A number of years ago I was going through a pile of my books and I discovered a copy of Edward Bellamy's Looking Forward.  Turns out I'd checked it out from the Colby library over a decade earlier and failed to return it, and somehow they never found out.  I figure that all the massive donations I gave the school during my Gravy Train Days have more than made up for the fines, and the reason fate allowed me to keep the book was so I could write a superfluous, Tom Friedman-esque opening graf for an inconsequential blog post (minus any cab drivers).

Anyway, what interested me in Bellamy's groundbreaking tome was his obsession with “the labor question” and its solution.  My cadre of 6 regular readers might recall one of my majors at Colby was Russian and Soviet Studies (I graduated the same year the Soviet Union gave up the ghost).  So labor and the proletariat thing was something I investigated as part of the curriculum, though I tended to focus more on the philosophical side of things (e.g., Marx's inversion of Hegelian Dialectic, etc) being a Philosophy major as well.

If I'd been a more motivated student, I would have been another person.  I also would have pursued a thesis–assuredly not unique, nor particularly accurate or insightful–about unions that I toyed with before wandering down the Wittgensteinian path of the philosophy of language (that's how I chose to mate my two fields of study).

I saw some hints of that thesis in an article I read today at Salon (yes, I still read Salon):

Lind correctly notes that American labor unions have historically resisted universal social programs in favor of their employer-based bargains. But this has much to do with the very same reasons that American labor unions have in the past been less successful in reducing economic inequality. American labor unions are characteristically fragmented and historically wedded to a narrow, craft-union philosophy. But labor unions are undergoing tremendous change, as they must if they are to survive. Accordingly, it is not clear why Lind holds up the Old Labor of the past as any indication of how a revitalized labor will act in the future. The labor movement must do more to change itself, but given the transformations thus far, there is little reason to think the New will be anything like the Old.

I recommend reading the original Michael Lind piece from earlier in the week–I found much to agree and disagree with, and appreciate the follow up article today.

Now lemme walk this back a few steps.  I studied the Soviet Union and Marxism because I wanted to understand our Cold War adversaries (I was originally attracted to the Russian language because of family history).  I thought Marx was pretty out to lunch, but had some decent observations and kinda just missed the point.

I wrote a not-entirely-bad paper (hey, it got a B+) about historical frames of reference that used sci-fi as an analogy, particularly relying on Forbidden Planet and Star Trek amongst other things to show how our imagination of what's possible can evolve: the latter illustrating the limits of 1950s thought with flying saucer ships and intoning that we don't get to the moon until the late 21st century (not to mention gender roles); the former, possibly ironically, still spoke of Leningrad just a few years before the USSR collapsed.  

Yeah, it was a strange piece of work, but the pop culture thing helped me understand how trapped we are by our contemporary context, and that Marx was writing in a particular epoch.  Bottom line was that Uncle Karl couldn't foresee the rise of the labor movement as we know it today, what an idiot, etc.

The way I looked at it, unions have not only served as agents of social and economic change, improving working conditions and whatnot, but really as a bulwark against revolution and socialism itself.  Sure they might have been revolutionary to some extent, and have some elements that smack of socialism, but they allowed us to achieve greater equality and better lives for most workers without wholesale rebellion.  Labor was able to gain more of a stake in the future, corporate governance and whatnot, change the dynamic of its relationship with capital, obviating the need for regime change and the proletariat taking over the means of production.

But it seems that all revolutions become institutionalized, ossified, and unable to continue progressing.  Any criticisms I've ever had about labor has been focused on union leadership which, while maybe a reflection of membership, is still as divorced sometimes from those it represents as our government is from the electorate.  One place where they've certainly appeared to be rather parochial and counterproductive is in the healthcare debate.

I am not going to fully document this and admit my recollection might be completely off-base here, so welcome any correction.  But the lasting impression I have going back to the beginning of the HCR debate is this: the AFL-CIO in particular came out in staunch support of single-payer, said they'd fight hard for a public option and would refuse to help Dems who didn't work for that, then capitulated on the diluted, wholly imperfect ACA once they got a concession on th Cadillac Healthplan Tax.  Even if that capsule history is too simplistic and not completely correct, the fact remains that a force that should've been able to mobilize for real reform ended up backing away from the fight.

That's not just a critique of any specific unions or labor in general.  It goes for all of us.  But I had higher expectations that even with dwindling numbers there was an opportunity for the unions to get more people in the streets and the halls of Congress.

I think the problem of 2009 and 2010 is perfectly illustrated by the great action we're now seeing in WI and other states.  The corporatists have done a great job on the divide and conquer routine.  I've seen so many comments online (which may or may not be representative of anything, but I'm a blogger, so whatever) that reflect this: if unions are so great, why aren't more people in them; why do the unions only protest when stuff impacts them; why didn't the public sector unions fight when we private sector folks were getting laid off; etc?

So we're siloed.  In a union or not?  Private sector or public?  Work at a company with good benefits or shitty/no benefits?  And we fight for our small piece of the pie instead of fighting to make sure everybody has a decent piece.

We need to defragment ourselves and defragment our social benefits.  And that's where unions come in, and eventually get rid of themselves.  Unions need to fight as they have been to hold the line against corporatist dilution of our rights and power.  And non-union people need to join in that struggle, as we've seen in Madison and elsewhere.

Then we finish the job and move away from reliance on employer benevolence.  We all fight united for single-payer so we might benefit from the political entity we incorporated to promote the general welfare, and unions will be no longer necessary–they kept us from succumbing to socialist revolution, and now they can provide a bridge to the next progressive stage before riding off into the sunset.

As Uncle Abe said in his State of the Union message to Congress in 1861

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. 

We need to stop operating with old assumptions about the relationship between capital and labor.  Capital may have lots of dollars and lackeys in government at the moment, but we have the numbers and are starting to show our collective will all around the country.  We have it in us to defend what so many people fought and died for, and to make additional gains if we keep the momentum.

I'm not sure if Bellamy would've been surprised that by 2000 (or 2011) we still weren't (or aren't) a workers' utopia.  He can be forgiven for not exactly predicting the future of labor (yet he was uncannily prescient about a lot of interesting technological and societal developments).  Even though most of the folks in WI, IN, OH and all over the US haven't read his book, they are helping realize an important component of Bellamy's vision: The enfranchisement of humanity…may be regarded as a species of second birth of the race.

Let's stay at it so we can look forward to a more humane future for ourselves and our posterity.

ntodd

PS–I know this is meandering and longwinded, and quite possibly not overly coherent.  Been a rough couple weeks with SamLTPax and I'm not sure I've got all my wits about me, but I felt compelled to blog this and it just kinda took on a life of its own.  So there you have it.