The Bushites
continue to shape a new American empire by inciting and feeding on the national
state of siege sentiments born of September 11th. United States unilateralism and war mongering abroad privileges American
corporate interests over all others.
It prepares the ground for real conflict with the business and financial
entities of our one-time allies. The new
foreign policy makes the world safe for the export of genetically modified
food, for U.S.
oil interests, and for the enrichment of domestic weapons manufacturers. Foreign nations, even wartime allies, need
not apply.
Sparing no effort
in the aid of U.S.
capital, the Bush administration has, on the domestic legislative front,
managed to heap tax breaks on the super rich.
This, while denying the child tax credit to the poor, defunding even his
own No Child Left Behind initiative, and bleeding the states of the finances
that enable them to provide even the minimal vital services they do.
As the 2004
election season approaches, labor’s political presence and influence have
reached a new low. The frightening
adventurism of the administration’s foreign policy and the impending collapse
of our domestic economy nonetheless present the labor movement with a grim
opportunity and a grave responsibility.
As our government continues its saber rattling, further enflaming
anti-American sentiments and attacks, and as the
economic suffering of millions of Americans deepens, labor and its progressive
allies could find the wherewithal to begin to dismantle an empire built on very
shaky ground.
In this issue of
New Labor Forum, we endeavor to analyze the character and potential debilities
of the new empire. In an article on the
unruly economics of empire, Walden Bello argues that the Bush administration
has created a Pax Americana, which controls subordinate nations through the
threat of military force in the service of domestic, rather than global,
corporate interests. This Pax Americana,
Bello suggests, contains particular
inherent weaknesses that expose it to attack from without by subordinated
populations, and may give rise to increased domestic and international
opposition.
The other, yet
only partially exposed, flank of the Bush administration is our dangerously
weak economy, with rising unemployment, decreasing consumption and deep
stagnation. Two articles in this issue take the measure of the domestic
suffering embodied in the Bush administration’s economic policies. In the first, James Parrott examines the
economic crises faced by state governments throughout the country as they
confront the worst economic downturn in decades, further exacerbated by
decreased federal aid to the states. In
the second article, David Hilfiker reviews the relentless, and little discussed, legislative initiatives of the current
administration that amount to full-blown class warfare. Making the public aware of these initiatives
will prove crucial to progressive efforts to turn the political tide.
If labor is to
play any role in these endeavors it will need to represent much more than the
current 13.2 percent of U.S.
workers. It will need to organize
millions, rather than thousands, of workers each year of the foreseeable
future. Better organizing strategies, no
matter how sophisticated or well-endowed, argues Dan Clawson, will not enable
labor to do that. Only the building of a
movement suffused with a broad vision and the energy of huge numbers of people
willing to invent new forms of protest, suggests Clawson,
will enable labor to reinvent its lost power.
This article is the second in an on-going series of essays designed to
raise the most fundamental theoretical, analytical, and organizational
questions, to take nothing for granted in addressing the dire straits of the
American labor movement.
The work/family
tensions that squeeze so many families, and especially working mothers, may
provide an issue upon which the labor movement could rebuild itself. Labor
could reach the hearts and minds of the American public by spearheading bold
efforts to keep working parents from having to choose between their children’s
well-being and their own job status and security. Here, Sue Cobble discusses the history and
current condition of labor’s efforts to weigh in on the work/family dilemma.
While work/family
pressures might help ignite a labor-backed social movement of the sort Clawson
calls for, that or any movement will depend upon new kinds of leaders,
politically experienced and audacious enough to take the necessary risks. Roger Toussaint, President of Local 100 of
the Transit Workers Union, may prove just such a leader. Here, Kim Philips-Fein analyzes Toussaint’s
origins as a Trinidadian radical, his immigration to New York City, activism as
a local 100 dissident, and subsequent rise to lead the recent high-profile
negotiations of the country’s biggest mass transit system.
In our last issue,
we published a provocative argument by Stephen Lerner, urging the restructuring
of the house of labor along industrial lines to facilitate massive organizing
victories. In the current issue we seek
to stimulate discussion of this important proposal by running a series of
responses to his article by Jane Slaughter, Elizabeth Bunn and Simon Greer; and
Lerner’s replies to his critics. We
open this dialogue to our readers, inviting letters and ideas for further
articles on this topic.
Also by way of
call and response, we publish two reactions by Bob Muehlenkamp and Jeremy
Brecher to an article in our last issue by Peter Rachleff on the near demise
and uncertain future of the strike as premier tool in labor’s arsenal. Rachleff presents his counter reply here, and
will lead a panel on the strike for New
Labor Forum at the North American Labor History Conference this fall at Wayne
State University.
In our Books and the Arts section, the American
political landscape resurfaces in a review by Nelson Lichtenstien of The Emerging Democratic Majority. So too, the question of the strike reappears,
in the form of a review by Robert Ingalls of Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in
Twentieth Century America. We are
also pleased to run a commentary by Paul Buhle accompanied by a selection of
Walker Evansesque photographs from Julia Clinker’s A Life in Coal, a poignant photo-memoir
of her own West Virginia mining
community. Switching gears, you’ll also
find reviews by Ian Blecker of SUVs¾The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How
They Got That Way; by Nancy DellaMattera of two
recent books on labor education, Education
for Changing Unions and Teaching for
Change: Popular Education and the Labor Movement; and by Patrick McCreery on the role that race, class, and gender played in
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. All this, plus a film review of Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing by Leonard Quart and a
selection of working-class poetry, makes this an abundant cultural offering.