Counterfactuals about the decline of the U.S. labor movement

Had the "rank and file rebellion" of the late 60s and 70s successfully taken control of a significant number of unions, would the later trajectory of U.S. politics and the labor movement have been different?

At least 4 possibilities, from leadership mattering a lot to not at all:

1. Substantial difference in political balance of 1980s, thus blunting the edge of the capital assault and retrenchment in various ways
2. Neoliberal gains could have been "slowed down," perhaps preserving some greater degree of organizational capacity for labor
3. The institutional weakness of the American labor movement was institutionally "baked in" to the form in which it coalesced by the mid-20th century. In particular, the existence of the South as a non-union region, locked in by Taft-Hartley, fatally weakened the (northern and western) labor movement.
4. The structural conditions of post-crisis world capitalism fundamentally restricted possibilities. Namely, competitive pressures in the context of world industrial over-capacity and the threat of capital mobility sharply limited the leeway for what labor could ever have won.

Some key questions

1. Was there a sufficient recovery of profits and accumulation, by say the late 80s, such that there was some "surplus" labor could have won?
2. If a more tenacious labor movement had raised the cost of the the straightforward labor-squeezing strategy adopted by many U.S. firms, what would have been their response? Would they have invested more in productivity improvements, or would they have just moved south or overseas more quickly?
3. Would the U.S. have needed German-like institutions to achieve a German-like "high road" trajectory of maintaining industrial competitiveness?

Marxist intellectual projects

1. Production of knowledge of direct relevance for political strategy
2. Illumination of issues in political economy more generally
3. Defense of the political-economic perspective in the academy
4. Vindication of even the idea of "materialism"

Yet, whatever one's specialized work, one has an obligation to be capable of analysis of the political and economic conjuncture and able to think critically about strategy.

An analysis of the political conjuncture

(Paraphrased from a talk by Vivek Chibber)

We are in the midst of what is probably the greatest economic crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, and yet the political project of neoliberalism remains ascendant. If anything, the fiscal dimensions of the crisis are being mobilized to push forward with the restructuring of state institutions. There have been pockets of mobilization and resistance, but insofar as they become organized political forces at all, they have been absorbed by the legacy institutions of 20th century social democracy--i.e. the parties and unions. Yet these institutions of the "center left" no less than the their counterparts on the right have long since become committed champions of neoliberalism and, in the current situation, austerity.

The move by the social democratic parties to commit themselves as above all good managers of the capitalist economy has only confirmed a sort of political and above all electoral "confusion"--as large segments of the population become disengaged from the political process or even express outright hostility by voting for far-right parties. Yet this abdication on the part of social democracy on its role as representative of popular interests has not yielded any increased relevance of the self-described radical left. The radical, revolutionary left has clung to its rejection of the "incremental" road to social transformation that is still associated with (although in practice abandoned by) social democracy. However, the "insurrectionary road" that they proclaim as an alternative has no possible of political traction, let alone success.

The irony is that both the mainstream social democratic institutions and the revolutionary factions arrayed on their left flank are children of the Second International. This shared legacy, in fact, plays a large role in the shared ineffectiveness. The organizational inheritance of the Second International is the disciplined, vertically consolidated party and union. However, once an organization is integrated with the bourgeois state, top-down control necessarily produces demobilization and both encourages and enables the marginalization of militants by the leadership.

While it is understandable that marginalized militants would respond by rejecting integration with the the institutions of the capitalist state, in favor of the hope of insurrection and revolution, barring an act of god no advanced capitalist state is going to fall to insurrection. The welfare state, whatever its attenuation in recent decades, has changes the political landscape fundamentally. As a result, even if any future left mobilization would need to start-out with "extra-parliamentary" and even illegal tactics, sooner rather than later it would need to orient itself to the state. The state is simply too closely bound up with the the well-being of every individual in society to be ignored.

The watershed of the decline of social democracy

A working hypothesis of NYU Political Economy:

Why did the "social democratic project" start to peter out in the 70s?

• Not so much working/class middle class divide.
• Instead: Internalization of "managerial" outlook on capitalist economy by party leadership, combined with failure to meet the economic crisis.

To be more specific, the economic and political "conjuncture" of the late-70s was that of center-left parties facing a decade of economic stagnation. In principle, business continued to support Keynesian macroeconomic policy, it just wasn't working any more. In this situation, one clear response would be to attempt to free the hand of capital, on the hope that greater economic flexibility (especially in employment) would spur additional investment, and thus growth and jobs. This was the neoliberal tack taken by almost all advanced industrial economies in the 80s and 90s, either over the objections of social democrats or, indeed often eventually if not immediately, with their support.

The alternative response, proposed by left-wing factions within many of the European social-democratic/labor parties, would be for the state to take a much more active role in investment decisions, in effect to attempt to plan their way out of economic stagnation, or at least to meet social goals such a improvement of living standards. However, this would almost certainly have brought about an intense backlash from business, up to and including a capital strike. Recognizing this, and realizing that their organizations (the parties themselves but also the unions) were no longer oriented towards the kind of mass mobilization that would be needed to overcome such a counter-attack (and probably themselves disinclined to that sort of strategy just by virtue of their successful integration through long-term electoral success into the management of the economy), the leadership of the parties rejected this alternative, in some cases throwing the left wing factions out of the parties.

This contrasts with a more common explanation of the loss of ground of the social democratic parties, which centers on the shift in the employment structure away from blue-collar industrial labor and towards services, etc. This portrays social democratic decline as an inevitable consequence of long-term social trends. Instead, the hypothesis above insists on the role of organizations as a mediating factor between social groups (classes) and politics; it is, indeed, the "balance of class forces" mediated through political organizations (including parties and unions) that determined the "the political space." The "inevitablist" view tends to make too much of the contrast between white-collar and blue-collar workers; they are from a class perspective both labor, even if it is historically the case that industrial blue-collar workers have been better organized by the labor movement and thus integrated into the social democratic parties. This, however, is a question of strategy, not fundamental class interests. Another way to put this is, what is the necessary cause of the loss of ground by the social democratic parties? Would it have happened because of the changing employment structure even if there hadn't been the economic crisis of the 1970s? Or, would the crisis have forced the same choice (with the same probable response, all else equal), even if the total share of blue collar industrial workers in the workforce had not been declining?

This is not to say that there weren't deep processes leading to both the crisis of the 70s and the response of the parties. In the first place, capitalism is crisis-prone; at some point there will always be a period of depressed profits, and thus anemic investment and employment growth. In the second, the loss of mobilizing capacity--and the marginalization of militants--in the labor movement was not an accident, but a direct result of the institutionalization (as part of, and in effect participants in, the capitalist economy) and bureaucratization of the unions and the social democratic parties, making any other decision by the party/union leadership in the 70s difficult to imagine.

If an alternative was possible--or will be possible in the future--it will be a function of having built (or, in the future, building) a different kind of organization that did not encourage, or even require, the gradual decay of moblizing potential and structural bias against militancy. In principle, this is a question of political strategy, but no one knows, as of now, what kind of strategy and what kind of organization could fulfill that role.

To put it a bit more strongly: The left lost out not because it was "outmaneuvered" by the right, or because its natural base was eroded by economic trends, but because the organizations it had built in its period of growth were incapable of responding radically to economic crisis.

All econobloggers should use French history analogies

Noahpinion: "Like the wars of Louis XIV, the push for a rehabilitation of Old Keynesianism resulted in a lot of sound and fury, but only modest territorial gains."

Despite this, his argument is that actually on a deeper level, in terms of the face of macroeconomics in the public sphere, what he calls "the Krugman insurgency" has had the consequence of once and for all puncturing the image of unity and certainty among economists. Economics no longer speaks at the rest of the public sphere with a single, authoritative voice  ("one thing is for sure - we're not going back to talking about how abortion affects crime rates") but is instead openly a politically volatile field of debate.

And yet, the political bloc that is so often described as being associated with the intellectual hegemony of neoclassical economics--namely, the roll-back of the welfare state or its replacement with market-facilitating policies--is as strong as it's even been, if not stronger. From this perspective, the great service that "the Krugman insurgency" might perform is to demonstrate beyond a doubt that the intellectual products of economists aren't a driving force politically. Indeed, it is possible from within the theoretical presuppositions of mainstream economics to make arguments for the welfare state, for market regulation, etc; if policymakers have ignored those potential arguments, it's a result of their politics and not some feature of the theories they use, or at least cite in their public justifications.

If the circle of students surrounding a couple of professors on my program were to produce a list of "working principles", this would be one of them: "In general, politically well-connected intellectuals are selected on the basis of the balance of social forces, and this produces the affinity between predominant intellectual discourses and the interests of politically dominant groups. Thus, at least as a rule of thumb, the structure of discourse of the most influential intellectuals does not so much cause the biases of political debate and action as vice versa."