were sought by multiple people using individualized e-mails. People understood their signatures in differing ways. I intended this to be an open, within-the-house-of-labor letter. When I sent the letter to Andy Stern, the initial SEIU reaction was friendly; when the letter was sent to the UALE e-mail list of some five hundred academics no one objected. But when UHW leaders, without our advance knowledge or agreement, ran a half-page ad in the New York Times, all hell broke loose.

Many of those who signed the letter probably did so largely out of ignorance, thinking: “if [person x], whom I know and respect, asked me to sign the letter, it must be a good thing to do.”The SEIU’s initially friendly reception turned sharply negative when the ad appeared in the Times, and most of the signators received calls from someone they knew in the SEIU asking them why they signed, and/or asking them to withdraw their signatures, and/or indicating that there would be consequences. Many of the people who had signed (quite reasonably) felt burned, and let me (and others) know about it. I myself would have happily signed even had I known the letter would be reprinted by UHW, but I would have fully informed those from whom I was attempting to collect signatures, and I’m sure many people would have chosen not to sign.

General Principles

Saying that sometimes academics should be involved in internal labor politics certainly does not mean that we should do so lightly or routinely. The more unusual our interventions are, the more likely they are to be taken seriously. The more those who take a stand have worked with labor and can point to work that has helped labor, the more attention labor leaders will pay. We should not act unless we inform ourselves about the issues. We should be aware that our actions may have consequences. Perhaps most important, for this or for any other organizing action, we should think carefully about the reasons for our actions and their likely consequences. Will our involvement in union internal politics actually promote the values and positions we believe in?

One of the lessons of the SEIU disputes is that although academics are often convinced that we don’t matter in “the real world,” union leaders feel otherwise. They are very concerned about what labor-friendly academics think and do. Labor leaders are willing to invest significant time and energy into a battle for our hearts and minds. If a sizeable number of us take a stand, labor listens, and that is perhaps the strongest reason why, when we think key values and issues are at stake, we should be involved in internal union politics.

*Thanks for comments and reactions from Steve Early, Tom Juravich, Stephanie Luce, Ruth Milkman, Eve Weinbaum, and Ferd Wulkan. Several of these people strongly disagreed with one or another part of my argument, and definitely aren’t responsible for what’s written here.

Spilled across the title pages of progressive journals are demands for a new New Deal, a global New Deal, a New and Improved Deal, a reNewed Deal, and even New Deal 2.0. After Obama’s election, political cartoons—most notably, but not exclusively, on the cover of Time magazine—featured a jubilant, toothy Barack Obama with a cigarette holder, posing confidently in an open limousine à la FDR.

Elsewhere, otherwise sober commentators began speaking of “Franklin Delano Obama.” Even before the coming of the Great Recession, but accelerating ever since, the era of Roosevelt has become a metaphor, political principle, and guiding light for all that must be returned to American politics. Then, inevitably, comes the shock of reality: the new Gilded Age seems to have a lot more traction in American political culture than did the hope of a new New Deal.

For a historian (and social democrat) like myself, this puts me in a bind. I’d love to see a triumphal return of the New Deal. Many of the policies of the 1930s represented the best of what the United States might be as a nation—caring, sharing, secure, and occasionally visionary—while few issues seem more important today than bringing the concerns of working people out of the shadows and into the political and economic light. But bad history makes for really bad political strategy, so we must face up to a key fact: the creation of the New Deal was pretty tenuous to begin with, and the decades following—often called “the New Deal order”—were pretty close to an aberration in American history.

Indeed, the political era between the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt through the administration of Richard Nixon, as my co-author Nick Salvatore and I have argued, marks a “long exception” in American political history and culture.[1] During this period, the central government utilized its considerable resources in a systematic, if hardly consistent, fashion on behalf of non-elite Americans. One can visualize the outcome in the statistical graphs as an anomalous historical hump that rises in the forties and declines in the seventies: economic equality improves then tumbles, union density rockets upward and then slowly falls, working people’s income goes up before dwindling, and the percentage of wealth possessed by the most affluent dips before roaring back with a vengeance. Even the minimum wage rises to a useful figure in the late sixties before fading.[2]

While it is useful and hopeful that the United States can achieve such a politics again, we ought not be misled by freewheeling historical analogies. The catalyst for these developments was neither FDR’s charismatic personality, the brilliance of his New Deal advisors, nor World War II. Rather, it was the sui generis circumstances of the Great Depression itself, particularly the ferocious impact it had on Americans over the three years and five months between its start in October 1929 and FDR’s inauguration in March of 1933. It was this trauma—at once economic, political, and cultural—that propelled a more activist government intervention on behalf of everyday American citizens than the U.S. had ever seen before—or since. Even as partisan a champion of the New Deal as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. explained, the dawning of the New Deal was a “unique episode” in the nation’s history “which grew out of a unique crisis.”[3]

Nothing emerges de novo, of course, and the New Dealers built upon a number of historical trends: the Progressive reform impulse, Theodore Roosevelt’s demand for the regulation of big corporations, and—above all—the massive federal mobilization during World War I. Also, the new corporate paternalism of the 1920s, known as “welfare capitalism,” raised expectations of what the employment relationship could and should offer, just before it all collapsed following the economic crash. All that said, and it is admittedly not a short list, the New Deal was as clear a break with policy tradition as any in American history. Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s closest advisors, suggested the degree of departure when he described creating national relief on a blank drafting table “almost as if the Aztecs had been asked suddenly to build an aeroplane.”[4]

The rupture with the past may have been real, but the legislative achievements were also more tenuous and brief than most tend to recognize. What historians call the “first” New Deal basically turned the project of recovery over to business itself (along with some substantial relief interventions and dramatic efforts like the Tennessee Valley Authority). Those early reforms ended due to their internal contradictions or the Supreme Court—or both. With the notable exception of Glass-Steagall and other reforms of the financial sector, the first New Deal failed to have a lasting impact. After 1935, the true breakthroughs, known as the “second” New Deal, offered a more cohesive, proto-Keynesian vision for reform and the most substantive parts of Roosevelt’s legacy: the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, the Works Progress Administration, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the empowerment of the CIO, and—above all—the landslide 1936 election that created the “Roosevelt coalition” out of a historically fragmented working class.

As much as Roosevelt famously wagged his finger at the “economic royalists,” however, he did so only briefly. The window of opportunity for substantive collective economic policies opened in 1935, but it also slammed shut less than three years later. What followed were the forgotten years of the Roosevelt administration: the 1938-1939 years of defeat and retreat, the return of hard times, and the possibility that the 1936-1937 strike wave would be just another failure like 1919 or 1934. As the historian Nelson Lichtenstein argues in the case of the labor movement, “industrial unionism’s moment of unrivaled triumph proved exceedingly brief.” He notes that it was only a matter of weeks after the CIO’s famous victories at General Motors and U.S. Steel in 1937 before “the radical challenge posed by mass unions generated furious opposition: from corporate adversaries, Southern Bourbons, craft unionists, and many elements of the New Deal coalition itself.”[5] Maury Maverick, outspoken Democratic representative from Texas, was one of the few to openly declare the exhaustion of New Deal efforts. “Now we Democrats have to admit that we are floundering,” he told the House. “We have pulled all the rabbits out of the hat, and there are no more rabbits . . . . We are a confused, bewildered group of people, and we are not delivering the goods.”[6]

It took the Second World War to consolidate existing achievements—especially union strength—while simultaneously marking what the historian Alan Brinkley calls “the end of reform.” As macroeconomic planning for mass consumption and “full” employment trumped the disparate inventiveness of the Progressives and the New Dealers (almost completely ending the Democrats’ anti-monopoly tradition), the nation ended up with a postwar politics that Brinkley calls “less challenging to the existing structure of corporate capitalism than some of the ideas it supplanted.”[7] Yet even the path to a trimmed vision required a twelve-year-long depression, a false start, surviving a strongly-organized counter-attack, and a World War before it reached its modern form—a truly extraordinary gauntlet of historical circumstances.

How best, then, to think about the New Deal as it shaped the postwar era?  After the war, New Deal alliances seemed like an all-powerful force capable of implementing liberal policy, regardless of conservative opposition. Yet when challenged, this same juggernaut shattered, its central contradictions revealed in its own negotiations with the very real complexities of American history and politics.  The divisiveness of race, ethnicity, immigration, and religion (all bound up tightly with one of the thorniest problems in American politics—individualism) was temporarily mitigated, though hardly terminated, during the New Deal era.

Black-white race relations were certainly the most salient example of how important—and thin—the New Deal veneer was. While African-American voters switched their allegiances from the party of Lincoln to the Roosevelt coalition for good reasons, the price of almost every piece of New Deal legislation was the exclusion of black people. And, while the CIO devoted itself to organizing without regard to race, its project remained hamstrung on the racism of the white rank-and-file and the political power of the “Solid South.” When the Democrats dared to introduce a civil rights plank in 1948, or when they passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the entire coalitional edifice shook as the white South bolted from the Democratic Party and the urban North cleaved along racial lines.

The absence of immigration was another decisive factor in both the formation and continuation of the New Deal order. The “culture of unity”—a term used by historian Lizabeth Cohen to describe the shared sense of fate produced by the homogenizing forces of large-scale industry, welfare capitalism and mass culture—was based largely on the suspension of immigration after 1924.  As a result, when the crash hit, nativism was largely at bay and the workers living in this country were here to stay. When immigration resurfaced slowly in the generation after the 1965 immigration reforms, so did the neo-Know Nothings and militant nativism of today, returning “the” working class to historical patterns of internecine hostilities and political divisions reminiscent of the pre-New Deal era.

Like immigration, the divisiveness of religion in American politics also had a reprieve that allowed the New Deal to cohere. Evangelical Christianity, mocked into irrelevance after the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, largely went underground in the thirties and forties, offering limited “culture war” challenges to the rise of the New Deal (aside from those of Father Charles Coughlin and other populist dissenters). Garry Wills calls the postwar era a “Great Religious Truce,” an “interfaith Amity” in which a vague Judeo-Christian faith was enough to define Cold War Americanism.[8] That consensus would finally fall apart in the 1970s, as people of faith questioned rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s when the state was busy intervening in cultural questions like abortion, busing, prayer in school, pornography, and birth control—issues that re-politicized religion’s place in American life and undermined the New Deal coalition, in the 1970s and beyond.

The ideology, though hardly the reality, of individualism wound around all of these other issues like vines in a political jungle. Roosevelt, despite being the architect of the regulatory state, never quite offered a clear alternative to the individualist ethos so deeply embedded in himself or America’s public culture. In fact, so persuasive were FDR’s evocations of that American ideology that brain truster Rexford Tugwell believed that even when Roosevelt tried to construct a new vision of individualism suitable for modern corporate society, his efforts had “not been immune to our national myths.” “Like all of us,” Tugwell continued, FDR “had a weakness for what was familiar and trusted which led him to overestimate [the myths’] sufficiency and underestimate their irrelevant antiquity.” Even the Great Society and many of the new social movements of the sixties were based more on expanding long-denied individual rights rather than securing the type of collective economic rights promised by the New Deal. Less about redistributing the economic pie, post-sixties liberalism was more about providing people with the skills to compete for a decent slice.

So, if mining the political veins of the New Deal for our historical analogies proves futile, where should we turn? Perhaps the Progressive Era might prove more helpful. Gilded Age corporate power raised unavoidable issues for Progressives. The political hodgepodge of the first decades of the twentieth century, however, contained often chaotic and contradictory claims with regard to community, social harmony, voluntary association, radicalism, and—when necessary—the state.  While the pragmatic approach to reform, diffuse leadership, mixed-class alliances, and the lack of a clear left and right dichotomy have been criticized as the era’s failures, perhaps they are its virtues.  At their best, the progressive reformers appreciated the power of individualism in American political culture, affirmed a vision of democratic life across class (if decidedly not racial) lines, and sought a bridge between that individualism and a common good.

Had it not been for the Great Depression, it is probable that American liberalism would not have taken its modern form; we would have been left with the chaotic brilliance of progressivism without a cohesive liberal creed. Even the term “liberalism,” in its modern definition, arose during the New Deal to distinguish the new politics from the versions of reform that had been discussed a couple of decades before. Today, with both liberalism and its precepts close to bankruptcy, perhaps the tumultuous cross-class fray of the Progressive Era may prove more promising for thinking about the future than the political rigidities of the postwar era.

The late Tony Judt—in his eloquent defense of social democracy, Ill Fares the Land—explains that today’s progressives “must take onboard the sheer contingency of politics: neither the rise of the welfare states nor their subsequent fall from grace should be treated as a gift from History. The social democratic ‘moment’—or its American counterpart from the New Deal to the Great Society—was the product of a very particular combination of circumstances unlikely to repeat themselves.”[9] Historical analogies can empower, but they can also limit. If a path out of our own time is to be charted, and this is the most urgent of projects, it must be done afresh—without stale political metaphors resting on extraordinary historical circumstances.

The question whether an Obama-era Democratic party may offer opportunities for labor and left-of-center political interests presumes that Obama’s Democratic Party offers potential for significant departure from the rightward tacking we’ve seen since Bill Clinton’s presidency. There is little in anything Obama’s said or done to warrant such a presumption.

Throughout his career, Obama has been able to assume left support while never seriously committing to any actually left policies. In fact, in his books and speeches he has frequently invoked stereotypical images of left dogmatism, intemperateness, or folly, often as asides that seem intended mainly to reassure conservative sensibilities about his judiciousness.¹

This inclination to toss off casual references to the Left’s “excesses” or socialism’s “failure” has been a defining feature of Brand Obama and supports the claim that he is a new kind of pragmatic progressive, singularly able to bridge—or rise above—left and right, and appeal across ideological divisions.²

Rather than a departure, however, Obama’s political style presumes and consolidates Clintonism’s ideological and programmatic victory. Obama could not have sold his liberalconservative “bipartisan” transcendence so successfully to leftists/progressives if Clinton had not already moved the boundaries of liberalism rightward enough to incorporate key elements of the Reaganite agenda and worldview. Clinton’s presidency articulated a Democratic version of neoliberalism that abjures commitment to the public sector’s role in mitigating inequalities produced through market processes. This is the substantive foundation of Obama’s political vision. His posture of judiciousness and transcendence of left-right division, for example, depends partly on ritual validation of bromides about “big government,” which he can evoke through nods to resonant phrases, without needing affirmative arguments that might disconcert his left constituents.

Obama has been able to assume left support while never seriously committing to any actually left policies.

In a similar vein, Obama’s reliance on nasty, victim-blaming stereotypes about black poor people to convey tough-minded honesty about race and poverty also presumes victorious Clintonism. Clinton’s rhetoric of “ending welfare as we know it,” his division of the poor into those who “play by the rules” and those who presumably do not, his Orwellian recasting of the destruction of low-income housing and forced displacement of poor people as “moving to opportunity” and “HOPE,” and (most of all) his debacle of “welfare reform” already had helped effect liberal Democrats’ accommodation to underclass ideology that construes behavior modification as the fundamental objective of anti-poverty policy. Obama’s nefarious “Popeyes chicken” speech and his Father’s Day excoriation merely rehearsed, albeit more effectively, Clinton’s well-known stratagem of disparaging poor black people in speeches to black audiences. ³

Neither Obama’s deep and tight connections to investor class interests (no candidate received more in financial sector campaign contributions, as is reflected in his list of economic appointments) nor his commitment to a militarist foreign policy has differed substantially from Clinton’s, Gore’s, Kerry’s or others’ in the Democratic leadership. So why, then, have so many politically savvy people assumed—both during his presidential campaign and since his inauguration—that an Obama-led Democratic Party would mark a progressive departure from its predecessors?

This assumption stems largely from his racial classification and the complex imagery and claims associated with the prospect of his becoming the first president publicly recognized as black. That imagery encouraged characterizing the implications of Obama’s election for American racial politics as lying in a different, and perhaps normatively precedent, dimension from his substantive vision and programmatic agenda. From that perspective, the symbolic significance of the opportunity to elect a black president could mystify, or even outweigh, the candidate’s actual politics.

In this view, Obama’s victory and presidency are progressive because he is black. Obama receives a pass from progressives because the election of a black president is by definition a progressive accomplishment. Whatever advances and supports this president’s election and administration must be progressive, even when he explicitly and preemptively rejects left options for conservative ones. Tellingly, Obama himself has sought to deflect criticism by adducing who he is—elements of his biography, his personal bona fides—rather than his substantive political commitments. The logic that roots Obama’s progressivism in who he is rather than what he does or stands for also mirrors Clinton’s insistence that his liberalism inhered in who he was—the poor boy from Hope, Arkansas who could feel your pain, baby-boomer, post-segregationist Southerner. As we have seen around one issue after another—the endless, even expanding wars; failure, yet again, to follow through on promised labor law reform; an approach to health care reform that built in satisfying the insurance and pharmaceutical industries as non-negotiable from the outset, the equivalent, as my father would say, of hiring Jesse James as a bank guard; an inadequate approach to economic stimulus; abetting, if not actively advancing, the destruction of public education; and, in some ways most destructive of all, blithe inattentiveness to the intensifying fiscal crises of the states—the belief that this administration is open to progressive initiatives remains undisturbed, undercutting protest or mobilization from the labor movement and other institutional constituencies actually capable of marshalling opposition. The conviction that Obama literally embodies the aspirations of a Democratic Left has encouraged a suspension of criticism of his administration, as the travesty of the Gulf Coast oil spill dramatically illustrates.

The belief that this administration is open to progressive initiatives undercuts protest or mobilization from institutional constituencies actually capable of marshalling opposition.

So the posture from the AFL-CIO and other unions—as well as environmental, civil rights, women’s, and public interest groups—has been first to defend the administration against attacks from the Right and then to hope that demonstrated loyalty or “responsibility” will pay off in concessions. This hopefulness is often expressed in appeals to the president’s better, more progressive instincts—which had largely been projected onto him in those supporters’ will to believe—and efforts to dissociate him from his appointees’ actions. (If we could only get an audience with the king, we could show him the mistakes being made in his name!)

To be sure, our side has realized gains from this administration that would not have been possible under Republicans. One recent illustration is the apparent shift in the New York Labor Board’s disposition regarding graduate student unionization. ⁴
Department of Labor enforcement reportedly has improved dramatically as well, and Obama’s executive order mandating project labor agreements for federal construction projects (Executive Order 13502) will have real impact. The EPA and OSHA have been reinvigorated as regulatory agencies, as have others, and civil rights enforcement in the Department of Justice has been renewed. At the same time, it is not clear that these and other gains indicate any particular openness to progressive politics from Obama’s administration. They just as likely reflect the general ways that having a Democratic administration in power is preferable to the alternative.

These and other such gains are meaningful so far as they go and are not to be dismissed. It is necessary to lobby, advocate, cajole, compromise, and acquiesce to win as many such victories as possible. The reality of our political weakness is such that we cannot hope for more from a sitting administration and Congress. No less than comparable gains under Clinton, however, these must be weighed against what we have lost and will lose—as workers of whatever race, gender, and sexual orientation—as the result of the Obama Democrats’ generally imperialist foreign policy and economic and social policies that shrink social protections while expanding the punitive apparatus and reinforcing financial sector and corporate hegemony.

That sort of accounting is unlikely to take place, partly because doing so would mean confronting a core contradiction of labor and left political strategy that is content to operate entirely within the national Democratic Party’s programmatic steering imperatives. Over time, a political strategy crafted within those constraints will be able to do little more than negotiate the best possible terms of defeat in a revanchist regime of upward redistribution that is the practical logic of neoliberalism.⁵
As Doug Henwood recently observed, the essence of this contradiction is that “the Democratic Party is a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons that it’s something else. So, Dems make progressive noises to satisfy the base, but once in power, do the bidding of their funders.” ⁶

Obama is more likely to complete the Clintonist consolidation of the Democratic Party as the identitarian left-wing of neoliberalism.

It is this tension between the class basis of the Democratic Party’s policy commitments and the concerns of its electoral base that often gives Democrats the appearance of incoherence. Republicans don’t have that problem because they’ve fashioned a popular electoral base on issues that lie in a different domain from their commitments to the financial sector, crony capitalism, and upward redistribution.

This brings us to what is distinctive about the Obama-era Democratic Party and his administration. Obama’s signature accomplishment may be sidestepping that tension precisely through the symbolic power condensed in the imagery of the First Black President. That imagery—which condenses longstanding tropes and narratives of American history, racial and otherwise—has swept up not only the politically naïve. Nor is this disposition only a matter of ideological thrall. It has a material foundation in the institutional arrangements that have emerged through the breakdown of the New Deal and postwar social bargaining system, and the political weakness and demobilization that accompanied it. Therefore, rather than providing new opportunities for the Left and labor, the Obama presidency is more likely to complete the Clintonist consolidation of the Democratic Party as the identitarian left-wing of neoliberalism.

In an otherwise insipid 2008 New York Times Magazine article on Obama as avatar of yet another “new black politics,” Matt Bai contended that the new black politicians are “just as likely to see themselves as ambassadors to the black community as they are to see themselves as spokesmen for it.” ⁷ They are, that is, emissaries from Democratic elites who communicate the limits of the possible and thinkable, as established within the boundaries of the neoliberal policy framework, to their putative constituents at least as much as they articulate, and advocate for, the interests of the latter to the former. That characterization applies more broadly to those institutions and interest groups, including the labor movement, that are likely to be harmed by the party’s commitment to a larger framework of neoliberal policy priorities. At best, those institutions effectively function to fit their constituencies’ interests and political agendas into that larger framework. This development is substance and product of political demobilization.

As the Clintonist consensus has taken more complete hold in defining the Democratic policy horizon, those opinion-shaping elites have less and less to deliver to their constituencies, to the extent that victory commonly, perhaps unconsciously, reduces to averting the worst possible defeat. In their efforts to mobilize electoral support for Democratic candidates, at least on some basis other than the standard mantra that “the other guy is worse,” these emissary elites’ claims to constituent bases have also had to strain credulity ever more. Labor Party National Organizer Mark Dudzic’s observation about John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign expresses this contradiction neatly:

Legions of anti-war activists campaigned their hearts out for a pro-war candidate. Laid-off textile workers and steelworkers went to the wall for a man who had never voted against a single trade agreement. Lifelong advocates of health care as a right devoted their every waking hour to elect someone who promised to throw another half a trillion dollars down the sinkhole of private, for-profit health insurance. ⁸

Unless we believe that it is possible to persuade people indefinitely that their material experience is, in fact, not their material experience, this is an arrangement that cannot hold.

Clintonism was partly an attempt to displace this contradiction by weaning Democratic liberalism from its association with downward economic redistribution through crafting a new mythical target voter, much as the Republicans had under Reagan. The ideal New Democrats are socially liberal members of the professional-managerial stratum and investor class who accept the dominance of the financial sector, an imperialist foreign policy, and a retreat from the public sector in the name of rationality and innovation; they are committed to cultural diversity and identitarian liberalism—or at least to feeling smarter and morally superior to their Republican neighbors, families, and co-workers. This mythical voter also is drawn to a post-partisan, technocratic vision of politics and policymaking that renders class rule invisible by presenting it as undebatable rational necessity, a baseline commonsense. Eruption of discontent from labor and the Left around NAFTA and welfare reform underscored the limits of Clinton’s strategy. However, by the end of his administration the apparent Clinton prosperity, and the need to circle the wagons to defend him from right-wing attack, seemed to harmonize the Democratic base. ⁹

Obama’s technocratic approach to policy depoliticizes decision-making and appeals to a professional-managerial constituency.

Obama has taken the logic of Clintonism further in two respects. First, his posture of judiciousness and technocratic approach to policy matters depoliticizes decision-making and appeals to a professional-managerial constituency. In addition to conferring a tint of “grassroots” authenticity, his self-narration as a “community organizer” reinforces this effect via the trope of change without conflict. (This move fits perfectly with what we might call the NGO-ization of social movements.) Second, he promises to harmonize the Democratic coalition by embodying an evanescent progressivism that appeals to blacks and non-white immigrant groups, as well as liberals of whatever race, gender, or sexual orientation, on the basis of his own biography and identity and the massively seductive power of the First Black President trope. The latter is a notion of progressive politics without clear programmatic content apart from a commitment to diversity. Moreover, to the extent that Obamaism reduces to an essentialist—and essentially irrationalist—grounding of politics in identity, and a post-partisan, post-ideological approach to policymaking, it also fits comfortably with neoliberalism’s disparagement of the public and the social.

Walter Benn Michaels argues in the Spring 2010 issue of New Labor Forum that it is possible to meet an egalitarian ideal of diversity or parity of group representation within an ideological and policy regime that radically intensifies economic inequality, even in ways that increase hardship on significant proportions of the groups that benefit from pursuit of diversity. ¹⁰
From this perspective, conflation of the two notions of social justice—equality and parity among groups—is not simply an analytical problem, but can have real-world consequences that include a zero-sum relation between diversity and economic equality.

The labor movement has become a cue-taker in the Democratic coalition, corralling and channeling its constituencies around and between elections to rationalize why the promised payoffs fail to materialize.

Proponents of an antiracist politics commonly express anxiety that Obama’s election could issue in premature proclamation of the transcendence of racial inequality, injustice, or conflict. It is and will be possible to find as many expressions of that view as one might wish, just as it will be possible to find a more or less explicitly racist “birther” tendency. The greater likelihood, and in my view the great danger, is that we will find ourselves left with no critical politics other than a desiccated identitarian leftism capable only of counting, parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast in the arid language of disparity and diversity. This is a politics that emanates, by the way, from the professional-managerial class that remains generally insulated from the ravages of the ongoing economic crisis, ¹¹
the endless wars, and the other costs of predatory neoliberalism.

So what does the analysis I have laid out here say for practical political action? As I have indicated, working to win whatever gains can be won for labor and other left interests, particularly at the level of social regulation, is an urgent necessity for the sake both of improving and securing people’s lives and buttressing our position in ongoing struggle. But, without social movement pressure, we win hardly anything. The late Tony Mazzocchi often observed wryly that the labor movement, and working people in general, got more from the Nixon administration than from Clinton’s. The difference is not that Nixon was more our friend than Clinton was. It was that our movements were still vital enough as a force in the society to compel action, to force our will onto history, if only in limited ways. We have so long since lost that capacity that it seems no longer to exist in historical memory.

If we are to have any hope of shifting the terms of political debate in a direction more favorable to working people’s interests, we need to focus on rebuilding social movement capacity as well as winning what can be won under the terms decreed to us by Democratic neoliberalism. This is a project, however, that cannot be conducted within the constraints of either the electoral cycle or Democratic politicians’ and functionaries’ sense of the limits of the possible. And there lies a Catch-22. Institutions, like the labor movement, that have the capacity to generate and sustain such a project have become, to an unhealthy extent, cue-takers in the Democratic coalition; they function as much as anything else to corral and channel their constituencies around and between elections to rationalize why the promised payoffs fail to materialize. In this institutional vacuum, many energetic young and not-so-young people have gravitated toward romantic political strategies that amount to little more than hyperbolic, often seemingly Alinskyite calls for propaganda of the deed and fantasies that are the political equivalent of spontaneous combustion. Creating alternative courses of action that can help navigate our way out of this political impasse seems to me to be a vastly more important discussion for us to have than wondering what we might be able to win from a Democratic Party and administration over which we, in any event, have no control.

Notes

1. For example: “It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.” Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), 98. Such characterizations abound in Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).

2. Matt Taibbi, “Obama Is the Best BS Artist since Bill Clinton,” February 14, 2007, available at www.alternet.org/story/48051.

3. Barack Obama, “Speech on Fatherhood,” June 15, 2008, available at www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/obamas_speech_on_fatherhood.htmlhttp://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/obamas_speech_on_fatherhood.html; see also “Obama Sharply Assails Absent Black Fathers,” New York Times, June 16, 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/politics/15cnd-obama.html and Lynn Sweet, “’Y'all have Popeyes out in Beaumont?’ Obama on the Bully Pulpit,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 29, 2008, available at blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/02/sweet_column_yall_have_popeyes.html.

4. “Showdown on Grad Unions,” Inside Higher Education, April 28, 2010.

5. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19.

6. Doug Henwood, “How to Learn Nothing from Crisis,” Left Business Observer #125, February 25, 2010.

7. Matt Bai, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?,” New York Times Magazine, August 6, 2008.

8. Mark Dudzic, “After the Elections: What Next?,” available at www.thelaborparty.org (accessed January 5, 2005) and cited in Adolph Reed, Jr., “The 2004 Election in Perspective: The Myth of ‘Cultural Divide’ and the Triumph of Neoliberal Ideology,” American Quarterly 57 (March 2005): 4.

9. Reed, “The 2004 Election,” 11.

10. See Walter Benn Michaels, “Identity Politics: A Zero-Sum Game,” New Labor Forum 19, no. 2 (Spring 2010).

11. See Andrew Sum et al., Labor Utilization Problems of U. S. Workers Across Household Income Groups at the End of the Great Recession: A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation’s Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent (Flint, MI: C.S. Mott Foundation, February 2010), 13.

New Labor Forum 19(3): 82–85, Fall 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095–7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.193.0000003

Disillusionment with Democrats is one of the oldest—and most familiar—sentiments of labor progressives. Sadly, the first twenty-one months of the Obama era haven’t done much to alter those feelings. Without question, there has been progress on a number of critical issues—economic stimulus, health care reform, financial reform, key appointments at OSHA and the National Mediation Board (which oversees railway and airline labor relations)—which would have been unimaginable in a Republican presidency.

But the frequent ideological and political vacillation of the new administration and its congressional allies on a range of issues has given rise to a surge of anger and frustration among labor activists who had fervently hoped that Obama’s victory would at last inaugurate a new progressive era in American politics. Especially in the weeks leading up to the vote on health care reform in late March, as numerous labor-backed members of Congress abandoned those who had worked so hard to create a powerful Democratic majority, feelings of betrayal among labor political activists were palpable and deep.

The situation is immeasurably worse at the state level, where devastating budget crises have driven debate over fiscal and budget issues, as well as attitudes toward public sector unionism, dramatically to the right. In state capitals like Trenton and Albany, it is almost as if the Obama victory, and the potential ideological shift it signified, never happened. The vicious rightward skid of state and local politics, drenched in the economic anxiety of the Great Recession and echoing powerfully of Reaganism and California’s Proposition 13, has been stunning to labor and community activists.

In New York State, for example, an incipient property tax revolt and relentless editorializing against tax increases on the wealthy seem to have paralyzed Democratic legislative majorities struggling to close a $9 billion budget gap. The state’s first black governor, David Paterson, has warned that the wealthy—the putative engines of the state’s economy—will flee if required to endure their fair share of the state’s tax burden. He vociferously argued that New York’s historically generous social spending represents a kind of “addiction”—as if pre-kindergarten programs, rebuilt infrastructure, small class sizes, a robust higher education system, and a clean environment are the symptoms of some kind of rare disease. Leading Democrats refuse to impose even temporary tax levies on the bloated bonuses of Wall Street bankers, even though 2009 financial sector profits would simply not exist were it not for the massive—multi-trillion—taxpayer-funded bailout of 2008.

The vicious rightward skid of state and local politics has been stunning to labor and community activists.

Across the Hudson, much of New Jersey’s Democratic Party establishment has joined an escalating public crusade to pin the state’s persistent fiscal problems on the allegedly excessive compensation of teachers and public employees. In this, they deliberately pit struggling property taxpayers—who have lost any hope of pension or health care security in Wal-Mart America—against middle-income public employees desperately hoping to preserve their modest pensions and decent, though hardly extravagant, health care benefits. Perhaps the state’s loudest Democratic proponent of this approach has been Ironworker leader-turned-state senator, Steve Sweeney. Upon becoming the Senate majority leader earlier this year, Sweeney rammed through a package of bills, slashing pension benefits for future public employees and imposing health care cost-shifting on any public sector contract that does not already include it. So much for collective bargaining.

The bills sailed through the Democratic-controlled state senate with only two abstentions and not a single vote in opposition; only a handful of Democratic assembly members risked editorial board wrath by voting against the package. Sweeney is actually playing junior partner in this crusade to Republican Governor Chris Christie, who has won national conservative acclaim for his vitriolic attacks on the state’s largest union, the New Jersey Education Association. The situation has deteriorated so far that Christie felt comfortable earlier this year accusing the teachers of using their students as “drug mules” to advance a parochial political agenda.

Many labor activists, myself included, would not have predicted this depressing state of affairs on November 4, 2008, when Obama’s movement-like campaign triumphed in the context of the worst crisis of capitalism in seventy years. A massive outpouring of hope and activism, ideologically inchoate as it was, had mobilized millions of youthful and of-color voters in unprecedented fashion. The Reagan-Gingrich-Bush worldview, a toxic mix of imperial adventure and blind faith in unregulated markets and trickledown economics, had collapsed spectacularly in a self-induced implosion of reckless financial speculation and unfettered greed. Surely a new era of progressive change was at hand.

But as it turned out—and certainly we should have anticipated this—it takes more than a change of presidential leadership to bring about major economic and political change. From the very first, Obama hewed to the rhetoric and practice of “bipartisanship,” almost inexplicable in the face of a Republican minority that seemed resolutely and unanimously committed to opposing even the tiniest departure from right-wing political economy. The fruits of bipartisanship were bitter: the stimulus package was watered down with tax cuts to win the votes of a handful of Republicans, undermining its effectiveness and achieving nothing in terms of inoculation against the right-wing message machine. The administration allowed conservative Montana Democrat Max Baucus months for a fruitless pursuit of Republican support for health care reform, reinforcing the appearance of congressional dysfunction and allowing the Tea Party time to mobilize for the raucous town hall meetings. For no apparent reason, over a year went by without any appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which had been deadlocked with three vacant seats for nearly two years. And before finally reversing course late in March, Obama even declined to make recess appointments to the NLRB in February, reportedly out of a desire to avoid antagonizing Republicans. And, of course, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts killed any hope of enacting desperately needed reform of the nation’s labor laws.

With the spring 2010 recess appointments to the NLRB, there is hope of pro-labor rule-making that might ease the way for organizing.

But the Obama administration’s reluctance to pursue a straightforwardly progressive strategy is only part of the problem. In the absence of clear progressive leadership, at the grassroots level as well as in the White House, the economic anxiety generated by the deepest postwar recession has taken a predominantly right-wing populist form. The White House’s slowness to pin blame for the collapse on Wall Street chicanery, the virtually unconditional bailout of the nation’s largest financial institutions, and an economic team composed primarily of Wall Street insiders, allowed the Limbaughs and the Becks to make big government—rather than its opposite, deregulation—the culprit in the financial collapse. Anxiety about the racial transformation of America, led for the first time by a black president and gradually becoming a majority minority population, also clearly plays a critical role. Over half of the Tea Partiers, 89 percent of whom are white, say that too much has been made of the problems of blacks in recent years, and a similar percentage say that the administration is overly concerned about the problems of poor people. Ninety-two percent believe Obama is moving the country toward socialism, a laughable proposition for an administration whose economic team is led by what Robert Kuttner early on described as a “Team of Rubins.”

Nevertheless, the achievements of the last twenty-one months should not be discounted or minimized. The administration’s ultimate determination to wage partisan warfare to achieve passage of health care reform seems to have marked a liberating transition. The plan itself was deeply compromised, and labor was infuriated by the president’s persistent support for taxing higher-cost health plans. But a determined campaign forced the administration to retreat on 80 percent of the impact of that proposal and, in the end, the passage of reform signified a victory for the belief that public goods, provided by government and funded by taxpayers, are an essential element of a fair society—a decisive repudiation, however flawed and contradictory, of the dominant view of the previous three decades. The spring 2010 recess appointments to the NLRB mean that the long logjam at the board will be broken, and there is hope of pro-labor rule-making that might ease the way for at least some organizing. The National Mediation Board issued a critical rule change strengthening the organizing rights of hundreds of thousands of airlines workers. And the administration’s commitment to pursue partisan financial reform seems to suggest an overdue realization that for the president to address the actual needs of society, Republicans will have to be bypassed. Further, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s charges of outright corruption at Goldman Sachs may be one of those turning points in the zeitgeist, shifting the political climate as the public focuses on the greed, speculation, and dishonesty at the root of the Wall Street collapse.

How, then, should labor political activists deal with this most recent bout of disillusionment with Democrats? Profound frustration has prompted some to call for labor to break its ties with the Democratic Party completely, and organize a truly independent labor or progressive party. This is a hopeless fantasy. High school civics provide the primary reasons: in a non-proportional system of representation with winner take all, single district elections, opting to support third-party candidates who have no chance of winning means isolation from the actual arena of legislative decision-making. History is littered with the wreckage of these fantasies, which have been more or less energetic, depending on the state of mass movements at the time they arose. I was personally involved in the 1980 incarnation of such hopes, the Citizens Party which, buoyed by the anti-nuclear power movement in the wake of near-catastrophe at Three Mile Island, ran environmentalist Barry Commoner for president. We believed a significant split in labor was possible because of Carter’s economic turn to the right, which included supporting deregulation of both the airline and trucking industries as the long ascendancy of right-wing economic ideology got underway. As the Party’s New York State organizer, I repeatedly argued that there was little difference between Carter and Reagan and that the time had come to build a truly independent party founded on principles of economic democracy. In the end, there was no break in labor, and Commoner drew an insignificant percentage of the vote. Ten months after the election, when Reagan fired over eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers, I was permanently disabused of the notion that there are no significant differences between Republicans and Democrats.

Some have called for labor to break its ties with the Democratic Party, and organize an independent labor or progressive party. This is a hopeless fantasy

Further, the Democratic Party has demonstrated enormous ideological elasticity, especially in times of great crisis, and has moved sharply to the left under the pressure of highly mobilized mass movements at several crucial moments in our history. The most dramatic example of this dynamic came during the Second New Deal of 1935, when the most radical Congress in American history and the Roosevelt administration collaborated to enact Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Works Progress Administration, the Wealth Tax Act, and the Rural Electrification Act, among other reforms, in three short summer months. The Democrats were responding then to the pressure of a massive working-class mobilization that began early in the Great Depression and culminated in the massive strikes of 1934. By the end of Roosevelt’s re-election campaign in 1936, the pragmatic patrician was declaring that the forces of “organized money are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred… I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces have met their master.” Similarly, thirty years later, Lyndon Johnson parlayed the power of the civil rights movement into the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the War on Poverty. When Johnson drawled, “We shall overcome” in his nationally televised speech proposing the Voting Rights Act, Martin Luther King, Jr. was moved to tears. This Democratic adaptability has historically foreclosed the emergence of majoritarian third-party efforts.

At the same time, labor simply cannot afford to disengage from the legislative process. The last twenty-one months may have been frustrating, but a McCain presidency would have been devastating: no health care reform, instead of a flawed, but historic, step forward; a far more paltry stimulus package which would have left the economy in even worse condition; anti-labor appointments to the NLRB, instead of delayed pro-labor recess appointments; and little hope of significant financial or immigration reform legislation. Similarly, as difficult as the tenure of Governor Corzine was for New Jersey state workers, the Christie era is already much, much worse. Whatever his flaws, Corzine at least believed in collective bargaining. The difference that makes in the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers is immeasurable.

But continued unconditional support for Democrats is also clearly unacceptable. The challenge is how to go about building independent political power for labor and its allies while staying engaged in the work of fighting critical legislative battles. A number of strategies are possible:

 Mount strategic primary or third-line challenges to anti-labor Democrats. Led by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a number of unions joined with Move On to support Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter’s challenge to the senator from Wal-Mart, Blanche Lincoln. By investing millions in a challenge to the right-wing incumbent, labor sent the Democratic leadership a clear message that it will no longer support anti-labor Democrats simply in order to maintain the party’s majorities. In a primary run-off election in early June, Halter fell several thousand votes short of a stunning upset, but the point was made nevertheless. In upstate New York, community activists and a number of major unions are exploring a similar strategy to punish Congressman Michael Arcuri, who was elected with vigorous labor support in 2006 but who switched from a “no” to a “yes” vote on health care reform in March. That betrayal ignited outrage among New York labor and progressives.
 Utilize “fusion” or cross-endorsement voting by building independent third parties that usually endorse major party candidates. Over the last dozen years, New York’s Working Families Party (WFP) has built an impressive track record of both issue work and electoral power, becoming a major progressive force in state politics. Under New York’s unique system, which permits candidates’ names to appear on multiple ballot lines at the same time, the WFP has endorsed major party candidates, most often Democrats, who support its legislative agenda of progressive taxation, high-road economic development, and social investment. The WFP won an increase in the minimum wage in 2004 despite Republican control of the governorship and the state senate, helped win passage of the largest progressive tax increase in the nation in 2009 in order to stave off devastating budget cuts, and won passage of landmark “Green Jobs” legislation later in that session. The potential of fusion as a tactic for building independent power is also reflected in the success of the WFP’s younger cousin in Connecticut, which has developed into a major player in Hartford on issues such as paid sick days and closing corporate tax loopholes.

The challenge is how to go about building independent political power for labor and its allies while staying engaged in the work of fighting critical legislative battles.

The problem with fusion, of course, is that it is legal in only a handful of states, having been outlawed by a coalition of railroad and banking interests in most places in the early 20th century in the years following William Jennings Bryan’s Populist-Democratic fusion candidacy for president in 1896. The track record of labor-backed fusion in New York and Connecticut argues for labor to devote a significant chunk of its political resources to opportunistic campaigns to re-legalize fusion voting. A year ago, the Oregon legislature did just that, and the Oregon Party is now engaged in a challenging campaign to achieve ballot status under state law. Already, however, it has managed to elevate debate about the creation of a public bank, modeled on North Dakota’s, which will serve the interests of ordinary Oregonians, rather than its investor class.

Labor will no longer support anti-labor Democrats simply in order to maintain the party’s majorities.

 Take to the streets. As a labor political director, I am obsessed with elections and legislative strategies. But what has been conspicuously—and bafflingly—absent from the struggles of the last twenty-one months has been a mobilized, insurgent mass movement. I argued—mostly to myself—that labor should have planned a massive, Solidarity Day-style demonstration on the first warm day in the spring of 2009, to send an early, powerful message to the Obama administration that it must deliver on working people’s demands for stronger organizing rights, massive economic stimulus, and real health care reform. Instead, it was the Tea Party that took the initiative to the streets last summer. Labor and its allies—USAction, Move On, environmental organizations, organizations of women and people of color, student groups, Jobs with Justice, etc.—must devote greater resources and energy to popular mobilization.
 Take the long view. Hopes of a dramatic progressive shift in the nation’s political culture because of Obama’s election were overblown. Obama’s victory represented a decisive rejection of the war in Iraq and the failed economic policies of the Bush administration. It also represented an undefined aspiration for change. The moment cries out for a new ideological clarity about the role of government in mitigating the excesses of markets run amok, from Wall Street to the Gulf Coast. But it now seems clear that decisive movement toward those values will require more than a single electoral victory. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will have to take to the streets to force the society toward greater social justice, economic equity, respect for workers’ rights, and a sustainable economy. Our job is to do whatever we can to encourage and prepare for the moments when those movements arise.

The Obama election opened up the possibility of a progressive revival, and labor must continue to search for tactics and strategies that can push through that opening. Patience, persistence, and experimentation are the watchwords of the day. Simply abandoning the Democrats won’t get us where we want to go, and the consequences of such a strategy could be catastrophic. Merely sitting back and hoping that Democrats will get the job done is also clearly not a viable strategy. The challenge is to build a movement, both in the streets and at the polling places, which can push Democrats and the society from below toward a new progressive era.

New Labor Forum 19(3): 82–85, Fall 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095–7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.193.0000004

The current hard times have been harder on some people than on others, harder on the poor—obviously—than on the rich; but harder also on blacks and Hispanics than on whites. As of this writing, the unemployment rate for blacks is at 15.6 percent, and for Hispanics it’s at 12.7 percent. For white people, it’s 9.3 percent. ¹

Of course, the vast majority of the unemployed are white. But it’s the disparity in rates, not in absolute numbers, that tends to get foregrounded, since that disparity functions not only as a measure of suffering but also, in William A. Garity’s concise summary, as “an index of discrimination in our society.” ²

And it’s the ongoing fact of discrimination that motivates our ongoing interest in identity politics. As long as inequality is apportioned by identity, we will be concerned with identity.

This is obviously both inevitable and appropriate. But it is also—and almost as obviously—irrelevant to a left politics, or even to the goal of reducing unemployment, as we can see just by imagining what it would be like if we finally did manage to get rid of discrimination. Suppose, for example, that unemployment for whites and for Asian-Americans were to rise to 10 percent while for blacks and Hispanics it fell to 10 percent. Or suppose that unemployment for everyone went to 15 percent. In both cases, we would have eliminated the racial disparity in unemployment rates, but in neither case would we have eliminated any unemployment. And we don’t even need hypotheticals to make the point. About three quarters of the job losers in the current recession have been men, which means that the numbers of men and women in the workforce are now roughly equal. So, from the standpoint of gender equity, the recession has actually been a good thing. It’s as if, unable to create more jobs for women, we’d hit upon the strategy of eliminating lots of the jobs for men—another victory for feminism and for anti-discrimination since, from the standpoint of anti-discrimination, the question of how many people are unemployed is completely irrelevant. What matters is only that, however many there are, their unemployment is properly proportioned.

This is, in part, a logical point: there’s no contradiction between inequality of class and equality of race and gender. It is also, however, a political point. The influential Think Progress blogger, Matt Yglesias, has recently written that, although “straight white intellectuals” might tend to think of the increasing economic inequality of the last thirty years “as a period of relentless defeat for left-wing politics,” we ought to remember that the same period has also seen “enormous advances in the practical opportunities available to women, a major decline in the level of racism paired with a major increase in the level of actual racial and ethnic diversity,” and “wildly more public and legal acceptance of gays and lesbians.” ³

“These aren’t just incidental add-ons to a program that’s ‘really’ about comparing income-percentile ratios,” he goes on to say, because “it all fundamentally goes back to the same core belief in human equality.”

But it doesn’t. In fact, the belief in human equality that has cheered on anti-racism and anti-sexism has not only been compatible with—it’s been supported by—a belief in human inequality that has been happy to accept the fact that 10 percent of the U.S. population now earns just under 50 percent of total U.S. income. This is what it means for the most eminent of the living Chicago economists (Gary Becker, whose first book was The Economics of Discrimination) to praise globalization and “the increasing market orientation of different economies” by noting that, although they may “raise rather than lower income inequality,” they also make that inequality “more dependent on differences in human and other capital, and less directly on skin color, gender, religion, caste, and other roots of discrimination.” ⁴

Why? Because discrimination is costly to the employer: you have to pay not just for the labor but also for the laborer’s skin color or gender which, in a truly competitive market, you can’t afford to do. Hence employers who discriminate—like employers forced by unions to pay expensive benefits and higher wages—are doomed. Indeed, from this standpoint, the problem with discriminatory hiring practices is the same as the problem with unions: they both make labor costs higher, and a company less competitive.

Thus the commitment to competitive markets intensifies economic inequality, but diminishes the inequality produced by racial and gender discrimination. Or—to put it the other way around—if markets are good for producing an ethic of anti-discrimination, antidiscrimination is good for producing success in markets. So does this mean that Chicago economists believe in human equality? Well, when it comes to the inequalities produced by discrimination, they do—discrimination is bad for business. But when it comes to the inequalities produced by the market itself—inequalities of wealth and income—they don’t. And why should they? The belief that people shouldn’t be discriminated against in no way entails the belief that they shouldn’t be exploited. That’s why even very straight, very white, very old, and very conservative intellectuals can be just as happy about, say, gay marriage as Matt Yglesias is. Indeed, the only kind of unions Gary Becker approves of are the ones he hopes to see created by “a private contract,” ⁵

allowing consenting adults of any sex to marry whomever they choose, and thus eliminating what he regards as the arbitrary and unjust exclusion of gays from all the rights available to straights.

This doesn’t mean that gay marriage isn’t a good thing, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be vigilant in fighting all kinds of discrimination. It just means that fighting discrimination has nothing to do with fighting economic inequality, and that the commitment to identity politics has been more an expression of our enthusiasm for the free market than a form of resistance to it. You can, for example, be a feminist committed to equal pay for men and women and also be committed to equality between management and labor but, as the example of everyone who’s ever campaigned against the glass ceiling shows, you don’t have to be and aren’t likely to be. After all, it’s one thing to worry about the fact that the average CEO now makes in one day what the average worker makes in one year; it’s a completely different thing to worry about the fact that there aren’t enough women CEOs. And what the identity in identity politics requires is only that we worry about the second.

So, for example, while the overwhelming fact about students at elite colleges and universities today is how wealthy they are—three quarters of them, as Richard Kahlenberg has been admirably relentless in reminding us, “come from the richest socioeconomic quarter of the population, and just 3 percent from the bottom quarter, a roughly 25:1 ratio” ⁶

—what we worry about is not their wealth but their color. The advantages of wealth are something neither the proponents of affirmative action nor most of those “at the forefront” of what Richard Kim has called “the affirmative action backlash” want to fight about. Indeed, when Kim himself wonders where the opposition to affirmative action—what he calls the “seething, misplaced, amnesiac resentment, so often masquerading as class-consciousness (see Walter Benn Michaels)”—comes from, he can only imagine the commitment to economic equality as a cover-up for the real motive: racism, in the form of white people’s supposed fear of “the unnerving, inevitable end of the white republic.” ⁷

But you don’t need to be a racist to notice that his paean to the campus as a “space” for “the yellow . . . the brown, the red and the black” leaves out the poor, just as the universities themselves have done.

And, for that matter, you don’t need to be a racist to notice that most of the anti-affirmative action arguments have nothing to do with class either—it’s reverse racism that they carry on about. In fact, Americans today are never happier than when we’re calling each other racists—just think of Glenn Beck complaining about President Obama’s “deep-seated hatred for white people.” At least when we worry about anti-black racism, we have the advantage that our worries are rooted in reality. But white people (and Asians and Jews) just look (and are) delusional when they cast themselves as victims of prejudice in contemporary America. It may, for example, be true that over 60 percent of the people in the bottom quintile of American wage-earners are white. But it is not true that they are the victims of racism. They are the victims of capitalism.

Furthermore, so are most of the African-Americans and Hispanics who fill out the rest of that quintile. Our focus on identity obscures the fact that while equality between the races would enable some blacks and Hispanics to escape the bottom (their places taken by newly recruited whites and Asians), equality between classes would enable all of them to escape it—there wouldn’t be any bottom. Which is a more progressive goal—a world in which only 13 percent of black people (instead of 24 percent) live below the poverty line or a world in which none of them do? And if that sounds too utopian, it’s worth pointing out that even a very little and entirely race-blind progress in alleviating American poverty would nevertheless disproportionately benefit minorities, precisely because minorities are disproportionately poor. So not only is identity politics a bad idea, it’s a bad idea for the very identities it’s supposed to protect.

Identity politics is a bad idea for the very identities it’s supposed to protect.

Or at least it’s a bad idea for some of them, for poor blacks and poor Hispanics. For although real progress in the direction of greater economic equality would be more beneficial to poor blacks and Hispanics than would complete economic parity with white people, the goal of economic parity with whites works a lot better for black and Hispanic elites. Indeed it works pretty well for white elites too: which would you rather do—welcome some women and minorities to your board of directors, or not have a board of directors at all? Of course we haven’t yet achieved an America in which women and minorities are proportionately represented on the boards of the Fortune 500. But, as the still-burgeoning diversity industry suggests, the effort is one that rich people themselves have been and should be happy to embrace since it doesn’t reduce economic inequality—it endorses it.

You know you’re in a world that loves neoliberalism when the fact that some people of color are rich and powerful is regarded as a victory for all the people of color who aren’t.

It would thus be a mistake to understand this debate as a choice between a politics of identity and a politics of class—the politics of identity already is a politics of class. It has no quarrel with economic inequality and it brilliantly represents the interests of those who benefit from that inequality, providing them with a model of social justice in which their success is supposed to count as good news not just for them, but for all the people who supposedly share their identity. You definitely know you’re in a world that loves neoliberalism when the fact that some people of color are rich and powerful is regarded as a victory for all the people of color who aren’t (and when this, indeed, is regarded as a victory for justice itself).

But why should the fact that some people are rich count as good news for the poor? Racism is wrong, sexism and heterosexism are wrong; discrimination of any kind is wrong, and it’s a good thing to oppose it. But it isn’t discrimination that has produced the growing economic inequality in the U.S., and identity politics today—with its irreducibly proportional vision of social justice, its defining goal of equality between identities—does more to legitimate that inequality than to oppose it.

……… ……… Notes

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Status of the Civilian Population by Race, Sex, and Age (Washington, D.C., December 2009). 2. Quoted in Clea Benson, “Race Gap: Still Hard at Work,” Congressional Quarterly, July 26, 2009, available www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=weeklyreport-000003177528.

3. Matt Yglesias, “Ideology from the Bottom Up,” Think Progress, December 1, 2009, available yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/ideology-from-the-bottom-up.

4. Gary Becker, “Competitive Markets and Discrimination against Minorities,” Becker-Posner Blog, September 7, 2008, available uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner.

5. Gary Becker, “Should Gay Marriages Be Allowed?” Becker-Posner Blog, August 10, 2008, available at http://chronicle.com/article/Reactions-Is-It-Time-for/62615.

7. Richard Kim, “Asian-Americans for Affirmative Action,” Nation, January 9, 2007, available at www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/155512. I cite Richard Kim here because he was originally supposed to take part in this discussion but, of course, the enthusiasm for rich kids of color is not his alone.

New Labor Forum 19(2): 8–11, Spring 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095–7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.192.0000003

Identity politics has its share of shortcomings. But the problems that plague an anemic class politics won’t be solved by eliminating its supposed competitor. In recent decades, identity politics has mushroomed to include more and more social groups for good reason: numerous categories of persons have been systematically denied rights, privileges, and social respect. Major social categories, like race and sexuality, are not a “distraction” from the “real” problem of economic inequality; rather they are an integral part of an individual’s lived experiences. But identity politics cannot end all forms of inequality. At best, it is one strategy in a larger assault against systems of inequality.

The Skip Gates debacle of July 2009 illustrates the importance of identity politics, as well as some of its limits. Professor Gates, an esteemed Harvard University professor who is African-American, found himself arrested on his front porch by a white police officer responding to a call of a break-in. Hands down, race mattered. It is difficult to imagine that a fifty-eight-year-old white man, living in a stately home near Harvard’s campus and walking with a cane, would be arrested after showing proof of residence. But the attention generated by identity politics often focuses on sensationalized details at the expense of understanding systemic dimensions of social problems.

The media’s coverage of this shocking, frightening, and embarrassing public incident often focused on Professor Gates’s professional achievements while alluding to, but never fully addressing, the structural dimension of police officers’ abuse of authority, especially when racial minorities are involved. Public conversation centered on whether Professor Gates’s achievements should have exempted him from the indignities of “being black”—a view rebutted by the answer to the question, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?” Consequently, the systemic suffering of poor and minority communities, whose encounters with police officers too often end in death or imprisonment, received relatively little comment. Furthermore, some observed that Gatesgate upstaged President Obama’s major address on health insurance reform scheduled for that week, detracting attention from the most significant social and economic reform in over six decades. Finally, the entire affair culminated in a friendly beer summit at the White House, demonstrating how “kumbaya handholding” trumps actual accountability when politicians face difficult political situations.

Despite these and other shortcomings, we can’t dismiss identity politics. A stigmatized identity is not a private matter; it is fundamental to the operation of systems of inequality. Stigmatized groups legitimize and naturalize the subjugation of particular social groups. Erving Goffman’s brilliant work identifies some of the strategies stigmatized individuals employ to minimize the effects of social marginalization. ¹ These strategies include: passing (hiding a stigmatized identity by pretending to be a member of the dominant group), distancing (denigrating the social group to which one belongs), and silencing (refusing to acknowledge or discuss difficult issues surrounding membership in an oppressed group). An identity politics that contests these social norms is a powerful and meaningful political act. Subordinated groups gain power when they reinterpret a spoiled identity in ways that affirm the humanity and agency of the group and challenge its exclusion and shame. It rejects dehumanization and, when forged within political contexts, targets systemic practices that reinforce the denigrating treatment of a group. The poor are well aware that identity politics defined by the successes of individual black Ivy Leaguers, like Skip Gates and Barack Obama, has little bearing on their material conditions. Too often, diversity programs divert and co-opt group remedies into individual achievements. An identity politics framed as high-achieving minority group members gaining a seat at the proverbial table fails to address the inherent inequity of the table itself.

INTERTWINED IDENTITIES

Identity politics is not a panacea but it can deepen our understanding of how social inequality works. It is more fruitful to understand how class status and identity politics intertwine than to debate which one is more important. Some argue that the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans demonstrates the neglect of the poor and the primacy of class hierarchies. Others argue that historic racism against African-Americans more fully explains the humanitarian crisis the storm produced. But insisting on this separation is tantamount to arguing that the best way to study water is by examining hydrogen apart from oxygen. The essence of water is the combination of the two. Class and race (and other social categories) are separate social and intellectual categories, but it is imperative that we understand how they intertwine in real life. A generic poverty does not exist; class standing is intimately fused with a person’s other identities. Consequently, poverty in urban Harlem, with its high-rise public housing projects and panhandlers, is different than poverty in rural Haymarket, Tennessee, with its trailer parks and meth labs. Similarly, sexual minorities (homosexual, bisexual, or transexual) all face discrimination but an individual’s racial, cultural, religious, and class statuses will affect the specific obstacles she encounters and her ability to navigate them.

A CULTURAL PROBLEM

Quibbling about identity politics does not get us any closer to solving the problem of greedy, shortsighted, and unaccountable capitalism and employers who refuse to pay a fair wage. The severe income inequality and falling union density rates of recent decades simply cannot be blamed on identity politics. Despite real productivity gains made by American workers, their wages and incomes are largely stuck at 1973 levels. Beyond income levels, the bottom 40 percent of those with wealth (in the form of stocks, savings, life insurance, real estate, etc.) held only 0.2 percent of overall wealth in this country.

The consumerist, individualistic, and anti-government elements of American culture bedevil both a politics of class and a politics of identity. When facing systemic inequalities, Americans overwhelmingly pursue individualistic responses: they work harder, get a better job (or a second or third job), get an education, start a small business, cut corners, or get more credit. Those who have lost jobs and homes in the worst financial crisis in recent history have not coalesced in a movement against Wall Street greed. Instead, they have organized to blame and punish big government and taxes (witness the Tea Party movement). The desire to be rich and the seductions of consumerism present real obstacles to efforts designed to end structural inequalities. A meaningful social change strategy must address how ideas about individual effort and merit—that ignore systemic injustice—hamper efforts to make policy changes that will bring more social and economic equity.

FINDING ALTERNATIVES

Attacking identity politics doesn’t get us very far in building alliances that respect the complexities of people’s lives. Unproductive strategies, such as silent white guilt, complaints about welfare cheats, and critiques of identity politics, have had their day. Rather than banish identity politics, let’s acknowledge how it operates within our movements. Doing so will cultivate the skills needed to create truly inclusive social justice organizations and movements. It is time that we all learn how to talk about race, class, gender, sexuality, and mental and physical ability (our own and that of others) in meaningful and responsible ways.

Learning to navigate identity politics should become an essential part of any organizer’s toolkit.

Learning to navigate identity politics in an authentic and engaging way should simply become an essential part of any organizer’s toolkit. Take a workshop with working-class activist Betsy Leondar-Wright and learn how white, college-educated devotees of class-based ideologies can become better allies by addressing the rage and mistrust that some members of stigmatized social groups feel when members of privileged groups preach about organizing for economic equality. ² It’s time to stop pretending that these tensions are not there, that they don’t matter, and that ideological affinity is enough for successful movements. Being clueless about one’s own social position is an obstacle to alliance building across lines of social difference.

Instead of insisting on minorities joining a class-based movement, perhaps class-based activists should join forces with movements that seek to redistribute society’s resources to some of society’s poorest and most stigmatized groups. The United States Social Forum held in Atlanta in the summer of 2008 featured the work of many of these activists. Those who are fighting mass incarceration, the demonization of welfare recipients and undocumented immigrants, and the marginalization of ex-felons in the workforce must fully engage with the intersection of poverty and specific marginalized social identities. These movements are informed by, but not confined to, a plain vanilla class politics.

Instead of blaming identity politics, let’s turn attention to the real culprit: a system that co-opts, distracts, and obfuscates when faced with demands for fundamental change.

In addition to grassroots organizing, we need business and social leaders who will create institutions that cultivate a world defined by peace, fairness, and sustainability, rather than one driven by war and exploitation. The product of one interesting effort in this regard is Resource Generation, an organization that recognizes that the passing of the Baby Boomer generation will result in the largest generational transfer of wealth in U.S. history. The group works with wealthy young people to create strategies for pursuing political activism in ways that expand the resources available for social justice movements, but without reproducing the worst aspects of the “I-know-it-all” and “Do-it-my-way” sensibilities of the privileged. ³

BEYOND SYMBOLISM

WE CAN’T IGNORE SOCIAL identities. Economic equality without social dignity and respect lacks meaning. But symbolic inclusion without real structural change is an empty and manipulative gesture. Instead of blaming identity politics, let’s turn attention to the real culprit: a system that co-opts, distracts, and obfuscates when faced with demands for fundamental change. The Skip Gates debacle demonstrates that giving individual blacks more money does not solve the problem of police abuse within minority communities. Similarly, achieving economic equality would still leave many social problems on the table. We have to re-tool to reach potential allies for whom non-class-based identities are significant. Doing so requires significant growth in our political and personal strategies, as well as uncomfortable conversations about expanding the social vision that guides our movements.

Notes

1. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963).

2. Betsy Leondar-Wright, Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists (British Colombia, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2005). See alsowww.classmatters.org/2006_07 .

3. Karen Pittelman and Resource Generation, Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It for Social Change (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2006). For more information about Resource Generation, seewww.resourcegeneration.org.

New Labor Forum 19(2): 12–15, Spring 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095–7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.192.0000004

We are overdue for a new strategy. Labor and the Left are at low points in long declines. One cause has been adherence to a failed strategy. We need to acknowledge that reality and answer two linked questions. First, what part of getting into this situation was our own doing? Second, what changes in labor’s and the Left’s strategy could revive the two groups and rebuild their coalition into a powerful political force? To answer the first question: labor’s and the Left’s strategic attitude toward capitalism undermined both partners and their coalition. To answer the second: changing their attitude toward capitalism could, I believe, revive them significantly in the near future.

With rare exceptions, the strategic orientation of labor and the Left toward capitalism has been one-sidedly macro-focused on the nature and extent of state economic interventions. Thus it emphasized taxing enterprises rather than workers, the rich rather than the middle- and lower-income earners. It generally favored state regulation of the private economy rather than laissez-faire, public over private enterprises, and state planning/controls over private/free markets. The welfare state, social democracy, socialism, and communism were all understood chiefly in the macro sense of state intervention. Differences among them concerned the extent of those interventions (ranging from regulation, to control, to state ownership of enterprises and productive resources).

In contrast, labor and the Left paid far less attention to capitalism at the micro level, the internal organization and operation of the enterprise. They did not challenge the basic position of corporate boards of directors as appropriators and distributors of the surpluses produced by other people, the workers. They accepted—or simply presumed—that those boards would exclude workers from the appropriation and distribution of the enterprise’s surpluses (or profits). Rarely did Left forces seriously raise the goal of workers themselves becoming, collectively, the appropriators and distributors of enterprise surpluses. When that idea surfaced, it was usually dismissed as unworkable, utopian, and irrelevant to workers’ practical interests. The Left restricted itself to demanding state-enforced limits on employers’ exploitation of workers, deception of customers, and abuse (both socially and environmentally) of surrounding communities.

Labor and the Left have paid less attention to capitalism at the micro level.

Labor’s and the Left’s implicit micro-level strategy with regard to the enterprise thus became reduced to improving the terms of the employer-employee relationship for the workers, not eliminating that relationship altogether. Unions were to bargain collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions, leaving employers to receive and distribute the surpluses. Such (micro) bargaining within enterprises was to be allied with leftist political (macro) struggles for state interventions to benefit workers (via tax reforms, market regulations, greater welfare payments and/ or subsidized public services, and socialized medicine).

Capitalist employers have always responded by deploying the surpluses they kept appropriating to evade, weaken, and undo whatever reforms and gains labor and the Left could win. They did so at both the micro and macro levels. They distributed portions of their appropriated surpluses at the micro level to support intrusive supervisors, to alter technologies, and to outsource production. They distributed other portions of their surpluses to support think tanks, build mass media connections, finance selected academics, and buy politicians to improve their macro-level conditions. Such dispositions of capitalists’ surpluses eventually undid most of the gains that the Left and labor won via Roosevelt’s New Deal. Examples include the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, as well as the subsequent undermining of progressive taxation in favor of profit-oriented deregulation, and so on. Capitalists’ surpluses today fund all the major efforts to block or weaken reforms initiated by Obama’s administration.

Thus, in the U.S. and beyond, the old strategy that allowed corporate boards of directors to keep appropriating and distributing the surpluses of enterprises had repeatedly disastrous consequences for labor and the Left. Similarly, in countries such as the U.S.S.R. and China, “socialist” strategies—that replaced corporate directors with state officials without changing the internal employer-employee structures of state enterprises—eventually undermined the initial gains won by their revolutions. Yet Left and labor forces in both situations seem unable to criticize their parallel old strategies and draw the lessons for a new strategy. Today, they again demand reforms, especially in response to the current global capitalist crisis. And once again, those reforms leave largely unchallenged the employer-employee relationship within enterprises.

A new strategy would not leave in place an adversary with the incentive and the resources to block, minimize, and then undo what labor and the Left can win. The key new strategic component is micro-focused in two parts. First, enterprise boards of directors must no longer be non-workers or elected by shareholders. Second, their functions—the appropriation and distribution of surpluses—must henceforth be performed instead by the workers collectively. The new object for struggle is thus the internal transformation of each enterprise. The goal is a fundamentally transformed job description for each worker, one that would involve both: (1) the realignment of particular tasks within an enterprise’s division of labor; and (2) full participation on that enterprise’s collective board of directors. No worker could meet one part of such a job description without also meeting the other.

Making this new strategic goal a central part of Left, labor, and socialist and/or communist programs would radically transform them from what they have long been. To the macro focus on state interventions (via reforms and regulations) would be added this new micro-level goal. By achieving it, workers would acquire the requisite status, incentives, and resources to make enterprise policies support their traditional macro-level goals (such as economic planning, social welfare, and greater wealth and income equality). However “radical” the new strategy may be considered, it offers the only real hope to secure any future reforms won by labor and the Left.

This new strategy is unapologetically anti-capitalist. It aims to challenge the essence of the capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee relationship—and replace it with a communitarian organization. On that basis, all the other dimensions that are characteristic of capitalist societies would open up for democratic reconstruction as well. Will the distribution of resources and products be achieved by market exchanges, or by other mechanisms (e.g., decentralized economic planning based on combinations of democratically defined social and individual needs)? Will there be private ownership of enterprises—by individuals, groups, or communities—or will there be regionalized, nationalized, or internationalized ownership? What success criteria will govern investment decisions: enterprise profits, progress toward social objectives, local community goals? Raising and answering these questions would finally become the business of everyone, as befits any genuinely democratic society. As workers’ different perspectives and evolving preferences gradually inform these questions, their long exclusion from democratic decision-making within capitalist economic systems will finally come to an end.

[We need to] replace [the employer-employee relationship] with a communitarian organization.

This new strategy’s brand of anti-capitalism is distinguishable from mainstream socialism or communism. Those traditions, both theoretically and as seen in the regimes they established once in power, also left in place the micro-level exclusion of workers from the appropriation and distribution of the surpluses they produced. Socialist and communist traditions were chiefly macro-focused: on transformations of property—from private to public—and on distribution mechanisms, from market to state planning. Their micro-level goals were to improve the conditions of employees within enterprises rather than end those enterprises’ employer-employee relationships. The failure of “actually existing socialist and communist economies” to overcome that internal enterprise division eventually undermined them and enabled their greater or lesser reversions back to private capitalist economies. ¹

This new strategy, if successful, would do more than democratically transform production. Workers who also served on their own boards of directors would make different decisions—about what to produce, how and where to produce, and what to do with the surpluses their labor generates—than traditional boards elected by shareholders. Their decisions would, for example, be far less likely to relocate production across the country or the globe, or install technologies harmful to workers’ health, or use enterprise surpluses to bulk up on intrusive supervisory staff. Worker-directed enterprises would much more likely establish funds to retrain and reposition workers in response to changes in technology or altered demands for output. The capitalist conception of unemployment would end, as jobs and individual incomes finally become basic human rights and labor is considered everyone’s shared social obligation. Workers’ broadly defined well-being (an inclusive standard) would displace individual enterprise profits (a narrowly exclusive standard) as the prevailing objective of enterprise decisions.

Workers who also served on their own boards of directors would make different decisions—about what to produce, how and where to produce, and what to do with the surpluses their labor generates.

Because workers live in the communities that surround their enterprises, the decisions they make as collective directors will continuously monitor and improve local economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts unlike the decisions made purely on behalf of the capitalist enterprises’ boards of directors and major shareholders. Indeed, because residential communities are complexly interdependent with enterprises, new political mechanisms would be needed to share final social decision-making authority democratically between worker-directed enterprises and their community-based counterparts. That could end the capitalist pattern by which enterprise directors and major shareholders prevail over residential communities by channeling their disproportionate resources toward bribery, public relations, or other manipulations of community decision-making. Government at all levels, from local to international, would be transformed into more collaborative structures based conjointly on enterprises and those residential communities that are interdependent with them.

By democratically reorganizing enterprises at the micro/internal level, this new strategy builds a foundation for a society-wide transition from today’s merely nominal democracy to the real thing. Workers functioning in and responsible for democratically structured enterprises will more likely understand, demand, and lead a social movement for parallel democracy and responsibility within their communities. When workers themselves dispose of the surpluses generated from within their enterprises, they are likely to use them to further the macrofocused policies that they supported as citizens. No longer would a separate group of people (a social minority comprised of boards of directors and major shareholders without any democratic obligations to their employees) be able to sabotage the macro-level policies supported by the majority of those employees.

The new strategy calls upon workers to recognize the need and take responsibility for the implementation of change in the places where they work, inside the enterprises where they spend most of their adult waking hours. It gives workers the sequential tasks of first transforming production within each enterprise, and then maintaining and developing the new production organization. Workers themselves become the self-conscious and self-directed foundation of society’s economic development. This could lead to the concrete realization of longstanding commitments of labor and the Left to workers’ empowerment, liberation, and self-actualization: commitments that had long been only vague, rhetorical gestures. This new strategy might inspire a revival of the labor movement, as well as other Left movements. Continued adherence to the old strategy has failed to do that for a long time, and it promises nothing better for the future.

The emphasis herein has been on strategy partly because that, rather than tactics, is what most needs change. Tactical adjustments and innovations, as well as exemplary creativity, have often been strengths of both labor and the Left. Owning up to fundamental strategic problems has not. The tactical roles involved with advancing the proposed new strategy that will be taken by trade unions, political parties, and/or social movements outside electoral politics thus remain open questions. They will likely be resolved variably, in line with the different social histories that have shaped workers and the conditions they confront. So, for example, it might be best, under some circumstances, to initially demand that about half the seats on corporate boards of directors be worker-based.

Another tactical question is whether the initial focus should be on workers becoming their own boards of directors at the decentralized level of the individual productive unit (i.e., at the factory or office) or at the centralized level of the enterprise or entire industry. These tactical choices require risks and advantages to be weighed. Beyond the economy, another tactical question would address how education would need to be reorganized and refocused to prepare young people for future jobs that include serving on collective boards of directors.

Imagine the promise of a strategically reoriented labor movement, no longer stuck in an ineffective, defensive rut.

Notes

1. See S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the U.S.S.R. (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

New Labor Forum 19(1): 8–12, Winter 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.191.0000003