Re: [Marxism] The absence of real forces [was: The low point]

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark writes: "I'm sorry these aren't easy thing to figure out or explain....

"But if you really want to figure out and explain them, it ain't going to be
easy....."

Sorry to have misunderstood the spirit of Mark's comments, which were by way
of stressing a point I only barely touched on, which is the damned
complexity of the whole thing of trying to figure out --not what has
happened to the working class as a whole-- but to individual working people,
but looking at them collectively in large numbers, in order to try to see
from THAT why political consciousness and motion is such as it is.

The difference between what has happened to the class "as a whole" versus
"large numbers" of members of the class as individuals is perhaps best
explained by an example.

Debating these same sorts of issues in Solidarity with Charlie P of New York
and Chris K. of Detroit, both of whom are fairly well known as writers,
Charlie in academia and Chris in a labor paper, which is why I mention their
names here, the comrades challenged what I was saying by citing the example
of meatpacking, where 20 or 30 years ago workers earned $20 an hour plus
decent benefits, to the situation today where they get little more than $10.
(and, of course, dollar for dollar today's money buys a lot less than the
money of 20 years ago, so the decline in REAL wages is even MORE drastic).

My response was, yes, but these are not the same workers. A lot of workers
in those places got screwed, especially Blacks, but many came back into
"middle class" status with jobs in other fields. Meanwhile the workers there
now, or their parents, 20 years ago were small farmers or merchants in
Mexico, and odd as it may seem, even at $20-$25K/year, they're making more
here than they ever did in Mexico and have more "stuff," although they
probably wouldn't be here if they had been able to keep on surviving as they
had been pre-financial crisis and pre-NAFTA in Mexico. 

So in trying to judge what has been the actual evolution of the
socio-economic well-being of large numbers of working class families, the
mainstream, the bulk, I've looked at tons of statistics and tried to figure
out what they mean, not in terms of the trajectory of the class as a whole,
but of workers and their families over time. 

And I've supplemented this by looking at "UN-type" development stats for the
U.S. -- how large are houses? How many bathrooms? How many have potable
water? Telephone? How many radios and TVs? Computers? Cars? 

The point Mark makes about averages is true, that high numbers for a few
disguise the real situation for the many. So I've given extra weight to how
many households don't have telephone service AT ALL. No central air
conditioning and heating? No cable TV? All sorts of indicators which have
been plummeting. 

And the picture that emerges is that by and large, American households today
(average size: 2-1/2 persons) have bigger houses and more of everything else
than the 3-person average household of 30-some years ago. But even the
poorest, least equipped households tend to have more over time. There are
fewer and fewer without ANY TV, without a phone, without indoor plumbing and
so on. The level of what is considered rock-bottom, as low as you can go,
the absolute minimum has been climbing.

And once the cheering for that stops, we should remember that homelessness
was not the way complete pauperization presented in the 1960's, not nearly
on so vast a scale. So, yes, I recognize that what has happened is in part
that some now have at least a phone, electricity and indoor plumbing, which
they did not have before. But others no longer have even a roof over their
heads, when they did before. 

The radicals tend to focus on wages and so did I -- especially of full-time
year-round workers. Not because I don't recognize that there are large
numbers, and overall increasing numbers of part-timers and so on, but
because the year-round full-timers are the big majority, and anecdotal
evidence suggests to me that those forced into part-timership most often do
return to what they view as more stable and satisfactory full time jobs.

This is where the distinction between what is happening to the class as a
whole and how most workers and their families are experiencing it over time
becomes real important. If workers or a given sector go from being 99%
full-time employed to being 95% or even 90% full-time employed, there is no
question but that the working class as a class just took a hit.

But if the way that actually happens to individual workers in their lives is
that there was a really bad year or two and then they got an ok job, or even
a better job, and a lot of the part time-ism is concentrated in the youth in
the ghettos, then I don't think it is going to be perceived as an attack on
them by most workers. 

Especially --and this is key-- because wages in the U.S. are extremely
age-stratified. A 30-year-old male worker might have lost the factory job he
held since his early 20's, and for a year or two he and the family were in
dire straits, with him holding a part-time job and doing child care and his
spouse going back to work full time before she wanted to, because the baby
was only one or two years old, but then if at age 32 he gets a job as a
low-level IT tech at come company, maybe having a course or two or maybe
just lying about his qualifications, and he gets on the career ladder at the
new place, and he's got health insurance and other benefits, then looking
back at the whole thing in his mid-to-late 30s, his reaction and that of
those around him isn't going to be "crisis, unmitigated catastrophe" but
that despite a rough patch this family is better off now than it was even
before he lost that job he had in his 20s. 

The most striking thing to me was how sharply age-differentiated median
wages are. The other striking thing was that overall, median wages (the
point where half earn less, half more) haven't changed for white males for
decades. They have gone up significantly for women, especially whites, but
also Blacks and Latinas (the latter least of all).

(For Latino males, the statistics are crazy, they make no sense until you
factor in the undocumented status. Then rises and falls in median wage
levels kind of make sense, since various legalizations at the end of the
80's and into the 90's pulled into the "legal" workforce a lot of the people
on the very, very bottom, making the "median" wage go down, not because
wages were going down in this sector, but because more of the worst-paid
were now willing to participate in the household surveys on which these
figures are based, they were included now but not before when they were
undocumented. This affects the stats for Latino males more than females
because the undocumented population is 3:2 male/female (and perhaps more --
the 3:2 figure comes from surveys in major metro areas at Mexican consulates
of people seeking the "matricula consular," an ID document often accepted by
banks and which used to help getting drivers licenses. This means this was
the urban population looking to stay here for a longer time, not the
seasonal agricultural migrant laborers nor those young people
(overwhelmingly men) who viewed themselves as being here for a couple of
years to help their families over a rough spot or to accumulate "family
capital" for a house or small business).

Who that median worker is HAS changed tremendously, and I don't mean that
ONE worker but the ones in the middle of the earnings ladder, say the median
plus/minus 10 percent on either side. Back in the day he was probably a
Teamster or UAW member, now that worker might well be a woman and is almost
certainly in an office/service-type setting. 

But the overall conclusion is this. Most white and Black, male and female
wage and salary workers who were in the labor force five, ten, twenty, or
however many years ago are making more today than they did then. The age
differential is in large part responsible but also, for some "essentials"
you get much more bang for the buck today than inflation figures would
suggest. Thus the part of family budgets going to food and clothing have
declined, with increases in entertainment. Housing costs are terra
incognita, the figures aren't much use because rental costs were used as a
proxy for all housing for a long time by the government statisticians. But
what is clear is housing units across the board are larger and better
equipped.

It is probably true that things have grown worse at the bottom of the
ladder. But a lot of the people at the bottom of the ladder --or their
parents-- weren't on THIS ladder AT ALL a couple of decades ago. They were
somewhere in the bottom half or third of the ladder in Mexico, or Guatemala
or Nicaragua -- with no way to climb up in those countries. 

Then there is the deucedly complicated issue of impact on consciousness. 

One thing everyone says responding to me when I get into these kinds of
discussions is, OK, as individual, many/most workers or families or
households they may not have taken it on the chin, but the degree of FUD
--fear, uncertainty and dread-- today is orders of magnitude what it was
decades ago. It is NOW part of the experience and expectation of most
American workers that they or someone in their immediate family circle to
have unexpectedly lost jobs, to have been stripped of pension benefits, or
to have been cast into financial crisis by illness. 

Just one statistic in this regard: ONE THIRD of all U.S. workers receive
disability payments from social security at some point in their working
lives. 

Moreover, the clear pattern seems to be than rather than this making working
people more prudent, keeping an emergency fund of a few months basic
expenses (as all financial planners and newspaper columnists and web sites
recommend), not taking on debt except "strategically," i.e. to purchase a
home or perhaps a car, and so on, people immerse themselves in all sorts of
debt, replace furniture and appliances before the end of their useful lives,
refurbish their homes and kitchens and bathrooms when these were just as
functional before as they are after, and generally put themselves on the
edge of financial catastrophe if anything should go wrong.

WHY do they do that? Because "Madison Avenue" as it used to be called is
constantly fucking with their minds. For example:

You call yourself a "real American"? America means freedom to roam the wild
west, so you need to get this two or three ton SUV and gets ten miles to the
gallon so you can drive over mountains and prairies. 

You call yourself a geek and don't even have this way cool new computer case
with an alien face and led-lit internal wiring? 

You're a sk8er boy and you wear generic sneakers instead of shoes from Vans
and a T-shirt from Fallen? 

You call yourself a good parent and aren't buying your bright, beautiful
daughter this $1000 SAT preparation course? Why it's not an expense, it's an
investment in her future!

And try to explain to a "tween" or a junior in high school that it's all
marketing bullshit when they come and ask, Daddy, can you get me ... 

That's why although IN GENERAL I am against the death penalty, in the case
of advertising industry execs I'm willing to make reasonable --and
generous-- exceptions. 

OK, I hyperbolate. But not much.

So what is the real impact on consciousness and political motion of being
overwhelmed with debt and living in constant fear of the pink slip? I think
under current American conditions it is extremely conservatizing -- but
could well become radicalizing under other conditions, and perhaps,
conditions that aren't HUGELY different.

Mark Lause is right, this is all tremendously complicated, but I cheerfully
plead GUILTY to having tried to even over-simplify it because at some point,
the American Left has to stop bullshitting itself.

We are STILL looking to the 30's. 

And, yes, if today's stock market decline is part of a collapsing bubble
that is going to hit (at roughly the same time) the big majority of working
people in the US with a depression, I am perfectly comfortable with --nay, I
look forward EAGERLY to-- dealing with a 1930's-type social movement of the
workers AS WORKERS and predict [remember, you saw it here first] that it
will be JUST LIKE the 30's, except corrected and amplified by the 60's.

But if today's 200+ point Dow decline, and the instability of the past week
or three, is just, in the final analysis, more "noise" in the Shakespearean
sense, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"
as was the stock market crash in 1987 and the Mexican financial melt-down
and so on, a rough spot but eventually, one or two or three years down the
road, it turned out not to have meant much for the real lives of real people
in Dayton, Ohio ... If THAT is the case, then I submit we Marxists are
completely unprepared to deal with the political reality that will confront
us.

I say that because this has been the case FOR DECADES, a conclusion that I
think an HONEST evaluation of the U.S. Marxist/socialist/revolutionary
workers movement TODAY makes unavoidable.

We have GOT to confront --theoretically, strategically and politically--
what I draw as the central conclusion of my few decades as a Marxist:
despite the tremendous power of the method of analysis, we have not brought
it to bear against this system as it exists today as a whole. Politics does
not work the way we imagine it does. The intersection of gender and nation
with class does not reduce, in the last analysis, to class, not in any
politically useful way. We are fighting the political/ideological battles of
the beginning of the century -- the last century -- instead of the one we're
actually living in. 

It does not matter how simple or complicated it is to figure out, what
should be noted is simply that we do, in fact, have to figure it out if we
want to get anywhere. 

Joaquin


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