Foreword to the
Third Edition

THE FRENCH ARE SAID TO BELIEVE that “to understand everything is to forgive everything.” Maybe so. For capitalism, however, the more of its nature and consequences one understands, the more there is to condemn.

Unless you are a mainstream economist. Except for a few, they don’t understand capitalism, because they don’t study it. What they do study is “a market economy,” which they look at within a framework of abstract and utterly ideology-serving assumptions that insure there is nothing to forgive.

In the “Econ Y2K” classes for which this pamphlet was prepared (see the “Note on Classes), we shall try to understand both the capitalist system and the cultivated ignorance of its economic “laws of motion” (and their meaning), which are so rigorously ignored by main-stream economic theorists—a condition seen by Thorstein Veblen as their “trained incapacity.”

Here we seek to give as compact a definition of capitalism as seems reasonable. Like other major social concepts, capitalism is not susceptible to a dictionary-type definition of a paragraph or a page. Thus, what follows here, indeed the classes themselves, should be viewed as merely a first step.

But that's how all journeys begin. This one, the effort to understand capitalism, is necessarily disquieting, as is the effort to understand a serious illness. In both cases, however, such an effort is essential if we are to cope with or to rid ourselves of its consequences.

    Doug Dowd
    San Francisco
    June 1999

P.S. I wish to thank my students and friends at VaiVecchio Press, who put this pamphlet together for my classes

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Toward Understanding Capitalism

 
 

THE MODERN WORLD came into being as a result of the interactions of four clusters of institutions and their main processes: capitalism, (1) colonialism, industrialism, and nationalism. Although the behavior of each of the “Big Four” is comprehensible only in terms of its relationships with the other – which not only interacted but did so in mutually transforming ways – it is also true that in order to understand that dynamic interaction it is essential to study each of the clusters in analytical isolation from the others. This procedure, essential though it may be, is also an insufficient basis for social analysis: we must always remember to put the Big Four back together when we seek to apply that understanding to concrete social problems.

Mainstream analysts, especially the economists among them, more usually study (or posit) small segments of the social process, which come to be enclosed in always tinier cubicles, locked in like prisoners with a life sentence in isolated cells. Here we’ll not select some small portion, but one of the Big Four, capitalism – itself, it will be seen, an immensely complicated set of social relationships and processes, which, to make matters even more difficult, must be studied in their historical development, not statically, as is customary.

So, and remembering that we are studying not a potted plant but an ever-changing and labyrinthian forest, we now separate out capitalism, which, especially in the United States, has increasingly come to dominate its fellow clusters; and that evolution in turn has meant that the United States has come to dominate the rest of the world. What has happened has occurred in part because of our geographic advantages, which made a substantial contribution to our great power. Also contributing, though less obviously so, is the fact that this country was less constrained than the Europeans (or Japanese) in its capitalist development by residual precapitalist institutions.

Put simply, capitalism was raw and rugged here – and remains so, by comparison with the capitalism of other societies. Capital’s power was unchained here, for better (for capital) and for worse (for labor). Thus, the United States has been not only the most capitalistic of all societies but, as such, the society in which capitalism has thrown much the most weight of the Big Four – which may be saying the same thing twice.

Capitalism did not, of course, start in the United States. Wherever it may have been born – whether in the medieval trading cities of Italy or Flanders or Germany (or elsewhere, as some argue) – it took irreversible hold first in Great Britain about two hundred years ago. Given Britain’s prior history, it was able to do so then and there only because it was then also possible for the same socioeconomic system to spread through trade and investment from Britain (with numerous variations) to what became the major powers by the end of the nineteenth century. Those nations became major and powerful because they were becoming capitalist and moving toward industrialization – whatever else was also required. (2) The minor powers (for example, Spain and Portugal) and the colonial world were falling under the formal or informal rule of the industrial capitalist states, and both they and the more powerful functioned within the framework of an evolving world economy largely created and very much dominated by Great Britain – the first hegemonic power in capitalist history.

In the decades since World War II, the United States has of course been the ruling hegemon; we and the members of the European Community, Japan, and Canada have been the most powerful of what are called the “core” economies (whose subsidiary members would include, say, Sweden and Belgium), with the rest of the capitalist world constituting the dependent “periphery.” (3)

The years between about 1910 and 1945 lacked a hegemonic power and an effective world economy; hence that period’s collapse into worldwide anarchy, chaos, convulsion, violence and wars. It was the world observed and anticipated by Yeats in 1919, whose “centre cannot hold.” (4) The intrinsically combative nationalist and capitalist world tends naturally toward economic and political conflict, unless there is an unchallengeable power with enough carrots and sticks to make it hold.

This matter of stability is something to think about – and to worry about – as this century ends. As the giant transnational corporations move toward a position of primacy in the world economy but with no likelihood of becoming hegemonic, the global role of the United States becomes increasingly problematic.

The world and capitalism have (of course) changed extraordinarily in the last two centuries. Both because of and despite all that, the revolutions and other upheavals of this century notwithstanding, capitalism remains the dominant socioeconomic system in the world. Behind the innumerable changes of its now long history, what is it then that has endured and that constitutes the continuing meaning of the capitalist system? And another question: what has given capitalism its extraordinary power as a system of production (whatever else it also is), which is to say, what has given it the power to subordinate all social relationships to its dynamism? Already in 1848, Marx and Engels, anything but fans of capitalism, nonetheless stood in a certain awe of its power, as witness this famous excerpt from the Communist Manifesto:

Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was...the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. (5)

What are the particular ways and means of capitalism that give it such power? What needs does such a system have, what imperatives must it satisfy, that drive it so forcefully through time and space and tradition?

The answers to those questions will revolve around an examination of the three prime needs of capitalism: (1) the need for expansion, (2) the need for exploitation, and (3) the need for rule by what amounts to an oligarchy.

What makes expansion necessary, even compulsive? What makes it happen? What gives the process its push, its direction, its rate, and its qualities, and what are its diverse consequences? The answers to those (and still other) questions must touch many bases, but all of them are connected by one analytical rope: the socioeonomic relations within a given capitalist society and of those between it and other societies. Sitting at the hard center of all those relationships is power: the power that allows and requires domination and subjection – critically, but not only, between classes within each society and between nations in the world political economy. First we look at the most controversial uses of that power: the exploitation of labor.

 

The Wretched of the Earth (6)

When we use exploitation in reference to natural resources, the term has (or had, until recently) a neutral sound. But when used in reference to labor, as here, it proclaims an unjust and ugly use of power – scarcely an attractive relationship to consider as essential to the health of one’s economy. It should be unsurprising, therefore, that nowhere in conventional (“neoclassical”) economic theory is the notion of exploitation discussed, or even admitted as a possibility of capitalist reality. Nor is that reality called “capitalist”: instead, the process is called “free enterprise” or “the free market” system – or until the 1930s in the United States, “rugged individualism” – all terms that muffle rather than stimulate thought. (7)

In conventional economics, there are four types of income: (1) interest, (2) profits, (3) rent, and (4) wages. Each is a return to a factor of production, presumably received in proportion to its corresponding contribution to production. Wages are a return to labor, the other three to ownership. Never is the question asked as to why most have no income-earning assets and why a few own all of them. That, of course, is (thought to be) a question of history – economic, political, and social history – and for neoclassical economics, history of any kind is beyond the analytical pale.

The classical political economists – the most notable of them Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823) – living before the age of democracy and modern euphemism, theorized within the framework of the labor theory of value. That theory unblushingly saw exploitation and class conflict as a necessity of the capitalist process.

The labor theory posits that (1) “labor alone creates value”; (2) wages are a reward for production; (3) interest, profits, and rents (8) are a reward to the socioeconomic power of ownership, not for any contribution to production; and (4) as Smith, Ricardo, and Marx all agreed, wages are determined by the costs of subsistence – that is, no higher than necessary to keep the worker and his family working and reproducing themselves.

Smith argued for the elimination of all the many “mercantilist interferences” with the free market for labor, land, and commodities by the State, his aim being a freeing up of capital accumulation and the industrialization process. All such “interferences” benefitted some person or some group: The “Poor Laws” might save workers from the starvation that stemmed from unemployment; by slowing or halting technological change, guild regulations shielded those enterprises using the traditional technology; finally,  the many trading companies (e.g., the East India Company) were protected from competition at both ends (buying and selling) of their trading circuit.

Smith’s focus was predominantly on the functioning of the economy within Britain. Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) agreed with Smith, but went on to inquire more closely into what he saw (forty years later) as a most critical relationship not treated by Smith: that between the distribution of income and State policies regarding foreign trade (and tariffs – that is, taxes on imports).

Smith’s analytical enemy was the mercantilist State; Ricardo’s was the political power of the landed classes. They used that power to control Parliament, and to impose a tax on imported grains – thus raising what we would call their own profits but which Ricardo termed rent (by definition “an unearned income”) and, in the same process, raising the cost of subsistence for the wage-earning class, determined mainly by the price of bread. Ricardo saw those “rents” as a return (or reward) to political power, and because he also saw an increase in wages as a decrease in profits, he argued that the tax on imported grains held back industrialization. Therefore: free trade!

Karl Marx (1818-1883), in his Capital, Vol. I (1867, subtitled A Critique of Classical Political Economy) accepted the labor theory of value, but modified it to turn it into a weapon against capitalism, rather than, as it had been for Smith and Ricardo, a tool for its construction. Specifically, with respect to Ricardo and the labor theory of value, Marx effectively argued that there was no analytical difference between the “rents” of the landlords and the profits of the industrial capitalist: both were due to their power, not to production, for which “labor alone” – as Ricardo agreed – was the contributor. (9)

In making this point (along with many other connected arguments), Marx established the theoretical centrality of exploitation in the capitalist process. (10) Thus he also stimulated what was becoming the economics profession to abandon classical political economy, which was to be replaced in the next decade or so by neoclassical economics. The classicists had an analysis embodying political, as well as economic matters, and its aim was social change; the neoclassicists assumed away the sociopolitical and almost all of the economic process and eschewed change.

We return now to exploitation as a question of power. For one group to exploit another always implies a relationship of power to powerlessness – whether we refer to exploited medieval serfs unable to survive the anarchy of the “Dark Ages” without the military protection of their “landlords,” the Africans enslaved because they had no power to hold off their captors, or among others, the “free workers” in a capitalist society who, owning no productive assets (tools, land, etc.), cannot survive without working for others on the latter’s terms. Those with power naturally set terms favorable to themselves, the terms of exploitation. (11)

In Great Britain, where industrial capitalism first took strong hold, the decisive factor establishing those power relationships was what came to be called “the enclosure movement.” This process, although it began as a trickle in the thirteenth century, became a river in the sixteenth century. For the rural people, it swelled to a devastating flood between 1770 and 1820, pushing them off the land in the half century before industrialization took hold to provide significant numbers of jobs. The result was a ghastly swamp of misery and cruelty for countless thousands of families.

And half a century later, four-fifths of the cultivable land of Great Britain was owned by fewer than three thousand families. Previously, the class that would become destitute, desperate, and totally powerless had constituted “a bold peasantry, their country’s pride” – for in that earlier era they had controlled their land and owned their simple tools. (12) In the nineteenth century, the condition of the Irish workers fleeing the famine into England became even worse than that of the English. Reporting on Germany, the eminent British historian Macaulay found that of German workers worse still.

Though only Britain had a full-blown enclosure movement that removed unknown hundreds of thousands of whole families from the nourishing land (where farm work was usually combined with premodern industrial work), powerlessness was established in diverse ways elsewhere, facilitating exploitation. Germany and Japan were already in the enduring grip of feudal exploitive institutions. In the United States, quite apart from slavery, exploitation was easy to achieve. The huge and rising waves of immigrants were ready, willing, and able to work under any conditions, while always hoping and believing something better lay just around time’s corner – as indeed, it often did, even if not with the alacrity they would have wished. (Oftentimes, the children were the benefactors.) And, with their eventual escape, the next wave of hopefuls stood ready to take up the punishment.

Exploitation by itself, however, does not make for business profitability. Indeed, often many of the most exploiting businesses have been among the least profitable and most precarious: farmers exploiting migratory (often illegal) workers, or in the pre- and post-union “needle trades” the exploiting of recent immigrants. Such practices flourished a century ago in the United States and have yet to vanish.

Nonetheless, exploitation is vital for profitability, (13) but it must be accompanied by a buoyant economy, if both the general economy and capitalist society are to be deemed “healthy.” This requisite takes us to the processes of capital accumulation and national economic expansion – and the blood brother, geographic expansion and the world economy.

 

The Political Economy of Expansion

Throughout its history, capitalist profitability has required and capitalist rule has provided, ever-changing means and areas of exploitation. These may be seen as the bones and muscles of capitalist social relations – essential for capitalist development, but in themselves not enough.

Given those social relations, the strength of capitalist enterprises and of their national and global economies vary in accordance with the volume, scope, and rate of capital accumulation – the expansion of productive capacities – popularly termed economic expansion or growth. In turn, satisfactory national economic expansion relates closely to the process of extensive and intensive geographic expansion.

Expansion in these twinned senses must be seen as the essence of the capitalist process, as its heartbeat. Furthermore, the full meaning, the widespread recognition, and the political consequences of capitalist social relations – which are, after all, highly unequal in both structure and effect, in societies where the populations have political rights that could be used to alter such structures – have been effectively obscured or blocked in the leading industrial capitalist nations mainly by their recurring ability to meet this need for expansion. This relentless expansionism represents the primary explanation for the containment of class conflict in the industrial capitalist societies, above all, the United States, historically the most expansive of capitalist nations.

Capitalist societies have changed extraordinarily in the last century and a half or so – in their economies, their politics, their technologies, their culture, in almost everything. Over that long period, however, the dependence upon exploitation and expansion has increased, rather than decreased. Changing greatly from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century have been the nature and the determinants of the expansion process and the burden and the forms of exploitation. As the imperatives and the forms of expansion are examined, keep in mind that, although the two processes are analyzed as though separate, in reality they function as different dimensions of the same process. First we look at capital accumulation and national economic growth, and then go on to global trade and investment.

The need for continuous economic expansion rises out of the motivations of business and the key institutions of capitalism: private ownership and control of the means of production in the hands of the very few and their use to make profit – depending upon a starkly unequal distribution of income, wealth, and power. More specifically:

1. Production is for profit. Apart from any other consideration, profits depend upon market buoyancy – that is, upon the relative scarcity of commodities compared with the demand for them. The socially most acceptable basis for market scarcity (as compared with monopolistic restrictions of supply) is the overall expansion of the economy. This originates in the expansion of productive capacity, which in turn brings expanding incomes and markets – for both consumer and capital goods. But only for a while, unless there is a further expansion of productive capacities – that is, further capital accumulation.

2. Capitalist economies are in principle (and almost entirely in practice) unplanned. If the disproportionalities and gluts from what is essentially an anarchic national (and global) production process are to be kept within safe bounds and the sharp edges of domestic and international economic rivalries are to be blunted, expanding markets are essential – even more so today than in the nineteenth century. In that earlier period, competition led to falling prices and perhaps to expanding sales. Nowadays, pandemic “nonprice competition” – advertising and sales promotion, trivial product changes, packaging gimmicks, ad nauseam – results in higher prices, thus increasing the need for expanding markets.

3. Market expansion is both “natural” and necessary. Technological innovation in both products and productive techniques, a normal and accelerating process under conditions of industrial capitalism, requires market expansion if the increased productivity and production that make technological change profitable are to occur. Also, the largest part of such innovation takes place in and most affects the capital goods industries (viz., machinery, heavy chemicals, metallurgy, electronics). They are the heart of an industrial economy, and they are always dependent upon expansion in the rest of the economy if they are not to suffer losses from excess productive capacity.

4. A highly unequal distribution of income and wealth is intrinsic to capitalism. While the largest part of the population has too little income to maintain its level of life, a small fraction has incomes well above what it is inclined to spend on consumption. If these consequent savings are not to be damaging to the economy, (14) they must be “put to work” by the continuous increase of real investment, by increases in construction and productive capacity. This use of capital requires positive profit expectations – that is, actual and projected market scarcities, in turn dependent upon an expanding economy.

5. Capitalism always depends upon debt financing to some important degree for its production and investment. Such dependence has increased both in degree and in kind over time – spectacularly so after World War II, and wildly so since 1980. It extends throughout all spending: of consumers for all kinds of purchases, of governments at all levels and everywhere, of businesses for both working capital and long-term investment, and most recently in significant amounts, for financing mergers (especially leveraged buyouts). As debt accumulation has accelerated and had both its means and ends contaminated by what amounts to large-scale criminal activity, what used to be a normal and functional process has become a problem in and of itself. Furthermore, it has exacerbated the problems of other areas in scary ways.

6. Individual national economies require global expansion. The economic expansion of each national economy has depended upon intermittent and deepening waves of geographic expansion and upon an expanding world economy. Here again two processes are analytically distinguished which in reality are but one.

The first falls under the heading of colonialism (which became “imperialism,” and then “neocolonialism” and is now euphemised to “development”). Increasing access to exploitable cheap labor, natural resources, and broader markets in the periphery has lifted the volumes of trade, investment, and production for the core economies. This capital outreach has assisted in the maintenance or increase of profits, and by raising the level of socially defined subsistence, it has helped to reduce social conflict in the core economies – but at the considerable expense of the world’s poorer populations.

The sociopsychological consequences of these patterns of overseas domination engender attitudes of superiority and vicarious power for the peoples of the powerful countries. Complemented by the patriotism and bellicosity assiduously cultivated in the nation-states of capitalism, this smugness has also contributed – often, if not always – to their political stability.

As will be shown below, the relationships among and between the strong nations in the global economy are even more vital than their ability to exploit weaker societies – although it must be emphasized that all the relationships of the involved economies are essential to the functioning of a stable capitalist world. Now we examine the nature of the critical needs of the leading economies as their satisfaction or frustration affects the economic strength of the separate nations.

 

Capitalism, Foreign Trade, and Accumulation

For the capitalist developmental process to have begun, to flourish, and to persist, there has always been and must always be a vibrant interaction within and between the national and world economies. The process has been something like a circus tightrope act in training. When strong, the capitalist system has moved through time dynamically, from crisis to crisis, balance achieved and lost and regained, always at higher levels of technology, organization, production, and real income. Concomitantly, the system at those higher levels requires always more nonmarket interventions to reduce or forestall the ever-rising business, economic, and social precariousness of advancing industrial capitalism.

As has been stressed already, to prosper and even to survive, this system has had to satisfy its strongest imperative: to expand – “vertically” through national capital accumulation, and “horizontally” through increased trade and investment in a buoyant world economy. The need for these mutually supportive and transforming processes of expansion is primary to the system. Thus, the needs of each country’s and the world’s people must be, must have been, and must for all time remain subordinated to the needs of capital – for better and for worse.

What constitutes a satisfactory rate of capital accumulation (with its associated economic expansion) and/or a healthy volume of foreign trade stands in direct proportion to some combination of (1) income distribution, (2) the rate of savings, and (3) the resource inadequacies of each nation. The higher the rate of savings and the greater the dependence upon imported resources, the greater the dependence upon a high rate of capital accumulation and of imports. Here in the United States, although the distribution of income is considerably more unequal than in Japan, our rate of savings is much lower, and our resource availabilities are far more abundant than Japan’s. Thus, the Japanese can and must invest more and import more (especially raw materials), and therefore can and must grow more rapidly and export more. The upshot is that a nation like the United States has more potential flexibility in both its production and consumption structures than does Japan – especially were we to reduce our largest import, oil. We would thus be advised to decrease our dependence upon fossil fuels (which we should do anyway for environmental reasons). But seldom are heard those encouraging words from economists or politicians. You’d think they live on another planet (as well they should). The capital accumulation and the exports of each nation have in common (1) that the production of neither is pur-chased by consumers within the national economy, but (2) that both are required to maintain levels of profitability in each capitalist economy. Either capital accumulation or exports can lead to higher levels of consumption and have often done so, but that is neither their purpose nor a necessary functional consequence.

An important similarity between domestic accumulation and an export surplus is that both act to stimulate the economy’s growth. An even more important difference is that domestic capital accumulation leads directly to increased productive capacity and often to improved productivity. Therefore the need arises for additional consumption and/or exports, further investment, and as has been increasingly vital since World War II, for higher levels of government spending in order to support (and often subsidize) the accu-mulation process. Net exports, in contrast, constitute a use of existing productive capacity having no necessary connection with any further national economic development, except in-sofar as the economy becomes habitually structured to supply an export market – as economies habitually do. If and when such important export markets decline, serious nation-al problems arise, as has been widespread in recent years.

Just as investment is directed by and for the class of owners and controllers of capital, exports/imports are class dominated. They are either for use in production – raw materials, machinery, etc. – or (mostly) for the consumption by the best-off of the population in the importing nation. Thus, both capital accumulation and exports/imports are accomplished essentially by and for a small fraction (the top tenth or top fifth) of each nation’s and of the world’s people.

At the very top of that fraction – perhaps the top one percent, in terms of income and wealth – are those who constitute the decision-making apparatus of a capitalist society: its power élite, its ruling class, its establishment. Whatever its name and its composition, it is that informal grouping that meets the third imperative of a functioning capitalist society: rule by the few. The manner of rule varies substantially from one capitalist society to another; what does not vary much is the relative size of the tiny powerful group or the sources of its power. This generalization may require serious alteration in the near future, if the present tendencies of fewer than a thousand transnational corporations to shape both foreign and domestic economic policies continue.

 

Oligarchic Democracy

Historians generally agree that as capitalism came into existence it did so in tandem with the (abrupt or gradual) breakdown of absolutist forms of government. In Britain, parliamentary rule grew as monarchical power declined toward the merely ceremonial, with numerous and belated variations on the Continent. The United States adopted a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. In fact, all capitalist societies have come to be political democracies. They cannot function well unless they become political democracies. However, they have not discovered how to function well (because of the imperatives of expansion and exploitation) when they move toward becoming economic and social democracies. (15)

Here let us take time to ponder a puzzle: Capitalist societies are characterized by highly unequal distributions of income, wealth and power, and with similarly unequal distributions of prestige, status, comfort, and almost everything else prized in those societies. They are also almost always characterized by political systems that give the general population the right to elect those who govern them, and to remove or replace them over time. How and why then can capitalist governments considerably more often than not cater to the desires of the few and, at best, ignore or override the needs of the majority?

Although the political institutions of the United States are among the most democratic of all the capitalist societies, the processes of rule by the few have been less contested here than in any other capitalist nation. Why?

The ordinary working people of the United States – that is, at least four-fifths of the population – have historically shown relatively little and, as we move to the present, always less concern with the location and functioning of power and the nature of class relationships in their society. In the half century or so preceding World War I, there was a developing tendency toward class consciousness, as reflected in the emergence of radical wings in the trade union movement, the birth of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and of what became a vigorous Socialist Party. (16)

That party was founded in 1901 and its leader became Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926). Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was not against socialism as such, but was against a powerful State: she was an anarchist. Taken together, these two represented a good part of the main radical tendencies in the United States before World War I, and are well worth a brief portrait.

 

Close-Up: Emma and Gene

Emma Goldman, born in Russia, was imprisoned in the United States first in 1893, and deported as a dangerous extremist in 1919 – one of the first victims of the “Palmer Raids” and the “Red Scare” extending into the 1920s. She fought for birth control (for which she was imprisoned again in 1916) and the full range of women’s rights, along with a communal, decentralized form of socialism, at the same time opposing war, police repression, and the death penalty.

“Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?” she asked in one of her frequent court appearances. Debs, leaders of the American Railway Union, became a socialist while in jail for the Pullman strike of 1894. Like Goldman, he was totally opposed to war, and he led the Socialist Party to be so during World War I – for which he was given a ten-year sentence and imprisoned for almost three years. Among his many eloquent statements, perhaps the best known is his statement to the court upon sentencing: “Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”(17)

We could use those two, these days.

Both the various radical groups and much of the more conservative sections of the trade union movement were crushed or weakened in the antiunion and Red Scare drives of the 1920s, but came back to life during the depression of the 1930s. That life did not last long. It was battered by the Cold War and McCarthyism, by antiunion legislation (the first being the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947), and not least, by the growth and spread of the techniques of persuasion – for selling “ways of life” and political ideas and candidates, as well as commodities. The growing consumeristic culture within which all this occurred was made possible by the sustained period of deepening and widening economic expansion in the twenty years or so following World War II.

Popular political concern and discussion have increasingly come to be focused mostly on personalities, on “social issues” (e.g., race, religion, personal matters such as abortion), and on a militarized foreign policy rather than economic and class relationships. To the degree that economic matters have been given attention at all by the electorate, all eyes have been focused on taxes. The result has been to defeat any possibility of improved health or education for the bottom four-fifth themselves and their children while lowering the taxes of the highest income levels. That’s irrationality. Indeed, that there might even be class structure (and that they just might explain much of the nature and the functioning of power in U.S. society in past and present) is a matter finding little or no recognition – except once in a while in the academic world, and then more often than not as a notion to be refuted.

We have been taught that ours is a “pluralistic” political system; that although our institutions do not provide for income equality, there is equality of opportunity, and thus the economic inequality that exists is traceable – somehow – to individuals having failed to work away at their opportunities. “One man, one vote” has been a ringing slogan for us, of course – not “one person, one vote” until 1920 in the United States, except for a few separate states; and not just any person, irrespective of color, until the 1960s. But that lack has had to do with gender and racial discrimination, not just the influence of economic oligarchy over political functioning. By now it is virtually true that anyone more than 18 years old has one vote, no more and no less. (18)

And what does “one vote” mean? Consider what and for whom we get to vote for or against; moreover, the Senate, still the “rich man’s club” it was of yore, provides each state with two votes irrespective of population. As a result, the smallest states are given a veto over the social legislation (which their voters, more than others, tend to oppose) and disproportionate power in all legislative bargaining. (19)

Be that as it may, one would have to believe in the tooth fairy to think that political power either begins or ends in the voting booth. The many thousands of political lobbyists (and what they offer or threaten), the many billions of dollars of campaign contributions by only a few thousand donors, the systematic control over the various elements of the media by a handful of companies (who also control much else) – none of these exists and functions in order to lubricate the machinery of political democracy, if that is supposed to mean that one person’s voice should be no heard no more strongly than all others. Of course not. Politics in industrial capitalist society is dominated by class interests today, as ever; and if this arrangement has powerful economic interests accepting and encouraging the irrational (20) elements in our society, so be it. It isn’t as if that were something new in our or world history.

From the point of view of those at the top, what becomes essential in a political democracy is to find ways and means to insure that the class interests of the largest portion of the population will lose their cutting edge in a welter of noneconomic issues, while those of the power élite are continually sharpened with the instruments of their power.

So it has come about that when the term class is used in the United States – as in the middle class – the reference is either to income levels or to what have come to be called “lifestyles,” in turn a reference to levels and modes of consumption. It can scarcely be denied that the historic definition of the term working class – that is, those who work for wages, having no other means of survival – applies just as much to the largest percentage of the people of the United States as, say, to those of Italy. But one would search at some length on the streets of our cities before finding anyone who, when asked “Which class do you belong to?” would answer, “The working class.” Almost all would answer, “The middle class.” Or not answer at all. It wasn’t always thus here, and it still isn’t so in the rest of the capitalist world.

The most recent and telling manifestation of this bias was in our presidential election of 1992: it was widely-noted and agreed that when candidates used the term “middle class” the reference was to those neither poor nor rich, nor black, brown, yellow or red: in short, the white working class is the “middle class.”

The use of such political language in other industrial capitalist nations (along with a weakening Left) is one of several indicators of how Americanized other nations have become since World War II. The absence of class politics is “as American as apple pie.” (21)

Throughout its history the United States has differed from, say, the French, Italians, and Germans in these respects, (22) but less so in the century or so preceding World War I than in subsequent decades. What in particular intervened was the growth of what has come to be called consumerism and its essential partner, the skills of the media – first becoming a reality in the 1920s, and greatly accelerating after World War II. When it is noted that other nations have become Americanized, it is consumerism that stands at the center of the description. The United States could afford consumerism – and needed it – first. Not until well after World War II did it become a possibility – and a necessity – for the other industrial capitalist nations.

When people think of themselves first as consumers (rather than, say, as citizens or as workers) they are seeing themselves in ways that take them toward selfish individualism and away from the recognition of common interests – or solidarity, to use a word rarely used in the United States. (23)

Those who may be classified as being part of a power élite or ruling class are also consumeristic, of course: how could one be otherwise in this day and age and place? But they also are solidaristic in advancing their class and group interests when it comes to legislation concerning taxation, the conditions of labor, and tariff and environmental policies, to say nothing of policies directly affecting their own industry or profession. (24)

The major exception to this set of generalizations regarding the lack of political efforts on their own behalf by ordinary working people in the United States has been, of course, the trade union movement. But that exception has become an endangered species: the number of workers in unions diminishes in absolute terms with every year, and proportionately even more so (as the working force grows): there are fewer than half as many organized workers now as in the 1950s – falling from about one-third to about one-eighth of wage-earners. Unions these days consider it a victory when they succeed in having their member’ wages and benefits reduced less than the initial demands of employers.

The steady weakening of organized labor is due to a variety of processes: successful attempts by the employing class (with the abundant help of a friendly State) to make it more difficult for unions to be formed and to function; the manifold uses of racism, by both employers and workers, that deflect the latter’s energies in self-defeating directions; and also the always declining interest of the upcoming generations of workers in being members of a union. (25) Nor does it help that consumerism (and what it accompanies and supports) focuses always more on individualistic ways and means. Just as capitalism brings out the worst in its three pals of the Big Four, it also has – must – bring out the worst in us. As one of the most popular songs of the antiwar movement asked: “When will we ever learn?”

 

What’s Next?

Predictions about social change are always difficult, always dicey, especially ones about the mercurial capitalist process. Historically capitalism has been the social formation that has changed most rapidly and in more ways than any other. Furthermore, its processes of change have continued to accelerate from its earliest times, as they must. Capitalism is the one social system that lives by change and dies without it. The system itself (consciously or not) creates change.

Among those who have been the most knowing of “the laws of capitalist development,” Marx and Veblen certainly rank at the top. Although Marx’s optimism concerning its overthrow was much wider of the mark than Veblen’s pessimism regarding its capacities for surviving through the cultivation of irrationality and strife, writing in earlier eras, neither came even close to anticipating the full quality of the era of monopoly capitalism. And now the second stage of monopoly capitalism is in a process of transformation toward something else. What is that something else?

There can be no dependable answer, but grim prospects abound. Present tendencies in the sociopolitical economy of the United States and, in different ways, of the world economy do not provide a basis for optimism – either for maintaining (let alone improving) the well being of people in general or for the strength of capitalism itself. As in the past, however (and assuming the foregoing generalizations to be valid), deterioration in either or both areas in no way assures a movement toward something better – whether defined in terms of well being, beneficial reforms within capitalism, or the emergence of some beneficial alternative to it. Totalitarian regimes of all sorts came on the heels of the military destruction and socioeconomic disarray after 1910, as did even greater military destruction. And the general improvement in material well being in the core countries after World War II, quite apart from the fact that it was made possible by what proved to be a ruinous Cold War (for all concerned) and the worsening of the conditions of a huge proportion of the peoples of the periphery, is also proving to be rickety. Indeed, all over the world, the imbalance between a wealthy minority and the impoverished many has never been greater.

The solution of our economic and political moguls to this deterioration has been to bring back important elements of nineteenth century capitalism, conflated with the latest elements of contemporary business organization and technology. Thus we see increasing dependence by the transnationals upon the very cheapest labor in peripheral countries, and the deployment of the latest technologies of production, communications, and transportation. (26)

The other side of that pleasant development (for the corporations) is the gutting of the well-paid labor force in the core countries, replaced by low-wage, part-time, and temporary workers – accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a further deterioration of cities, rising violence, shameful educational and health services, and a politics of fear and hate. In addition to the systematic neglect of our infrastructure, our cities, and our (as distinct from their) economy by the ruling élites is a stony indifference to an inevitable and long-term decline of average global purchasing power, which, ironically, is a form of self-induced malnutrition for the transnationals and their nations. With variations on particulars, that also brings back the nineteenth century, which functionally ended in 1914.

If mainstream attention is paid to these matters, they are dismissed in the same cavalier and mistaken way as in that same nineteenth century: the trickle-down theory, the origins of which were in Adam Smith. This fantasy flourished until the 1930s, when it was thought to have perished from sheer embarrassment. No such luck: it was born again as the 1970s ended and has risen to a level of credulous popularity hitherto reserved for Santa Claus.

Its message is that although the rich seem to be getting richer as the poor get poorer, that is merely an appearance and is deceiving: damn the statistics, full speed ahead! In the long run – the period in which, as Keynes reminded us sixty years ago, we are all dead – the manna will descend on us all (if, to be sure, in varying degrees). Meanwhile, in the United States and Britain, where trickle-down was invented and has had its current image burnished most fully, the past twenty years has the trickle seeming to defy the law of gravity as it continues to fall up, and at an ever-accelerating rate! Because the idea sits at the very center of capitalist ideology, there is no set or application of mere facts that can dislodge it. It’s sheer theology. And it sells like mad.

As in the past, if capitalism and its decision makers are to change for the better, it will only be if the pressure to do so comes from an informed and resolute majority of the population, not from some tiny minority of “enlightened” businessmen, politicians, or professors – even if the latter were throwing their two-bits’ worth in from the left field bleachers, as here.

Essays such as this one are, I trust useful; but this and others can mean little but laughs and groans unless they become part of a swelling growth of determination, understanding and effort by the people.

A farm woman of the Populist movement entered our history books when, more than a century ago, she said, “It’s time to raise less corn and more hell.” Like me, she would have liked what the great Wobbly organizer Joe Hill (framed by authorities for murder) added to that, just before he was executed by a firing squad in Utah in 1915: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”

 

 
 

Notes

1. Capitalism, depending upon your point a view, is a many-splendored thing or a hydra-headed monster – or some combination of both: in any case, as multi-dimensional as can be. For an introduction to capitalism’s historical and contemporary complexities, consider the excellent book of readings by Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and Thomas Weisskopf (eds.), The Capitalist System (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986)

2. Here I shall be quoting from or paraphrasing discussions in others of my written works. The preceding paragraphs, and some soon to follow, are found in much the same form in my The Waste of Nations, Chapter 2, as later arguments will be found in my U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776, Chapters 2, 7, and 9.

3. The periphery comprises what has been called the “Third World,” a term with a dominantly political connotation that emerged in the 1950s, as many societies sought to distinguish themselves from the “First” and “Second” worlds – that is, those in the capitalist or communist blocs, respectively. The core-periphery concept was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in his influential Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

It may be added that in the era of Great Britain and also in that of the United States, nations have of course moved from periphery to core, at least in some sense: today, for example, the “NICs” or “NIEs” (newly-industrializing countries or economies), such as South Korea or Brazil, do not easily fit anywhere; nor do they have the power to act so as to continue to move up without the considerable assistance and approval of the politics and the economics of  the core.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

4. Writing in January 1919, as the wreckage of the Great War still smoldered, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats saw that the worst was yet to come:

 Turning and turning in the widening gyre
 The falcon cannot hear the falconer:
 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity.

After a few more lines, the poem concludes:

 The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What Yeats saw as falling apart was European civilization, its apogee not much more than a tumbled memory as the twentieth century began. The “rough beast...slouching towards Bethlehem” that inspired his dread was very rough indeed: the horrors of the next decades were by any measure the bloodiest, most destructive, and most shameful in history.

The poem is entitled “The Second Coming.” It may be found in many collections. I have used Oscar Williams (ed.), The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (New York: The John Day Company, 1945), p. 300.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) – “The Last Romantic” – was deeply conservative, leaning to the political Right. For many poets with significantly different values who have been inspirational for the Left, however – W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and C. Day Lewis in Britain, E.E. Cummings and Robinson Jeffers in the United States, for example – Yeats was an abiding and positive influence. (T.S. Eliot, similarly influential in poetry was, if anything, more conservative than Yeats, characterizing himself as a monarchist and as, in effect, a medieval Catholic.) See the fine study by Douglas Archibald, Yeats (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983), especially Chapter 5, “Politics and Public Life, 1913-1939.” I note all this because in these days it seems to have been forgotten that one can learn much from those with whom one disagrees greatly.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

5. The Manifesto – a document of pamphlet size, about 30–50 pages (depending upon format) – may easily be found in a multitude of sources. Written when social change under capitalism was moving at a crawl compared with today’s supersonic speeds, its prescience in terms of the kaleidoscopic quality of change under capitalism is remarkable.

6. This the title of Frantz Fanon’s influential book of the 1960s, published in the United States by Grove Press (New York), in 1968. Fanon was an Algerian psychiatrist; in this book he sought to explain (and justify) the rage of the colonized peoples.

7. When I was a teaching assistant in econ at Berkeley in 1948–49, a prominent periodical had a contest to find a new name for capitalism – the problem being that much protest in the colonized world was “anti-capitalist.” There were a few dozens of teaching and research assistants, almost all of us veterans of both the depression and the war. Someone proposed that we have our own contest for a new name, the winner to receive a roundtrip ticket on the Bay Bridge train from Berkeley to San Francisco (there was still a train). My overly wordy suggestion for a new name for capitalism lost badly. The winner was Murder, Inc.

8. Rent in economics does not signify what we pay for our apartments, but refers to an income derived from a price in excess of that which is necessary to bring a given amount of production into the market. It is, in short, an artificially achieved (higher) price, due to some interference in the market – some form of private monopoly power or, as in the point under discussion in the text, the ability of private parties to enlist the State to raise their prices by a tax on imports. All monopoly profits are rents in this usage. Neoclassical economics, in sharp contrast, sees all incomes – wages, interest, profits, and rent – as equal to the recipients’ contributions to production.

Although neither Smith nor Ricardo presumed to do so, neoclassical economics claims to be scientific. One could thus reasonably expect that their conceptual apparatus be subject to testing – that is, verification – one of the key elements of the scientific approach. However, not only have their propositions not been tested, they are framed in such a manner that they cannot be tested. (My mere positing here of neoclassical economics as ideology rather than science will be elaborated upon in class.)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

9. Neither Marx nor Smith and Ricardo (or anyone else) ever argued that labor can be productive without the equipment and resources owned and used in the enterprises that pay their wages. But rents and profits are rewards for ownership (and, as noted earlier, the power that comes with it), not for production activity. (In this connection, managerial functions are seen as “labor.”) The means of production – “land, labor, and capital” – are, after all, the means of life, without any one of which the others are rendered useless (or considerably less productive). Ownership and control of the means of life, of course, is power.

10. Further discussion, both analytical and descriptive, is necessary to clarify the meaning and the role of exploitation in capitalism. I have provided a fuller (though still brief) discussion in Chapter 2 of my U.S. Capitalist Development, noted earlier. Here it may be added that the existence, the pervasiveness, and the essentiality of exploitation require time and space to explain; but what determines the wages of labor in conventional economic theory – its “marginal revenue product” – cannot be established at all: it is unmeasurable, nothing more than a convenient analytical and ideological fiction.

In the contemporary world, it is notable that the degree of exploitation of the workforce in the leading industrial capitalist countries has been much reduced (as measured, for example, by the simultaneous increase of real income along with lessened working hours); but that has been made possible by the enormous increase in the numbers of exploited in the periphery.

To get a sense of the severity of exploitation in the United States at the turn of the century, see the novel of Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, which describes in Dickensian detail the horrors of life (and the poisoned product) of the meatpacking industry in Chicago. For England, earlier, see Dickens. Those conditions are the daily fate of many hundreds of millions more today, in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa – nor are these horrors totally absent in the United States.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

11. Those terms have of course been altered over time under the pressures of organized labor and left of center politics. It is useful here to distinguish between exploitation and oppression, not only because they are often confused with each other analytically, but because there is a strong overlap between them. When used carefully, exploitation refers to production relationships, those between workers and their employers. Oppression refers to the social relationships making for ethnic, gender, racial, and religious injustices. Clearly, in a society where one gender or race dominates another, oppression is very likely to make exploitation easier, even inevitable.

Clarity is important in these matters, for political as well as analytical reasons: for example, it is quite common for someone to be oppressed without being exploited – a woman married to a rich man who mistreats her with impunity in any number of ways; or exploited without being oppressed. (A white racist who works at exploitive wages and accepts such wages the more easily because he is able to oppress. In the latter respect, a most illuminating historical analysis is that of David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class [New York: Verso, 1991]).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

12. See R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in 16th Century England (New York: Burt Franklin Publishers, 1959, originally 1912) and Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cape, 1928) for a full explanation of the process of “enclosures.” The “bold peasantry...” is from the epic poem of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), “The Deserted Village,” set in England (though the poet was Irish). The stanza from which the line in the text was borrowed is worth printing in full:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

What happened then and there has continued to numberless people in both core and periphery, and it accelerates in one tidal wave after another, each more destructive and irreparable than its predecessor – most tragically in the past and still today in the periphery and in the swelling numbers of unemployed and underemployed in the core countries, as the latter “deindustrialize.” As the nineteenth century began, Bentham was advocating workhouses (and the separation of children and parents). Without knowing it, former House speaker Gingrich and his allies followed an ancient tradition.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

13. In the years since World War II, the increase in levels of wages, real though they have been (though declining since the 1970s, as noted earlier), have been accompanied by additional forms of “exploitation”: in the marketplace, through monopolistic pricing, and through the State and an incidence of taxation that has a good four-fifths of the population – the bottom four-fifths – paying more than their proportionate share of taxes, while the top fifth, and especially its top half, benefits also in receiving a disproportionate share of the benefits of State expenditures.

14. In the United States it is generally the top ten percent of income receivers who do all the net savings of the entire population. Although others save, of course, in one way or another, their savings are canceled out by their borrowings. But how can there be too much savings? In Keynesian economic theory, “savings” is defined as “income minus consumption expenditures.” If that “non-spending” is not offset by “net real investment” (by business spending for expanded or improved productive capacities, as it does when the economy is expanding), the consequence is that all that is produced is not being purchased. The economy will therefore contract. If the contraction is not to become serious, there must be deficit-financed government spending to support (or increase) current levels of national income.

15. There was some significant movement toward economic and social democracy in many capitalist countries after World War II – most notably Great Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The movement has been reversed in greater or lesser degree everywhere since the late 1970s. The pressure for the reversal came from an unsatisfactory rate of economic growth and of world trade.

That capitalism needs political democracy was shown well by Thorstein Veblen for Germany in his Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution(New York: Macmillan, 1915), and for Japan in his essay “The Opportunity for Japan,” (also 1915) in Leon Ardzrooni (ed.), Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Viking, 1934). In both cases Veblen argued that even their versions of industrial capitalism were working to break down the lingering but still strong holdovers of a rigorous feudal past. He argued further that at some point democratic institutions (e.g., trade unions and socialist movements) would become so threatening to the national capitalism of both nations they would be led to retain “order” through a thoroughgoing militarization of their societies – that is, through fascism. Veblen was correct in his predictions. Within less than a generation, both in fact had become fascist: Japan by 1929, Germany by 1933.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

16. Trade unionism in the United States (often called “business unionism”) has almost always been accepting of capitalism and its policies have been aimed at betterment within the system. That was true of the Knights of Labor, the first substantial federation of workers (in the 1870s and 1880s), and even more narrowly so of the American Federation of Labor (founded in 1886). In the early years of this century the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, often called “Wobblies”) was formed. They were radical, anti-capitalist and anti-State, tending toward what was called “anarchosyndicalism.” Frequently, members of the IWW were lynched, by members of veterans’ groups or even of other unions. A fine book that covers much of this ground in the years surrounding the war is James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism, 1912-1925 (New York: Random House, 1969).

17. I have taken this quote from Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century, cited earlier, p. 70. Zinn’s history is both unique and splendid, a history written “from the bottom up,” filled with data, analysis, and quotations which, were the people of this country to read and absorb them, could be “the start” – or the revival – “of something good.” Debs ran for president as a socialist five times, and in 1912 received 900,000 votes, the most ever received by a socialist in the United States. For those interested, there is a nice collection of essays by Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), which has a good introduction by Richard Drinnon. There is also a useful “reader” on some of the radical voices in our history: Harvey Goldberg (ed.), American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957). It has statements by or about more than a dozen mild or strong radical critics of our society – Heywood Broun, Vito Marcantonio, Big Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon, et al.

18. As significant numbers of black Americans – mostly men – are targeted by the criminal justice system and subsequently lose their “right” to vote, age again becomes less of a guarantor of franchisement.

19. The Senate uses the filibuster almost constantly these years, thus requiring at least sixty votes (ten more than a majority) to pass legislation. “The forty senators from the twenty smallest states represent a population base of 10 percent! In the Clinton era, this means even senators who represent 90 percent of the population are not enough by themselves to pass a bill...” Tom Geoghegan, “The Infernal Senate,” New Republic, November 21, 1994.

20. Not all would agree with any given definition of irrationality. Here what is meant by “irrational elements” is those impelled by hate, fear, bellicosity, racism, the need to dominate, and the like.

21. Some will remember that in the civil rights struggles it was put differently, but just as accurately: “Violence is as American as apple pie.”

22. This country has no medieval past marked by formal class distinctions such as serf, lord, etc., and associated oppression and exploitation); its population, aside from slaves, has been almost entirely made up of voluntary, often eager, immigrants who almost always left a very harsh life behind; the ethnic, religious, and other diversities have made for an ever-changing sea of linguistic and cultural confusions and conflicts with associated difficulties of communication and the ability to perceive common interests.

(A story within a note: About 1950, I was teaching a class in unionism to a group of sugar refinery workers in the San Francisco area. The workers were either Italian, Mexican, or Portuguese in recent background. Whenever a discussion would emerge, the workers would insult and make fun of each other for their respective linguistic inadequacies, evenly shared among them. They spent so much time scorning each other in that way [and other ways], they never did get around to finding the strength to fight against what was a very tough company. Divide and conquer may have started in Rome, but it didn’t end there.)

And, to add only one more and very important factor to the many others that have allowed U.S. workers to be too relaxed about their own interests: the economic development of U.S. capitalism was by far the most successful of all in terms of consumption levels – especially as this century moved on – at least until the 1970s. And by the time real wages began to fall, as they did from 1973 until the present, the workers had only their hopes to help them.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

23. The various and disturbing consequences and long-term implications of this development were already real enough in 1970 to provoke gloomy analyses. Among those most helpful are Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), and Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Random House, 1970). The latter book is a disturbing look at suburbanization, within the framework of an individualism dominated by some combination of consumerism and fear – leaving the cities to “take care of themselves” with always more limited means and with predictably severe consequences for the larger society.

24. A certain group solidarity is to be expected; democracy means the politics of pressure. But there’s a class distinction to be made. For those whose pressure is backed up by substantial and enduring economic power – in industry and agriculture, or the medical profession, to take the most powerful – that pressure is predictably effective, more often than not. For those whose power is determined by their numbers and their ability to organize themselves the pressure is less substantial and less enduring, and predictably less effective. Divided for them is conquered.

25. This wholesale desertion of union membership has occurred partly, to be sure, because unions have become always more businesslike and less effective (and sometimes corrupt) and always less solidaristic.

26. Those wishing to keep up with the latest data and analyses of the transnational development in an ongoing way will find the journal Transnational Corporations most helpful. It is published three times a year by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Programme on Transnational Corporations; the year 1999 is the eighth for the publication of this relatively “objective” journal. Contact information:

 United Nations Publications
 Sales and Marketing Section, Dm. DC2-853
 United Nations Secretariat
 New York, NY 10017

 telephone (800) 253-9646 or (212) 963-8302
 email: publications@un.org
 web site: http://www.un.org/Pubs/sales.htm

 

Updated Jan. 28, 2000
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