| |
With budget cuts in the offing in Britain and the Tea Party Neo-NoNothings* on the rise in the United States, we might reflect on how we came to this sorry state of affairs in both the Mother Country and the Colonies.
In 1945, immediately after the Second World War, the Labour Party won a landslide election victory and enacted measures that radically transformed the role of government in society. Britain was transformed into a social democracy. Until Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the Tory Party reluctantly accommodated itself to this arrangement, though always eager to limit, contain and roll-back the so-called welfare state when it could.
The term "welfare state" was and is an ideological misnomer, implicitly suggesting that there exists some defensible role for government other than fostering the welfare of men, women and children. That radical 1945 Labour government created, however incompletely, the Responsible State, a governmental system that sought to achieve some of the goals that define a decent society: elimination of poverty and homelessness, a healthy citizenry, work for all, and dignified retirement for the elderly.
Over sixty years later, these obvious essentials of a decent society are viewed suspiciously as indulgences of "big government". In a country incomparably richer than the war-ravaged Britain of 1945 these responsibilities of a decent society are considered "unaffordable". Instead of being the only defensible way to organize society, a government that ensures none are hungry, homeless and infirm goes undefended in the media. From a social consensus that no one should suffer the indignity of poverty, a new consensus is proposed in Britain, based on the principle of indifference to the plight of one's neighbor.
If the trend is bad in Britain, we are already there in the United States. After financial collapse, severe economic contraction, and the election of a Deomcratic president, the political landscape is polluted by the most right wing polemics the US has endured since the end of the Second World War, beyond even what the John Birch Society could muster. If the stoning of women for alleged adultery is barbarous, a wealthy society without universal health care, in which the infirm die of medical neglect, is no less so. If the murder of people escaping tyranny by East German border guards was a crime, it pales in comparison to the official and vigilante killings along the US-Mexican border.
This is a far cry from Franklin Roosevelt's fourth State of the Union address in 1945 when he called for a "Second Bill of Rights", made up of "economic truths [that] have become accepted as self-evident…regardless of station, race, or creed", including full employment, a living wage, an end to "domination by monopolies", decent housing, universal health care, free education, and security in old age. Sounds good to me.
From such hopes and visions of this good society, we find ourselves with governments content to preside over lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbs) for a growing share of the population in both countries, and solitary, brutish and self-focused for those who are not poor.
What happened to destroy not only the political discussion of the good society, but the belief in its possibility by the vast majority in Britain and the United States ("can't afford it")?
The answer is, trade unions. They sustained hope for and achievement of the good society. Capital launched a class war in the 1970s and 1980s and workers lost. In Britain trade union strength was brutally broken by Thatcher in the 1980s, and all but destroyed in the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s. The policies and programs that made Britain and the United States decent places to live resulted directly from the political demands of the trade union movement. The current political problem is not that Barack Obama and the potential leaders of the Labour Party are insufficiently progressive. The problem is the weakness of the working class to make them progressive.
If this is not obvious to the aspiring middle classes who read the New York Times and the Guardian, big capital has no doubt about it as it fights its Thirty Years War against the working class in both countries. No Marxist has epitomized the result of labor's defeat in this war in Britain and the United States better than Franklin Roosevelt's speech to the Democratic Convention in 1936:
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by a new industrial dictatorship.
Stopping the budget cuts in Britain, passing an effective recovery program in the United States, and realizing other progressive hopes is the goal. The means is the trade union movement, to break the power of this "new dictatorship" of capital. Those engaged in the workplace struggle to organize workers are the frontline warriors of the progressive movement. The most important task for the rest of us is to support these class warriors, the flight attendants' battle with British Airways, immigrant meat packagers in East Anglia, the Teamster strike against Holcim cement in Massachusetts, and wherever else "working folk defend their rights" ("Ballad of Joe Hill", last stanza).
To quote from the famous song by Florence Reese, "which side are you on?",
I'll stick with the union
Till every battle's won.
(1931, Harlan County, West Virginia, coal miners strike)
Which Woody Guthrie repeated in "Union Maid" (1940),
I'm sticking to the union till the day I die.
*The No Nothing Party was an anti-immigrant, semi-secret political movement restricted ot white Protestant men in the United States in the 1840s. The name comes from instructions to members to deny knowledge of the party.
|
