Economic Conditions and Hollow Victories

Among the very few things to look forward to on Labor Day is Jack Rasmus’s annual report on the state of US labor. Rasmus, an accomplished political-economist, riffs on the famous Frederick Engels book with Labor Day 2024: The Condition of the American Working Class Today. It may come as a surprise to some, but academically-trained economists are among the most intellectually shallow and ideologically tainted practitioners of the social sciences. Some are so in awe of their own academic specialty that they paint all economic trends through specialist lenses. Still others are so tied to their political biases that they cannot resist slanting their conclusions to reinforce their loyalties to one of the two political parties that we are currently allowed.

Rasmus is the rare university-educated purveyor who knows where to look, looks critically, and clearly synthesizes the data to draw broad and useful conclusions for working people. For a philosophically-trained skeptic and self-styled Historical Materialist, I have grown to trust Rasmus’s digest of the meaning of arcane, jargon-filled, often-misleading government reports.

Of course, we have had earlier times when similar data were available. For over three decades, Labor Research Associates-- a group of Communist and left researchers-- published a comprehensive Labor Factbook every two years that addressed “labor trends,” the “social and labor conditions” of the period, “people’s health,” the “trade unions,” “civil liberties and rights,” “political affairs,” and “Canadian labor developments.” This comprehensive book armed working people who cared to advance the cause of workers with a cache of ammunition in the class war. We don’t have Labor Factbook, but we are lucky to have Jack Rasmus’s report.

What does his report tell us?

● Despite $10 trillion in stimulus since the pandemic, the US economy has only produced an anemic recovery: GDP of 1.9% (2022), 2.5% (2023), and 2.2% (2024, to date).

● And the US worker fared even worse: “...with regard to wages, the American worker has not benefited at all from the $10 billion-plus fiscal-monetary stimulus. Real Weekly Earnings are flat to contracting. And take-home pay’s even less.”

● The great US job creation machine that US politicians celebrate is not performing so well: “It is important to also note that the vast majority of the net new jobs created have been part-time, temp, gig and contractor jobs. In the past 12 months, full-time jobs in the labor force [have] fallen by 458,000, while part-time jobs have risen by 514,000.” 

Typical of an election year, official reports grab headlines, exaggerating job gains, only to be corrected later: “The jobs reports over the past year are revealing as well. They continually reported monthly job gains of around 240,000. But the Labor Department just did its annual revisions and found that for the period March 2023 thru March 2024 it over-estimated no fewer than 818,000 jobs!” [The September 6 employment report downgraded June and July’s job growth by a further 86,000 jobs!]

“The Wall St. Journal further reported that up to a million workers have left the labor force due to disability from Covid and long Covid-related illnesses. Neither of those statistics [is] factored into the government’s unemployment rate figures.”

● For working-class citizens, debt has been a paradoxical life-saver, supplementing slack wage growth. But it continues to grow at a dangerous pace and with increasingly unsustainable interest rates: “The last quarter century of poor-wage increases has been offset to a degree by the availability of cheap credit with which to make consumer purchases in lieu of wage gains and decently paying jobs. Actually, that trend goes back even further to the early 1980s at least.”

“Household US debt is at a record level. Mortgage debt is about $13 trillion. Total household debt is more than $18 trillion, of which credit-card debt is now about $1 trillion, auto debt $1.5 trillion, student debt $1.7 trillion (or more if private loans are counted), medical debt about $.2 trillion, and the rest installment-type debt of various [kinds].

American households carry probably the highest load of any advanced economy, estimated at 54% of median family-household disposable income. And that’s rising.

Debt and interest payments have implications for workers’ actual disposable income and purchasing power. For one thing, interest is not considered in the CPI or PCE inflation indexes and thus their adjustment to real wages. As just one example: median family-mortgage costs since 2020 have risen 114%. However, again, that’s not included in the price indexes. Home prices have risen 47% and rents have followed. But workers pay a mortgage to the bank, not an amortized monthly payment to the house builder.

One should perhaps think of workers’ household debt as business claims on future wages not yet paid. Debt payments continue into the future for purchases made in the present, and thus subtract from future wages paid.”

Since Rasmus penned his report, the Census Bureau released its report on household incomes. While there was an uptick in 2023, median household income adjusted for inflation remains below the levels of 2018, explaining why poll respondents (and voters) are feeling insecure about the economy. In fact, household incomes have only increased around 15% over the last twenty-three years-- hardly a reason for a victory lap by the last four administrations… or the capitalist system!

● Rasmus brings a necessary sobriety to the discussion of the state of the organized trade union movement in the US. While there are many exciting developments, the goal of building a formidable force to advance the interests of working people remains far off: “Since 2020 union membership has declined. There were 10.8% of the labor force in unions in 2020. There are 10.0% at end of 2023, which is about half of what it was in the early 1980s. Unions have not participated in the recovery since Covid, in other words, at least in terms of membership. Still only 6% or 7.4 million workers of the private-sector labor force is unionized, even when polls and surveys in the past four years show a rise from 48% to 70% today in the non-organized who want a union.”

“Recently the Teamsters union under new leadership made significant gains in restoring union contract language, especially in terms of limits on temp work and two-tier wage and benefit structures. The Auto workers made some gains as well. But most of the private-sector unionization has languished. And over the past year it has not changed much.

About half of all Union members today are in public-sector unions. It has been difficult for Capital and corporations to offshore jobs, displace workers with technology, destroy traditional defined-benefit pension plans, or otherwise weaken or get rid of workers’ unions. The same might be said for Transport workers, whose employment is also not easily offshored but is subject to displacement by technology nonetheless. But overall, union membership has clearly continued to stagnate over the past year, as it has since 2020.”

Rasmus’s candid conclusion: “The foregoing accumulation of data and statistics on wages, jobs, debt and unionization in America this Labor Day 2024 contradicts much of the hype, happy talk, and selective cherry picking of data by mainstream media and economists. That hype is picked up and peddled by politicians and pollsters alike.”

*****

And speaking of politicians…

A recent Jacobin piece stands as a sterling example of torturing facts and logic to build the case that Democratic Party politicians got the “stop the genocide” message at the Party’s national convention. Waleed Shahid writes that “the Uncommitted movement didn’t win every immediate demand…” in his article Why the Uncommitted Movement Was a Success at the DNC. The Uncommitted Movement didn’t win any demand-- immediate or otherwise-- at the DNC! 

It takes some skill and determination to recast a near totally effective effort to stifle the voice of pro-peace and pro-justice participants and protesters into “not just a fleeting victory — it is the beginning of a strategic shift in how the Democratic Party grapples with its own contradictions.” Sad to say, it takes a twisted perception to see “victory” and “a strategic shift” while convention-goers derisively and dismissively stroll past demonstrators reciting the names of civilians murdered by the Israeli military.

Shahid attempts the impossible in likening the 2024 Democratic Convention to the 1964 Convention, when brave civil rights activists shamed the Democratic Party before television cameras and journalists into negotiating with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (See this sharp comparative account in Black Agenda Report). There was neither shame nor negotiations in 2024.

Like Democratic operatives before him, Shahid scolds those expecting more from Democrats to-- in the future-- “out-organize” the Neanderthals controlling the party. In other words, force them to do the right thing!

When one finds a credible political party to support, it should not be one that must be coerced to support justice.

*****

It is a commonplace on the soft left to advocate a broad coalition or united front to address the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America. Building on the ineffectiveness of the long-ruling centrist parties, the French RN, Germany’s AfD, the US’s Trump, and a host of other populist movements have mounted significant electoral campaigns. The knee-jerk left reaction is to advocate a broad popular front of all the oppositional parties or movements, a tactic modeled crudely and inappropriately on the Communist International’s anti-fascist tactic. 

Most recently, the French left conceded to an electoral “popular front” with the ruling president, Emmanuel Macron’s party and other parties in opposition to Marine Le Pen’s RN. To the surprise of many, the left won the most votes and should have-- by tradition-- organized a new government. But President Macron “betrayed” popular-front values and appointed a center-right career politician, hostile to the left, as prime minister. To add insult to injury, Macron consulted with Le Pen for approval of his appointment.

Consequently, despite commanding the largest vote, the popular front is in a less favorable position and the right is in a more favorable position than before the electoral “victory” (see, for example, David Broder’s Jacobin article for more). 

This move by Macron should sober those who glibly call for a popular front as the answer to every alarm, every hyperbole regarding the populist right. 

Because of this gross misapplication of the united-front tactic, I can enjoy an I-told-you-so-moment. I wrote in late June: “The interesting question would be whether Macron’s party would return the favor and support this effort in a second round against RN. I doubt they would. Bourgeois ‘solidarity’ only goes so far.” Where the left selflessly threw its support behind Macron’s party where it needed to win, Macron through his deal with Le Pen, threw the left under the bus! 

Hollow victories, indeed.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Lessons Unlearned

Karl Marx knew a thing or two about politics.

Writing over a century-and-a-half ago, he studied the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions that sought to drive a stake in the vitals of the European monarchies and consolidate the rule of the emerging bourgeois classes.

Contrary to his critics-- especially the dismissive scholars-- he applied his critical historical theories with great nuance and subtlety, surveying the class forces, their actions, and their influence on the outcomes. While Marx conceded that the revolutions were suppressed in the short run, he was able to show how they importantly shaped the future.

Many would argue that Marx’s account of the aftermath of the rising in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is the finest example of the application of the Marxist method-- historical materialism (fn 1)-- to actual events.

It is said that Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British author, who was a colleague in British intelligence of Soviet spy Kim Philby and a notorious windbag, was once asked if he ever suspected Philby, if Philby left any clues to his loyalties. After a pause, Trevor-Roper said that Philby had on an occasion insisted that The Eighteenth Brumaire was the greatest work of history ever written.

More than a clue, and Philby may have been right.

The Eighteenth Brumaire sought to explain a great mystery: How a country undergoing a profound historic transition from one socio-politico-economic order (feudalism) to another (capitalism), could go from the popular overthrow of a monarch to a constituent republic and back again to the establishment of an emperor, Louis Bonaparte, in a few short years.

Marx couldn’t help but find a bitter irony in the fact that the coup installing Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew as emperor mirrored the uncle’s ascension to emperor after the French Revolution. With equally bitter sarcasm, Marx amended the old saw about history repeating itself with the phrase “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Where Napoleon I tragically hijacked the revolutionary process, Napoleon III brought the farcical maneuvers of a dysfunctional bourgeois parliament to a farcical end by creating a farcical empire.

At a time when our own political processes-- executive, legislative, and judicial-- resemble a crude farce, at a time when opinion polls confirm the popular disdain for these institutions, we may well find Marx’s analysis to be of some use.

Consider ex-President Trump, for example. He, like Napoleon III, represents a mediocrity, only known for his pretensions and his rank opportunism. Trump likes to portray himself as a great president who arose as a savior, an agent for the restoration of US greatness. 

Based on nostalgia for his uncle, Napoleon I, the nephew ruled France with the promise of an expanding empire to be feared and admired for its spreading of enlightened ideas; Louis Bonaparte promised to restore the unity of France, lead it towards greatness, and stability.

But are Trump and Bonaparte unique individuals who pushed themselves onto the stage of history? Are they historical accidents? Larger-than-life personalities?

Marx would argue that, in fact, Bonaparte succeeded because he enjoyed the support of a class, specifically the conservative peasantry, “the peasant who wants to consolidate his holdings… those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the empire.” Bonaparte’s supporters seek to save what they have and relive an earlier moment. In short, they want to make France [the Empire] great again. He answered the moment.

Marx explains:

In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them from other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above… Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them.

It must be noted that Marx is neither mocking nor condemning the conservative French peasantry for its support of the election of Louis Bonaparte (1849) or his coup (1851). Instead, he is explaining how and why Bonaparte could manage to rule, both legitimately and illegitimately, even after France had declared its second republic. The peasantry was, by far, the largest class. The peasantry had not yet recognized its existence as a class; it could not yet express its grievances, its interests, or its latent power in class terms; it could not produce its own class leaders. And it turned instead to a caricature, a small man with big aspirations, a toy Napoleon.

Like Napoleon III, Trump enjoyed class-based support: segments of both the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. The professionals and small business people who saw “elites” -- typically urban elites-- as threatening their way of life, culturally and economically, were drawn to Trump over the conventional corporate Republican leaders. Similarly, working-class voters victimized by deindustrialization, twenty-first-century economic crises, insecurity, rising costs of healthcare, etc., looked for someone “as an authority over them,” to send “them rain and shine from above,” that is, a modern-day Napoleon. They could not find that with the Democrats. They thought that they found it in Donald Trump.

Workers in the US have lost what the French peasant had yet to achieve in 1851: “...no community, no national bond and no political organization among them…They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name.” Nearly eighty years of red-baiting, business unionism, and Democratic Party supplication after a rich history of class struggle have left the US working class with little class consciousness, with little ability “to form a class.” It is no wonder that Make America Great Again resonated with so many.

Both Louis Napoleon and Trump have their camp followers and thugs. Marx designated Louis Napoleon’s lumpen proletariat group of mischief-makers the Society of December 10 for the role they played in stirring the pot after his election. Trump has his ultra-nationalist, racist trouble-makers as well.

Marx saves his derision for the “so-called social-democratic party,” founded as a coalition of the petty-bourgeoisie and the workers. With the militant revolutionary workers killed, imprisoned, or exiled after the June, 1848 rising waged to establish a social and democratic republic, the workers accepted compromise and the parliamentary road. In Marx’s words:

A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. From the social demands of the proletariat the revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to them; from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie the purely political form was stripped off and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose the Social-Democracy… The peculiar character of the Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not with doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony… This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.

“…within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.” This description of the limits of an incipient social democratic party in 1849 could be applied fairly to the aspirations of the small left wing of the US Democratic Party today. A little more than one hundred fifty years later, workers are still being herded into a party that seeks, at best, the weakening of the antagonism between capital and labor and transforming it into harmony [paraphrasing Marx]. The Democrats assume the votes of the working class and the most oppressed, while intensely courting the support of the urban and suburban upper strata super-voters and super-donors. This has been their strategy since the loss of the reactionary South to the Republicans.

In nineteenth-century France, the proletariat/petty bourgeoisie alliance was short-lived. Faced with a blatant violation of the constitutional limits of presidential action, the alliance allowed its threats of militant action to melt away when Bonaparte called its bluff, revealing a paper tiger.

Marx identified the folly of workers uniting with the petty bourgeoisie:

…instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people with the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it… No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation.

Not to be taken lightly for its defeat at the hands of Bonaparte and the bourgeois party, the petty-bourgeois took consolation with “the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then-- then, we’ll show them what we are made of!”

If this sounds eerily like the empty threats of the Democratic Party before the brazen actions of Trump, his friends, and the Supreme Court, then lesson learned!

If we see parallels with the politics of nineteenth-century France and the twenty-first-century US, then we surely are reminded of Marx’s quip that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Surely, only an allergy to history, a blindness to past tragedies, can account for the continuing allegiance of workers and their leaders to a spineless Democratic Party that continually betrays the interests of working people.

Surely, we can do better. Marx thought so…

(fn 1)  These reflections were inspired by a recent encounter with Jonathan White’s excellent 2021 book, Making Our Own History, A User’s Guide to Marx’s Historical Materialism, especially chapter 6..

 Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Searching for the “White Working Class”

The Wall Street Journal calls them the “forgotten Americans.” Others see them as racist and xenophobic. Then aspiring-President Obama characterized them in 2008 in the following way: "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Whether they are forgotten, dismissed, or demonized, the “white working class” has been discovered this election season.

As with any new species, researchers are scrambling to probe, dissect, and analyze white workers; pundits are spinning theories about their habits and dispositions; and politicians are searching for keys to unlock their votes.

Arguably, no social segment has been under the sociological microscope this intensely since US elites and their intellectual courtiers “discovered” African Americans some sixty years ago. Class, like race, must force itself on to the stage before notice is taken.

In the case of the “white working class,” the surprising success of Bernie Sanders on the left flank and Donald Trump on the right flank-- successes that, in part, are believed to owe something to white workers-- sparked the new interest.

Even a decade ago, it was widely believed that there was no working class in the US-- only a vast middle class and the poor. Fostered by social scientists, mainstream politicians, and union functionaries, the fiction prevailed that, apart from the very rich, everyone was either middle class or poor. Of course this illusion began to shatter in the wake of the 2008 crash and the ensuing economic stagnation. Likewise, the rebellion against corporate, cookie-cutter candidates in the 2016 primary fights exposed a class division that poorly fit the harmonious picture of one big class with insignificant extremes at the margin.

Whatever else the 2016 electoral campaigns have revealed, they surely have shattered the illusion that the US is largely a classless society.

But US elites and their opinion-making toadies struggle to find the “white working class.” Some accounts refer to them as “white males without a college degree,” still others, “middle-aged white males.” The Brookings Institute takes a small, but confused step closer to insight, by adding “the additional qualification of being paid by the hour or by the job rather than receiving a salary.”

Vulgar, crude characterizations reach heights of stereotypicality and ignorant simplicity: “Moreover, the political stuff they like – bombastic attacks on Mexicans, Muslims, and Megyn Kelly – can turn off minorities and college-educated whites, particularly women.”

Just as the mass media has fostered caricatures of African-Americans, the media and cultural/entertainment corporations craft an unflattering image of white, working class citizens. Where Black people are saddled with imagery of violence, idleness, promiscuity, and criminality, white workers are portrayed as bigoted, socially, culturally and intellectually backward, superstitious, and conservative.

One would never know from “hood” movies, talk radio hysteria, and the crime-obsessed news readers, that most African Americans are a significant part of the working class, maintain stable households, and work diligently for a better life.

Similarly, most white workers are neither gun fanatics nor Bible-thumpers. Most white workers do not attack gays, abuse their spouses and children, raze mosques or lynch Black People. 

Nonetheless, both caricatures are part of the baggage borne by elites, including liberal elites.

The common perception dished by the mass media is that white workers constitute the electoral base for Donald Trump, when the truth is that the median household income for Trump’s primary voters was $72,000. In truth, the nativist, anti-immigrant sentiments associated with Trump are more typical of the white petty-bourgeoisie than the white working class.

Certainly media elites, pundits, and politicians do not want to talk about the latent rebelliousness of the white working class-- a large majority of white workers believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction, an opinion that should not surprise anyone given the fact that the median household income in the US has declined by 7% since 2000. Unfortunately, the current crisis of political credibility shows that they, like most of the rest of the population, have yet to find a way out.

Social scientists have begun to acknowledge the toll that corporate pillage has taken on the working class, very dramatically of recent in the case of the white working class. Death rates, especially from alcoholism, drug use, and suicide have risen sharply among white workers. The institutions that formerly traded a measure of privilege to white workers for their compliance and docility have now abandoned them. The Democratic Party, for example, is so thoroughly corrupted by corporate money that there is little more than gestures for the causes of workers of every ethnicity.

Yes, there is an element of lost privilege that fuels white working class anger and despair. At the same time, the economic advantages that separated white from Black workers in the past are diminishing in many sectors and afford a rare opportunity to unite workers against their common foe. Until the left and workers’ organizations undertake that task, working class rebellion may well succumb to false friends and bombastic demagogues.

Nothing reveals the distance of the upper classes from the realities of working class life like the current media fascination with the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Writing as one of their own, J.D. Vance-- a principal at an investment firm-- relates his unhappy working class childhood to book club liberals and country club conservatives. 

Feeding the stereotypes, Vance exposes a dysfunctional childhood spared from ruin by an enlistment in the Marine Corps, a stint at Ohio State University, and a climb to the summit, Yale Law School. Looking down from the rarified air of Yale, he feels qualified to speak of “the anger and frustration of the white working class” and the hunger to “have someone tell their story.” The thirty-one-year-old investment executive’s rags-to-riches tale urges “people to hold themselves responsible for their own conduct and choices. ‘Those of us who weren’t given every advantage can make better choices, and those choices do have the power to affect our lives…”

There are echoes in Vance’s biography of the many “hood” oracles that depict Black life as, without exception, dysfunctional and unbearably ugly. But in this case, it is white, working class life that is soaked in alcoholism and threatened by senseless violence.

This profile, like the book title’s derogation of white workers as “hillbillies,” is deeply offensive to anyone growing up in a working class family or community. Vance’s addicted mother and sometimes absent father are neither exceptional nor common in white working class families anymore than they are unique to or absent from families of different ethnicities or socio-economic classes. To believe otherwise is to feed the ugly monsters of racism and class arrogance, the twin beasts nurtured by every ruling class.

Growing up in working class communities, we see the ravages of exploitation, the divisiveness of racism, and the despair of joblessness and poverty. Of course, these occasion harmful, counterproductive behavior. They wreck the lives of many. But they are not remedied by self-help bromides the likes of which Vance advances. 

Capitalism produces and reproduces wholesale misery that may no longer fall as unevenly as it has in the past. While African American workers are continually and relentlessly victimized by racist practices and denied access by exclusionary craft unions, capital today offers white workers little reward for supporting or tolerating racist policies. The twenty-first century global economic turmoil has devastated workers’ standards of living regardless of race or “choices.”

The future lies in the hands of those who reject divisive, elite-fashioned stereotypes and unite to face their common enemy.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com