It's No Accident

This (U.S.) Labor Day, it is once again time to take stock of the status of the class struggle in this country. There are a lot of ways to do this, and I will only touch on a few.

First, the macro numbers. Steven Greenhouse, the very capable labor reporter of the New York Times, reported a few days ago that the median hourly real wage for US workers has declined 2 percent since 2003. This was not a period of recession but of economic recovery, and as Greenhouse further reports, worker productivity rose in the same period.

So the country is producing ever-increasing wealth, but it is not going to the people who actually produce it. Greenhouse's article has a telling quotation from Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who is worried about this year's elections: "Some people who aren't partisans say, 'Yes, the economy's pretty good, so why are people so agitated and anxious?' The answer is they don't feel it in their weekly paychecks." Luntz is a vicious, devious, evil man, but he is not stupid, and if people like him were stupid, we'd all be in much better shape. So how can he say something as patently ridiculous as "the economy's pretty good," while simultaneously acknowledging that most people "don't feel it in their weekly paychecks"?

Luntz does that because he has an interest in mystifying reality. He has an interest in maintaining the illusion that there is something out there called "the economy" that is sometimes "good" and sometimes "bad." He doesn't differentiate among the people who make up that economy, because if he did, he would have to concede that we have an economy that is "good" for some and "bad" for everyone else. In other words, any one person's share of the economy is the spoils of the class struggle. And rich people are winning the class struggle, mostly because the other army has abandoned the field.

Keep in mind what all of this implies about current policy debates and struggles: it means that employers, economists, and newspaper commentators are flat-out lying when they tell you that defined-benefit pensions and fully-employer-paid health insurance are "unrealistic" or "unsustainable." They are also lying when they claim that funding programs like this out of tax revenue is either unsustainable where they already exist (Social Security, which is the equivalent of a defined-benefit pension program for the entire country; or Medicare and Medicaid on the health care side) or impossible to even consider implementing anew (i.e., national health insurance of some kind). All of these programs and much more besides are affordable and necessary for our society. It's just that some people have a lot of loot and don't want to give it up -- or they want more.

Now let us turn to some of the consequences of this. We have already noted that standards for a majority of people in this country are slipping, and economic existence for most families is precarious and uncertain. But there is a large and growing minority of people who live in real poverty.

One year ago, 1,400 people in the USA died in front of the world's TV cameras because they were poor. Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster, but those people would not have died if their communities had proper transportation infrastructure and if the government had cared to organize a proper evacuation of the kind that would have happened in any other country as comparably wealthy as the United States. Instead, they died by the hundreds, and there are tens of thousands of internally displaced people still, a year later. Whether or not you remain displaced; whether or not you have even the remotest chance of eventually moving back to the Gulf Coast to a livable rebuilt home; and whether or not you have been able to access appropriate levels of government disaster relief, housing, and health care are all directly related to your pre-hurricane economic condition.

Since very nearly all of the dead and internally displaced were black -- and if you think that's an accident, you're a fool -- it is crystal-clear that if the government of any other country had been as criminally negligent as this, it would have been hauled before the United Nations for conduct towards an internal ethnic minority that bordered on genocide or "ethnic cleansing," and . . . well, that probably would have led to an ineffectual tongue-lashing, unless the government were an enemy of the United States government, in which case it would have been used as opportunistic propaganda for starting a war. But the point is that the United States did not get even that ineffectual tongue-lashing.

Poverty in the United States is an in-your-face fact for people who have to live with it -- or die from it. That is why it is so infuriating that there is a phalanx of bought-and-paid-for pseudo-economists whose job it is to minimize its importance or even deny its existence. It's difficult to suppress the urge to do simple physical violence to such people, but the accomplished Max Sawicky of the Economic Policy Institute has just mobilized facts and logic to skewer a pig from the American Enterprise Institute whose morally offensive pigshit was splattered on the pages of the Washington Post yesterday.

If we're to get any relief from this, it's going to require a lot of organization and agitation. But if you're looking for an interesting development on the electoral front, you might want to have a look at the website for the One America Committee, where John Edwards is positioning himself far enough to the left that he will not be able to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 unless the left is able to pull off some sort of organizational and mobilizational miracle within the next two years. What Edwards is doing is fairly remarkable for those of us with no memory of the pre-Reagan years. Edwards is actually talking as if poverty is an issue for this country, and attempting to make it part of the national political conversation again (if you'll excuse my "conversation" metaphor, since real politics is not so much a conversation as a knife fight). For as long as I can remember, poverty and class in the electoral arena have been the provinces of a saving remnant of labor-inflected liberals and real progressives, a majority of them black (Conyers, Waters, Lee, Dellums, etc.), with a small and shrinking contingent of feisty elected officials from working-class white ethnic districts (Kucinich, without much of an etc.). But Edwards is not part of this "stage army of the good." When he ran for president in 2003-04, most of us at first figured he was a Bill Clinton clone, ideologically close to the DLC and wielding all of that dubious "Southern charm" as his most important asset. Instead, he started flipping the script in talking about the "two Americas." And even then, he almost became Vice-President of the United States.

Now, programmatically Edwards is not saying much that is all that different from the standard things that make Democrats generally preferable to Republicans. He is for raising the minimum wage. He opposes the shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to everyone else that has occurred under Bush, and wants to halt or reverse it. He supports card-check neutrality for union recognition, something to which most Democrats at the Federal level are now formally committed. So in what appears, at first glance, to be substantive issues, Edwards does not really stand out.

Where he differs, though, is on emphasis. He puts these issues front-and-center in his campaign and talks about them as if he wants to actually do something about them. And the way he is talking is going to scare away corporate donors and make Edwards dependent on working-class organizations if he wants to be viable in 2008. I have seen him at two events since the 2004 defeat. At one union event, he talked enthusiastically about his role as a national spokesman for the Hotel Workers Rising campaign, called unions "the most effective anti-poverty program in American history," and launched a blistering, spot-on attack on the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. At the other event, which was part of the "Wake Up Wal-Mart" bus tour, he took an explicit and consistent anti-corporate line on Wal-Mart, flaying the company for the fact that most of its workers can't afford health care. He has also taken public positions on issues that are near and dear to the hearts of grassroots organizers: opposing predatory lending (an ACORN favorite campaign) and, as I mentioned before, supporting card-check neutrality for union organizing. This is an issue that is wonkish and hard to grasp for people who have not actually seen union organizing campaigns up close, but Edwards gives every indication that he takes it seriously, unlike other Democrats who have endorsed the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) on a pro forma basis but cannot reliably be expected to fight for it as a priority.

The EFCA is something that the capitalists in this country categorically Do Not Want. This alone means that Edwards will not attract campaign cash from business interests. But it goes beyond that. Even though Edwards's formal program is tepid at the moment, the lords of capital also know that putting poverty and class front-and-center in national politics will open the door for the more costly stuff: namely, new Federal commitments for fighting poverty. The Edwards campaign -- and make no mistake, Edwards is going to run -- is worth watching, because it holds some promise as a presidential campaign that could get the basic forces in motion.

It's no secret that Hillary Clinton is currently the Democratic frontrunner for 2008. This is bad, not only because Clinton's politics are awful (they are, but I'm not expecting anything special from the Democratic nominee, whoever that might be), but because it would automatically mean four more years of a Republican White House. Tactically speaking, we're eventually going to have to have an anti-Hillary if there is any chance of ejecting the Republicans from the presidency in 2008.

Prior to that, however, there ought to be a candidate of the left with a campaign based on the basic forces of a progressive coalition. A lot of people like Russ Feingold for those purposes. I can see why. His track record is measurably better than that of Edwards. But he has not shown the ability that Edwards has shown recently to put the issues of poverty and class front-and-center. Edwards has already positioned himself well with the Change to Win section of the labor movement, which has the most organizing-oriented unions who are committed to putting real resources into fights. What he needs to do next is start securing early commitments and endorsements from progressive black elected officials and leaders, and he needs to start winning over and hiring activists from communities of color -- particularly African-Americans -- and getting those folks into leadership positions in his campaign. If he's able to do that, then we're looking at the labor/black coalition that needs to be the lodestone of any progressive electoral strategy in this country at the present moment -- and that is something that has not been seen since the Rainbow Coalition.

All of these are big "ifs" indeed. But whether we can realize some of these possibilities also depends on the strategic choices made by people on the left -- what remains, anyway, of the dwindling ranks of the "stage army of the good."