AFL-CIO Now did a very nice piece, I thought, on effective ways of "kicking ass for the middle class" as exemplified by a bunch of labor and state legislature actions taking place around the country, and I felt compelled to reply to an unnecessarily unappreciative comment from a FireDogLake contributor called Bill Perdue. His ripostes to that got stuck in moderation purgatory, probably with reason in the first case, because he told me I was lying, which is pretty bad manners; but his second version isn't so bad, and I thought I'd run it here, with a lengthier response of my own, and an invitation to him to carry on the discussion if he wants.
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| Drawing from the IWW journal, Solidarity (4th August, 1917) (Via) |
I'm the Obot Marxist: that is I regard myself as a real leftist, not a liberal, and my views on what constitutes really good policy are pretty different from Obama's, but I'm a huge admirer of his political gift, his writerly intelligence, and his compassionate intentions; I think he's the best qualified US president I'm likely to see in my lifetime, and I'm very reluctant to find him in the wrong. I believe all his not-good-enough gestures are, in the long run, going to be seen as vital progress.
Your typo "busing unions" is funny.
I don't believe the tales of how Obama lies about his intentions in order to hang onto that all-important hippie vote while he secretly plots for a Reaganist restoration. In the first place because the hippie vote is just not very important. I think when he's lying it's to the other guys, to lull them as he pushes a (very mildly) progressive plan past their unsuspecting smirks.
For example that dreadful freeze on pay for federal workers; as it turned out, it was only a freeze on cost-of-living adjustments for a period when no inflation was expected (and none occurred).
The case of the Employees Free Choice Act is simpler still, because the White House never abandoned it in any way. You've forgotten what the Senate "majority" was like in 2009-10, when Democrats hovered around the edge of a filibuster-safe supermajority continually subject to the whims and treacheries of prima donnas like Lieberman, Lincoln, and the unspeakable Ben Nelson, not to mention a host of other simply conservative members, and the abolition of the legislative earmark had left the leadership with practically no means of applying pressure. When Lincoln and Feinstein had said quite clearly that they couldn't support the card check provision, that was really the end. In the 2012 campaign AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka was insisting that the president still backed the bill, though, and would make it pass if there was a second term. He's still got three years and the worst Democrats have left the Senate (so has the possibility of a supermajority, though). I'm not holding my breath, but it's always good to feel hope.
I know there are quite a few Democrats in high places that I wouldn't care to hang out with. I don't defend Emanuel except to note that even he seems to have had a sweet kind of come-to-Jesus moment of understanding teachers recently: http://edushyster.com/?p=3471. I certainly have problems with Andrew Cuomo who is my own governor, and I've had problems with Jerry Brown at least since his first run for president and that early exemplification of techie pragmatism (the motto of which in its current form might be, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it's on the Internet). And his stupid support of a flat income tax. I was an organizing grad student myself back around 1978 (and an organizing restaurant cook a few years before that, but alas as soon as we'd voted in the union the entire staff got laid off), so that story about Lew, which I had not heard before, does not fill me with enthusiasm for the man.
But as far as Rahm goes, if anybody proposed cutting workers' wages during the bailout, that would be Rattner, not Emanuel (Rattner says he just wanted the union to "sacrifice more", not take a pay cut). Whomever these two guys may have said fuck to and whatever they may have done, the administration saved a million UAW jobs, which is pretty significant for them and their working families, in my view. It was union president Bob King, I believe, who suggested one of those two-tier systems where all the cuts are taken by workers who haven't been hired yet, and he was happy about the whole thing:
Your remarks about "working class" and "middle class" strike me as belonging to some really outdated analysis, not so much comparing apples to oranges as apples to horse chestnuts. What you need to understand, I think, is that there isn't exactly a "working class" in the Marxist sense (which is the only sense really worth using) any more, because the US economy at this point of very late capitalism or whatever stage we have arrived at isn't really organized around production relations any more, and hasn't been for some time, production itself having been so broadly outsourced or so deeply automated as to have become a basically trivial problem. There isn't any bourgeoisie to speak of either, for that matter. The whole concept of ownership has vanished into those computers that can trade and retrade the same share of company stock several times in a single second. Most of us nowadays, including on the factory floor, are somewhere in a vast and undifferentiated pool of management (I know somebody who is a "vice president" at Citibank, which really means she is just upside of a bilingual teller—if she's ever been in the same room as Jaime Dimon, it was a very large room).
We are divided into Weberian status groups, based on consumption patterns and false consciousness (many teabagging types are far from wealthy and believe that they are somehow aligned against abusive corporations), and while I'm convinced that a Marxian analysis must be a starting point for any future valid economic analysis, it's just not going to be the same as the old analysis, and the kinds of action it calls for will be quite different too.
Obama may like FDR be a budget-balancing conservative at heart (I just don't believe he is), but he may like FDR be mobilizing something much bigger than he is, out of pure political instinct. He attracts a lot of younger people thinking about the longer term, even though they can be perfectly cynical as to how committed he is, say, to the environment. He attracts an overwhelming number of people of color whose voices must be heard (you don't just listen, white man, if you find yourself in disagreement you must listen to the possibility that you are wrong), and a lot of actual union members. There's a reason why they don't blame Obama for the excesses of the Overseas Contingency and the NSA, or take them for that matter as seriously as the shakedowns and surveillance in our own fair cities. These are the makings of a movement with a kind of a revolutionary consciousness, for the first time since my generation screwed it up around 1969 and the Beatles broke up.
If you want to be a leftist I think it's becoming to be an optimist—not, I mean, a phony Ronald Reagan optimist but a revolutionary optimist who believes in and focuses on the possibility of progress. The continual whining and despair that I see in parts of the self-denominated left is an essentially conservative reaction to the vicissitudes of change—"No, no, it has to be dreadful, because it's new!" Fuck that shit, partner. People themselves have been getting better over the past five years, less sexist and racist, more rejecting of war, more attuned to suffering, more interested in organizing. That appalling noise the Tea Partiers are making is a death rattle. Get excited!
For example that dreadful freeze on pay for federal workers; as it turned out, it was only a freeze on cost-of-living adjustments for a period when no inflation was expected (and none occurred).
But feds won't be too terribly deprived in 2011 and 2012. Despite the freeze, some 1.1 million employees will receive more than $2.5 billion in raises during that period.
Regularly scheduled step increases for the 1.4 million General Schedule employees — who make up two-thirds of the civilian work force — will continue. The size of those increases ranges from 2.6 percent to 3.3 percent and by law kick in every one, two or three years, depending on an employee's time in grade.And then at the end of 2012 it was canceled. Then they turned around and extended it in a half-assed way in the Continuing Resolution negotiations, as the Republicans grew crazier and crazier; Senator Mikulski
likened the CR to the last helicopter leaving a disaster area. “The helicopter couldn’t take off if this modest pay raise was on it. I think this is a terrible mistake,” she said. “I hope that in next year’s regular order, we can make this up. But I want to say to my federal employees, this was a draconian choice.”And by August Obama was out demanding a raise for them.
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| Image via Our Daily Bleed. |
I know there are quite a few Democrats in high places that I wouldn't care to hang out with. I don't defend Emanuel except to note that even he seems to have had a sweet kind of come-to-Jesus moment of understanding teachers recently: http://edushyster.com/?p=3471. I certainly have problems with Andrew Cuomo who is my own governor, and I've had problems with Jerry Brown at least since his first run for president and that early exemplification of techie pragmatism (the motto of which in its current form might be, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it's on the Internet). And his stupid support of a flat income tax. I was an organizing grad student myself back around 1978 (and an organizing restaurant cook a few years before that, but alas as soon as we'd voted in the union the entire staff got laid off), so that story about Lew, which I had not heard before, does not fill me with enthusiasm for the man.
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| From the Richmond, VA, branch of the IWW. Submit your recipes! |
"If it wasn't for Rahm Emanuel,... if it wasn't for President Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, we wouldn't have an auto industry. Millions of more people would be out of work today," King told CNBC on Friday morning.There's that "middle class" again.
"They have done nothing but to help the middle class in America. I appreciate the Obama administration. I appreciate what they have done for workers in general. Did they do good for the auto industry?"Yes they did. Did Rahm Emanuel play a role in that? Yes, he did. I appreciate him."
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| Image by Guildsman at DeviantArt. |
We are divided into Weberian status groups, based on consumption patterns and false consciousness (many teabagging types are far from wealthy and believe that they are somehow aligned against abusive corporations), and while I'm convinced that a Marxian analysis must be a starting point for any future valid economic analysis, it's just not going to be the same as the old analysis, and the kinds of action it calls for will be quite different too.
Obama may like FDR be a budget-balancing conservative at heart (I just don't believe he is), but he may like FDR be mobilizing something much bigger than he is, out of pure political instinct. He attracts a lot of younger people thinking about the longer term, even though they can be perfectly cynical as to how committed he is, say, to the environment. He attracts an overwhelming number of people of color whose voices must be heard (you don't just listen, white man, if you find yourself in disagreement you must listen to the possibility that you are wrong), and a lot of actual union members. There's a reason why they don't blame Obama for the excesses of the Overseas Contingency and the NSA, or take them for that matter as seriously as the shakedowns and surveillance in our own fair cities. These are the makings of a movement with a kind of a revolutionary consciousness, for the first time since my generation screwed it up around 1969 and the Beatles broke up.
If you want to be a leftist I think it's becoming to be an optimist—not, I mean, a phony Ronald Reagan optimist but a revolutionary optimist who believes in and focuses on the possibility of progress. The continual whining and despair that I see in parts of the self-denominated left is an essentially conservative reaction to the vicissitudes of change—"No, no, it has to be dreadful, because it's new!" Fuck that shit, partner. People themselves have been getting better over the past five years, less sexist and racist, more rejecting of war, more attuned to suffering, more interested in organizing. That appalling noise the Tea Partiers are making is a death rattle. Get excited!
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| Image by Diego Rivera via BigThink. |
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