The Gates affair: looking on the bright side

A multiracial group of police officers on Friday stood with the white officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard scholar and asked President Barack Obama and Gov. Deval Patrick to apologize for comments the union leaders called insulting. Associated Press

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It has always been a truism of the classic left that the "class struggle" in America is eternally short-circuited by racism: that the hostility of working class whites toward blacks, and working class blacks justifiable mistrust of their white "comrades", always meant that the bourgeoisie could divide and rule them in comfort. In short, racial hostility would always trump class loyalty in America.

The clearest example of this was Nixon's "Southern Strategy", whereby tricky Dick pried loose the heretofore populist, "a chicken in every pot", southern whites from their age old, "solid south" loyalty to the Democrats and enfolded them into the Party of Abraham Lincoln, something which violated not only their most precious traditions, but also their every economic interest.

Thus, in America, so the saying goes, politics are racial, not class, based.

Perhaps this is changing.

Commentators from all over the world have affirmed that the election of America's first African-American president heralded a post-racial America.

In a rather perverse way, perhaps the professor Gates arrest hoo hah is this new America's first icon.

Hey, don't laugh! Look at it this way: as the quote above from AP shows, a multiracial group of working class union members stood united with their white "comrade" and faced down two members of the upper middle class, a Harvard professor and a former professor of the University of Chicago, (the second professor just happens to also be the President of the United States of America).

This multiracial workers union solidarity has stopped these powerful and prestigious men dead in their tracks and has the president -- supposedly the most powerful individual in the world -- back peddling rather smartly.

Is this a sign of the changing times?

As more men and women of color take their places in positions of power, naturally defending their privileges and the system that provides them with those privileges; as their color becomes increasingly incidental to their power and the status that goes with that power; as the oppression they, by the very nature of their position, exert on those beneath them is less and less identified with a particular skin color, will this -- in a deteriorating and stagnant economy -- bring the oppressed of all colors together to fight oppression... no matter the color of the oppressor?

If this is where post-racial America is taking us, then the "establishment" is soon going to be heartily sorry that they ever took this road and it will be interesting to see what tactics they may use to get the races conveniently back at each others throats. DS

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night... blogging

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism". British Ministry of Defence Report on the future

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After reading the quote from the British MOD report, read Harold Meyerson's well documented article from the Washington Post and then ask yourself how long it will be before the service workers, whose work makes life possible organize and strike and how long before the middle classes, whose only capital is their knowledge of information systems rebel and join them too.

Knowledge workers are today's true, world-proletariat, without whose labor nothing functions. The post-industrial knowledge worker is truly within the contemporary system in the same way that the industrial worker was within his or her system. It could be called the "vanguard" or "aristocracy"of the service sector whose problems Meyerson outlines. When the knowledge workers and the service workers join forces the world will change like a nuclear chain reaction. Therefore we can expect that the system as it is will make a herculean effort to keep this from happening. Traditionally the tools for preventing unions of such revolutionary potential from forming have been xenophobia, nationalism, religious manias and war. All of them are on today's menu.

Only organization at the grass roots level: unions, workers, students, Internet, micro-financing and NGOs and constant dialog and sharing of information can keep those sinister forces from derailing or co-opting this movement. DS

Harold Meyerson: A Dream Short-Circuited - Washington Post
Abstract: An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data from 2005 that became available showed that the bottom 90 percent of Americans made less money that year than they had in 2004. According to a study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, total reported income in the United States increased by 9 percent in 2005 over its level in 2004. All of that increase, however, came from the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent experienced an increase of 14 percent. Among the remaining 90 percent, income actually decreased by 0.6 percent. And 2005, let us remember, wasn't a year of economic downturn. The American economy was humming along. It was only the American people who weren't doing very well. What all this amounts to is a triumph of corporate and financial power, and of the conservative economics that shores it up. Once upon a time, American prosperity actually benefited Americans. From 1947 through 1973, productivity in the U.S. rose by 104 percent, and median family income rose by an identical 104 percent. Those were also the only years of real union power in the United States, years in which one-quarter of the workforce, and in some years one-third, was unionized. Apparently, this level of worker power and mass prosperity proved intolerable to our financial elite and their political flunkies. Since the '70s, American business has generally done its damnedest to keep its workers down. Employers routinely opted to pay the negligible penalties for violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permit its employees to join unions. In 1969, according the National Labor Relations Board, the number of employees who'd suffered illegal retaliation for exercising their right to join or maintain a union was just over 6,000; by 2005, that number had risen to 31,358. According to a study out this January from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, fully one in five activists on unionization campaigns are illegally fired. And as worker power declines, so do living standards. Secure retirement pensions are history; employer-provided health benefits are going fast. To all of this, conservatives offer no remedy whatever save to make things worse. Employer-provided pensions collapsing? Let's gut Social Security, too. Health insurance tottering? By all means, let's preserve our private, for-profit system, which currently fails to cover 47 million of our fellow Americans. All income increases going only to the rich? Let's switch to a flat tax (Rudy Giuliani's most recent brainstorm), which further shifts the tax burden from the upwardly mobile rich to the downwardly-mobile everyone else. READ IT ALL

Wal-Mart strikes again

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Wal-Mart is America's largest retailer and that is because of its amazing efficiency. It is retailing in its purest expression. Its only values are cost and consumer satisfaction. The fact that its employees instead of being called employees are called "associates," is in itself a profound ideological statement. Wal-Mart is at the center of today's deepest question of political philosophy: are we all merely just "consumers" or are we citizens with any responsibilities for each other's welfare as fellow citizens? A person in disagreement with the direction the world is moving, a person who wanted to engage in political activism, could find nothing more rewarding in its long range effects, nowhere where he or she could make more of a "difference", than to join the struggle to unionize Wal-Mart. DS
Wal-Mart Seeks New Flexibility In Worker Shifts - Wall Street Journal - Page A1
Abstract: The nation's biggest private employer is about to revamp the way it schedules its work force, in a move that could shake up many employees' lives. Early this year, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., using a new computerized scheduling system, will start moving many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge retailer but could be a major headache for employees. The change is made possible by a software system that can crunch an array of data, part of a shift toward computerized management tools that can help pare costs and boost companies' bottom lines. But it also could demand greater flexibility and availability from workers in place of reliable work shifts -- and predictable paychecks.(...) while the new systems are expected to benefit both retailers and customers, some experts say they can saddle workers with unpredictable schedules. In some cases, they may be asked to be "on call" to meet customer surges, or sent home because of a lull, resulting in less pay. The new systems also alert managers when a worker is approaching full-time status or overtime, which would require higher wages and benefits, so they can scale back that person's schedule. That means workers may not know when or if they will need a babysitter or whether they will work enough hours to pay that month's bills. Rather than work three eight-hour days, someone might now be plugged into six four-hour days, mornings one week and evenings the next. Some analysts say the new systems will result in more irregular part-time work. "The whole point is workers were a fixed cost, now they're a variable cost. Is it good for workers? Probably not," says Kenneth Dalto, a management consultant in Farmington Hills, Mich.(...) Paul Blank, campaign director for WakeUpWalMart.com1, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, says the new scheduling system has "devastating implications" for employees. "What the computer is trying to optimize is the most number of part-time and least number of full-time workers at the lowest labor costs, with no regard for the effect that it has on workers' lives," he says.(...) all full-time cashiers and customer-service workers are encouraged to consider including "if at all possible" a weekend shift every week. "Limiting your personal availability may restrict the number of hours you are scheduled,"(...) Tami Orth, a full-time cashier in Ludington, Mich., says she used to work a regular schedule of nearly 35 hours a week, with Mondays and Wednesdays off. In May, managers began to assign her as few as 12 hours a week, and her shifts began to fluctuate. "You can't budget anything," says Ms. Orth, who earns $9.32 an hour.(...) Ms. Clark denied managers use the system to pressure people to change their availability or force out seasoned workers. She also said the new system makes schedules more consistent. READ IT ALL (subscription)