[PEN-L:1932] Turbo-charged capitalism

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis:

"The acute sense of insecurity uncovererd by the Union of Aerospace
Workers' survey is therefore abundantly justified. The jobs of Boeing
employees are indeed especially precarious, and if the employees are
tossed out they are likely to find themselves unwanted by an
oversupplied labor market that offers mainly low-paid service jobs. For
the workforce of a premier corporation that pays everyone rather well
and also provides good fringe benefits, that is a catastrophic downfall
entailing the possible loss of high-mortgage homes, the withdrawal of
children from college education, and stress-induced sickness, without
Boeing's health-insurance benefits to pay for it (health-cost trauma
should become a recognized medical syndrome -- it is certainly more
genuine than its Gulf War counterpart). Almost all Boeing employees
emphatically view themselves as belonging to the middle class, but
that is a conceit as precarious as their jobs.

....Mr. [Robert] Reich and countless others by now have noticed that
today's 'turbo-charged' capitalism condemns the less skilled to a
lifetime of declining earnings, and that it has eliminated many of the
low-paid but respectable jobs that once allowed a striving section of
the underclass to rise into the working class. What Reich and others
have failed to grasp is that the upheavals and disruptions of 'turbo-
charged' capitalism (= accelerated structural change) condemns most
working Americans of all skill levels to lives of chronic economic
insecurity. As entire industries rise and fall much faster than before, as
firms expand, shrink, merge, separate, 'downsize' and restructure at an
unprecedented pace, their employees at all but the highest levels must
go to work one day without knowing whether they will still have their
job the next.

That is true of virtually the entire employed middle class, professionals
included. Lacking the formal safeguards of European employee-
protection laws or prolonged post-employment benefits, lacking the
functioning families on which most of the rest of humanity still relies
to survive hard times, lacking the substantial liquid savings of their
middle-class counterparts in all other developed countries, most
working Americans must rely wholly on their jobs for economic
security -- and must therefore live in conditions of chronic acute
insecurity."

(From Edward Luttwak's "Turbo-Charged Capitalism and its
Consequences" in the London Review of Books, November 2, 1995.
Luttwak is a right-wing intellectual who in the past has written
frequently about what he considers the "evils" of Communism. His
strong critique of the effects of capitalism today is notable for that
reason. While he focuses on the Boeing strike, it seems to have
anticipated recent events in France.)