What Will It Take To Wake Up the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of the New Working Class?
The American working class has been dissed and dismissed. Our unions busted, our wages slashed, our homes foreclosed and our rents raised. We’re blamed for the rise of Trump, but otherwise do not exist in the media landscape.
But the working class is a sleeping giant that is beginning to stir and will soon instigate a great campaign for racial and economic justice, according to a new book by Tamara Draut. A vice president of the liberal think tank Demos, Draut’s previous book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, explored the how the high cost of college, housing and health insurance, combined with stagnant wages and made the usual milestones of adulthood increasingly out of reach for millennials.
Her new book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, attempts to connect the dots between the struggles of those millennials and the politics of austerity, globalization and the massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent that has reduced the living standards of almost all working families over the course of the last 40 years. It finds a strong sense of optimism in the recent increase in protest activity.
Draut spends a good deal of her narrative making the case that there is still a working class in “post-industrial,” “digital age” U.S.A. The heterogeneity of this new working class—no longer solidly white and male, if it ever was—along with media indifference and a cultural legacy of devaluing “women’s work” and disenfranchising immigrants and people of color renders it “invisible” to many.
Quantifying who is even in the working class, statistically speaking, is a notoriously hard thing to do. She consults with the dean of working-class studies, SUNY Stony Brook professor Michael Zweig, who uses federal occupational data to estimate that 60 percent of us comprise the working class. But most political surveys do not inquire into one’s relationship with the means of production, and so Draut uses educational attainment as a not-unreasonable proxy.
Not that Draut’s tome would fit within the mountain of punditry that emphasizes educational attainment as a cure for poverty. She eviscerates this “elite blind spot” that focuses on the “miniscule” sliver of new professional jobs while ignoring the “scads of new jobs being created in home health care, fast food, and retail.”
Draut is one of the few mainstream writers I’ve seen who has noted the fact that workers are increasingly rejecting the label “middle class” for themselves, while political and media elites still use the term as a shorthand for the ideal American lifestyle. Not noted—perhaps not known—is that when unions do internal polling on political campaigns, questions phrased around improving the lives of middle-class Americans perform significantly worse than identical questions that talk instead about “working families.” Workers hear politicians’ “middle class” campaign rhetoric as promises to give more breaks to people who are already better off than them. (Which probably isn’t that far from the truth.)
The largest class of people in the country demanding their visibility and raising expectations that they deserve more is the very definition of a sleeping giant stirring. Draut sees the “Day without Immigrants” May Day protests, Black Lives Matter and the Fight for 15 as the beginning of a new workers movement. The key, she says, will be working through the historical legacy of racism and sexism to make common cause between these three interconnected movements.
There is perhaps a little too much optimism in Sleeping Giant. After all, the last big May Day strike was over a decade ago at this point. The ground is undeniably shifting, opening up a space for more progressive demands, but it’s not moving all that fast.
Still, since Draut handed in her final draft of this book, millions of voters rallied have to a socialist presidential candidate who will rewrite the Democratic Party’s platform, and the workers at Kohler and Verizon proved that the remaining large industrial unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak confidently that a new workers movement is rising up.
Still, since Draut handed in her final draft of this book, millions of voters rallied have to a socialist presidential candidate who will rewrite the Democratic Party’s platform, and the workers at Kohler and Verizon proved that the remaining large industrial unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak confidently that a new workers movement is rising up.
But it’s not entirely clear who the audience is for Sleeping Giant. While she clearly advocates for more unions, Draut’s treatment of unions is a little too abstract.
The “real power” of unions, she writes, is that they “can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting and issue advocacy.” That’s a think-tank view of unions. Anyone who’s ever been a part of a workplace job action that resulted in, say, a reduced workload or new safety equipment or got a disrespectful supervisor straightened could take offense at the notion that our “real” power is in our union treasury and checkbook.
Sleeping Giant seems best addressed to the Acela-riding political class: reporters and political staffers who need to learn that the working class still exists and that their “untapped political power” should be heeded. There’s a value to that. One thing that preceded labor’s great upsurge in the 1930’s, ever so slightly, was a rising tide of opinion among intellectuals and political actors that an increase in union power was necessary to stabilize the economy and shore up the Democratic Party’s base.
They can have their reasons for wanting unions, and we’ll always have ours.
The book falters a bit as well when it comes to the “Blueprint for a Better Deal” it advocates. Draut correctly notes that while the demand for a $15 minimum wage was immediately derided as unrealistic, the high bar that the demand set, combined with workplace action, quickly opened up a space that made a range of wage raises politically possible. Curiously, though, her programmatic proposals are safe, moderate, vetted. It includes paid sick and family leave, universal pre-K, tuition-free public college, card check for union organizing and overturning Citizens United.
I’ll take it all, but this is the stuff of a white paper, not a political manifesto. These are transitional demands that have a snowball’s chance in hell in the short term, and that, once the sleeping giant is fully woke and pressing a campaign that looks more like a mass strike wave, would hopefully be traded-in for much more ambitious demands.
Still, Sleeping Giant is a worthy entry in the contemporary progressive canon that should inspire more debate about the world we have to win.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Our First Socialist Mayor: Remembering Milwaukee’s Socialist Party History
As the country’s politics take a right turn, an unlikely progressive wins office as mayor of a major U.S. city. In an era marked by conformity and the primacy of business interests over the common good, he has the temerity to call himself a socialist. Both locally and nationally, his example serves as a beacon of hope for the waning left and a lightening rod of criticism for the resurgent right. His fundamental decency and fealty to the democratic process and the public good see him continually reelected, with most voters regarding him on a first-name basis. He goes on to run a quixotic campaign for President.
If this sounds familiar to fans of Bernie Sanders’ career, it should. But I am describing Frank Zeidler, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee who served three terms from 1948-1960. When the producers of the television series Happy Days wanted to cast a nostalgic look back on the supposedly placid 1950s, they chose to base their sitcom in Milwaukee. Of course, no mention is made that not only is the mayor a socialist, but the state’s junior Senator is the demagogic anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy.
This is a history that’s been hiding in plain sight, given focus by a new book from the University of Illinois Press’ Working Class in American History series. Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, by Tula A. Connell, explores the record of a socialist administration in an era that is popularly thought to be when Americans definitively turned against socialism and abandoned urbanism.
But there was, nevertheless, a right turn in the 1950s, and Connell’s book is a vital study of the roots of modern American conservatism. The election of Scott Walker and the battles over his anti-union attacks and the subsequent recall effort revealed to many outsiders the extreme polarization that have marked Wisconsin politics since before Zeidler and McCarthy shared the stage (A polarization that can be seen in Tuesday’s primary results, where Wisconsin Democrats went strongly for socialist Bernie Sanders and Republicans chose Ted Cruz because he is more reliably conservative than Donald Trump).
Connell’s history documents how Milwaukee business and suburban interests inveighed against the expanded role of government in as an attack on “American free enterprise” and used racial demagoguery to peel off voters from the New Deal coalition. This local right-wing pushback became part of a national network that gave rise to Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. If Wisconsin DNA is so central to modern conservatism, then today’s polarization of national political discourse was seemingly inevitable.
The public good or the virtue of selfishness?
Milwaukee was an early stronghold of the Socialist Party, furnishing the party with wins for mayor, council, state legislature and even a seat in Congress. In city government, they emphasized honest government and effective public services. Critics on the party’s left derided them as “sewer socialists.” The Milwaukee Socialists wore the term as a badge of honor.
Although, to this day, the Socialist candidate can draw upwards of 20% in first round balloting in Milwaukee’s non-partisan mayoral elections, Zeidler’s election was something of a last hurrah for the party. He ran as part of a liberal coalition and benefited as much from name recognition (his older brother’s tenure as mayor was cut short by his WWII casualty) as it did lingering voter loyalty to socialism.
But his record in office nevertheless contributed significantly to the city’s socialist legacy. Milwaukee’s stock of public housing was expanded dramatically; a lucrative new channel of newfangled television broadcasting was reserved for public education programming; and the city’s tax base was preserved through an aggressive campaign of suburban annexation.
Zeidler’s annexation agenda was particularly crucial for Milwaukee, and represents a road not taken for too many other post-war cities. The combination of white flight, highway construction, suburban development and tax breaks for mortgage interest is a uniquely American tragedy that left great cities blighted and broken down. Zeidler refused to accept that suburbanites could just cut themselves off from responsibility from the wider society. His office organized over 300 annexation votes that incrementally expanded the city by more than 35 square miles. Zeidler’s preferred method to win these votes was through education campaigns about the benefits of pooling resources and the efficiency of Milwaukee government, but he was also not shy about engaging in water wars. Suburbs that insisted upon independence were denied Milwaukee city water and sewer services, among other benefits.
Of course there was a backlash. The suburbs sued, right-wing elements pushed state legislation to make annexation more difficult while some townships merged to form “cities” of their own to forestall annexation by Milwaukee. An “iron ring” of rich suburbs encircled Milwaukee, ultimately producing the same racial tensions and defunding of public services that plagued other American cities.
In fact, much of Zeidler’s agenda was vociferously opposed by a rising right-wing movement. This subject is the heart of Conservative Counterrevolution. Author Tula Connell calls the post-war consensus around full employment and living standards that rose with productivity “a mirage” and documents how modern conservatism “was not newly generated in the 1950s or 1960s but rather represented a resurgence of a deep current in America’s history.”
It is perhaps not surmising that it was small and mid-sized businessmen who first chafed at the New Deal, and were in the vanguard of right-wing opposition. Conservative Counterrevolution’s bête noir is William Grede, who operated a Milwaukee area steel foundry that he (of course!) inherited from his dad. Grede was a viciously anti-union boss, who took the then uncommon step of hiring permanent replacement scabs when his employees went on strike in 1946.
Grede served a term as the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and, according to Connell, “had a fundraising finger in nearly every organization that challenged perceived encroachments on free enterprise,” including Americans for Constitutional Action, the National Association of Businessmen and the John Birch Society. His philosophy – which can be efficiently summed up by the title of the book he never finished writing, The Virtue of Selfishness – remained far outside the mainstream of Republican policymaking during his lifetime. Today, his brand of selfishness has utterly captured the GOP, thanks in part to the deep pockets of odious men like the sons of Grede’s Birch Society co-founder, Fred Koch.
Although Grede’s and others’ opposition to Zeidler’s public housing program was rooted in a fear of “creeping socialism” and a desire for private profit, his opponents resorted to the most base racism in order to win voters over. His opponent in his third and final election, Milton McGuire, waged a demagogic campaign that focused on the rising number of African-Americans moving to the city. McGuire accused Zeidler of placing billboards throughout the south, to attract new black residents with promises of low cost public housing. Zeidler won re-election handily, but had decided that his third term would be his last.
“The greatest living American”
Zeidler was succeeded by Henry Maier, a conservative Democrat who won office by race-baiting his opponents. His administration abandoned public housing construction, slow-walked civil rights, responded to 1967 riots with a law and order agenda and consolidated power. He remained in office for an unprecedented seven terms. By 2002, research showed that Milwaukee’s racial disparities were the worst in the nation.
One of the reasons Frank cited for not running for re-election in 1960 was his frail health. He was always in poor health, and yet he somehow lived to the ripe old age of 93. He even ran for President as the standard-bearer of the reconstituted Socialist Party in 1976! It was in his capacity as the party’s chairman emeritus that I had the pleasure of getting to know Frank. I always found it fascinating to visit Milwaukee while Frank was still alive; it was a bizarro world where the Socialist Party’s leader was revered as a statesman and warmly greeted as a neighbor. To whit: when I was doing press for the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001, a reporter for the Journal-Sentinel asked me what socialists in other parts of the country thought of Frank. I answered that most of us think he’s a really great man. The reporter naturally heard that as “the greatest living American” and put it in the story, embarrassing Frank slightly.
With the racial strife and economic decline of the city that came later, it’s not hard to see how Milwaukee residents look back on the Zeidler years as, indeed, happy days.
[This post first appeared at In These Times.]
Review: James P. Cannon and Origins of the American Revolutionary Left
Quitting the Socialist Party freed me to commit the twin heresies of reading V.I. Lenin and Michael Harrington. My political perspective hasn’t changed very much, but my perspective has become more nuanced. This leaves me very familiar with American social democratic theory and with the twists and turns of the old Socialist Party, as well as its last major off-shoots, and, thanks to Si Gerson’s library, with the external work and internal factionalism of the Communist Party, at least up until 1960. But the history of the American Trotskyite movement has remained a willful gap in my knowledge, mostly because I tend to find modern-day Trotskyites so interminable.
Bryan D. Palmer’s “James P. Cannon and the American Revolutionary Left” begins to fill in some of that gap. Cannon is best known (to the extent that he’s known at all) as a father of American Trotskyism and founder of the Socialist Workers Party. Palmer’s volume focuses on the period when he was a founder of the Workers (Communist) Party. Along with such odd bedfellows as William Z. Foster and Jay Lovestone, Cannon helped foster a native expression of Marxist-Leninist agitation in America, while navigating intense and ever-changing factional intrigue in the party and the International. As such, it is an adjunct to Theodore Draper’s stalwart “The Roots of American Communism” and a cousin to Edward P. Johanningsmeier’s and James Barrett’s recent biographies of Foster.
I consider Foster my favorite tragic hero; the first truly modern trade union organizer and a brilliantly pragmatic navigator of union structure who cast his lot with the Communists after Lenin endorsed his union work in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” In Palmer’s pages, in the first flush of the Third International, when revolution was proved to be possible, the attraction of foreign revolutionary leadership for Cannon and Foster is understandable. It is quite possible that most people on the Left would still be spinning their wheels trying to create new, perfect labor unions if that generation of activists were not directed from Moscow to get dirty inside the bureaucratic AFL unions and organize some new members and strike actions. Equally ironically, the lily-white left might never have evolved past the chauvinism that led good men like Eugene Debs to say dumb things like, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races,” to take seriously the civil rights of African-Americans without the pressure from Moscow.
But as the Communist International degenerated into a cult of personality around Stalin, national issues in Russia came to dictate what was seen to be in the best interests of the American activists, and led to constant faction-fighting that hobbled much of the party’s potential in the 1920’s. Foster eventually came out on top, losing most of what was best about him and becoming an unrepentant Stalinist. Cannon left at his earliest opportunity and cast his lot with Trotsky.
Much of the book is taken up in documenting temporary alliances like Cannon-Foster, Foster-Bittelman and Lovestone-Ruthenberg. It’s somewhat tedious and distracting from the main action, which may well have been Palmer’s point. (His attention to detail is laudable). The book is at its most exciting in describing Cannon’s International Labor Defense work in support of class-war prisoners like Sacco and Vanzetti, and in describing the intrigue of smuggling Trotsky’s criticism of the 1928 CI proceedings into America and surreptitiously forming the new Socialist Workers Party. That’s where Palmer’s book leaves off. It is clear that there is another volume still to come, documenting the effort to build a new sectarian political party and the lesser-noted work of Trotskyites in the labor struggles of the 1930’s, and that that book is where Palmer’s heart truly lies. I look forward to it, and to continuing my cautious research into American Trotskyism.
We Memoir Econo
Michael Azerrad’s excellent collection of 13 micro-biogrophies of beloved 80’s indie bands is a love letter to the era when pop culture began to fragment into mini-mass media of fanzines, underground rock clubs and vanity record labels. Cribbed from a Minutemen lyrics, Azerrad’s book, “Our Band Could Be Your Life” fleshes out the notion of gaining inspiration, principles and encouragement by the songs from some obscure band that your parents and most of your classmates never heard of.
Teh internets have exacerbated this tendency towards fragmentation. It is regrettable, to some extent, that there can never be another Beatles to saunter across (the equivalent of) Ed Sullivan’s stage and capture the hearts and imaginations of an entire nation in two and a half minutes. But it is perhaps better to have the Replacements, whose music feels more personal due to their underdog cult status, and whose “Let it Be” far outshines the sorry first record to share that name (made famous by its teevee and film pedigree).
Focused on the SST record label, Azerrad’s book has a clear narrative guiding it, despite its scattered vignette structure. It starts with Southern California’s Black Flag, who spearheaded not just America’s hardcore punk scene, but a network of record labels and concert venues (VFW halls, people’s basements and the occasional Actual Night Club), and follows the story as labelmates The Minutemen and Husker Du push against hardcore’s rigid boundaries, while east coast contemporaries Minor Threat aided in rigidly defining hardcore’s boundaries before leaving the scene behind.
Ian McKaye’s musical progress away from hardcore’s stifling “loud fast rules” while strictly adhering to a non-conformist independence from Corporate America, mass media and liquor provides “Your Band” with its most compelling narrative, as well as its most trenchant observation, courtesy of McKaye’s Fugazi bandmate Guy Picciotto:
“PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED, YOUR PARENTS HAVE TAKEN ALL THE DRUGS THEY CAN TAKE, YOU’VE HAD THE 70’S, YOU HAD HEAVY METAL – GET WITH IT, IT’S OVER WITH, WAKE UP. KIDS ARE LIVING RE-RUNS, THE SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER AND THEIR MINDS GET CLOSED TIGHTER AND TIGHTER, IT’S SUCH A WASTE.”
I missed hardcore, so 80’s indie was all about the Replacements for me (and REM, but they’re not indie enough for Azerrad). Other acts feted by Azerrad (such as Big Black and the Butthole Surfers) were familiar to me by reputation, but no one had made such a compelling case to purchase “Hairway to Steven” or “Songs About Fucking” until this book. Perhaps these bands, too, could be my life.