Are we puppets on a string? It is striking that the would-be Presidents on the Right (whether “establishment moderate” or conservative) are all promising more “jobs” to the electorate, while entirely ignoring the labor question (assertions of exploitation, the nature of toil, labor competition between ethnicities, “races” and genders) that has roiled the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. I took it up here, because I was struck by the constant repetition of the value of “hard work.” (See https://clarespark.com/2014/02/12/is-most-work-alienating-and-boring/.)
Back in the day when I read labor history, the emphasis was on bloody strikes, Taylorism, the Haymarket Massacre, competing labor organizations, the “de-skilling” of workers, the anarchist communes of the Spanish Republic, and the “false consciousness” that prevented “the working class” from adhering to the precepts of dialectical materialism by making the revolution that would free the world from poverty, war, and the humdrum lives led by the toiling masses.
Such talk has faded from view partly because such countries as Soviet Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela turned out to be something other than workers’ paradises. Faced with obvious failures, even “progressives” turned to “race” and “gender” as the divisions that mattered, or, even more disturbingly, are now rehabilitating “the Middle Ages” with their Good Kings, mysticism, aristocratic hierarchies and allegedly happy peasants and artisans, kept in line through benign religions. Or, the Left took up critical theory that blamed workers for consumerism (and sports) made popular by the new mass media that misled them into 20th century dictatorships.
Ukraine collective propaganda poster
Right-wingers have nothing to offer the working class other than “meritocracy” (i.e., upward mobility out of the class into the petit-bourgeoisie, where immigrant families are free to “work hard” and exploit their families). As for the populists, they are haters, whether of finance capital, [red] atheists (https://clarespark.com/2015/04/24/multiculturalism-vs-yid-red-spies-which-agitates-the-right/), or the Northeastern liberal establishment that goes for education reform, free trade, and regulated “socially responsible capitalism.”
Perhaps meritocracy is the best we can do. But the Republican Party should stop pretending that the labor question is a dead letter. As for the opposite party that ostensibly celebrates “the Common Man” while favoring teachers unions over kids, they deserve all the terrible things that could happen to this country under another Democrat administration.
The Labor Question (vintage postcard)
The Clare Spark Blog 