a country’s economic model can organize and disorganize political groups, empowering and disempowering them and shaping the coalitions they form.
This is nonsense. What matters is whether you have a young population or an ageing population. In the US, 50 is the median voting age. 22 percent of votes cast were by the over 65. These are not guys who care about the 'economic model'. They care about fiscal policy and interest rates because what they get paid for working is becoming less and less important to them. As for the young, student debt matters as does affiliative motivations for voting of a Religious, Racial or Ideological kind. Once again this has a weak connection with a 'country's economic model'.
Structural economic factors do matter- the Rust Belt made that clear- but where there is structural unemployment there is also likely to be an element of over-representation such that fiscal transfers can be extorted. In other words, pork-barrel, not ideological, politics wins out.
Industrialism, we argue, was fertile ground for the construction of a pro-democracy coalition,
Coz that's what's happened as China industrialized- right? The truth is, industrialism was a fertile ground for the construction of Teamsters and Mafias and Pinkertons and gun toting maniacs of various types.
one supported by labor unions;
Who was it Jimmy Hoffa supported? The good thing about the guys in the hard hats is that Nixon could always get them to go crack the skulls of hippies. But Mao had gotten his proles to beat the shit out of the students who, having served their purpose during the Cultural Revolution, were then sent off to the countryside.
On the other hand, I bet these two Professors really love Police Union Chiefs who believe in 'killology'.
post-industrialism, or at least the transition to post-industrialism, has fragmented such a coalition.
When? In Reagan's first term? Or Nixon's first term? How about when Eisenhower was elected?
The current problem is how to organize a pro-democracy coalition in the face of the Republican assault.
Tell lies. Lots and lots of lies. The stupider the better. Anyway, what else can you do if you happen to be a Professor of a shite subject?
We point, in particular, to two salient structural features of post-industrial political economy that constitute a challenge to democracy. First, to use a term of art from political science,
as opposed to a term of art from the burlesque theater
the structure of mass politics shifted from a single dominant “cleavage”—a conflict between owners and workers organized by labor unions—
so that was way back when America was racially homogenous- right? Also there was no farm sector or self-employed tradesmen.
to a pattern in which politics is organized around many different competing cleavages.
Because the population is not all of the same age, ethnicity and occupation- with the exception of a few evil Capitalists wearing spats and Top Hats and drinking the blood of the proletariat out of diamond encrusted goblets.
Second, there was a shift in the balance of power between capital and the state, which reduced the capacity of the government to respond to social and economic upheaval.
A shift in power is a political, not an economic, change. So what these cretins are saying is 'a political change occurred because of an economic change which was caused by that same political change- viz. that the State suddenly became shite and its capacity contracted and Capitalists started taking its pants down and going in dry.
Both of these developments
there is only one development here. The State turned to shit as did the Unions coz, for some mysterious reason, Capitalists gained superpowers and used those super-powers to fuck everybody in the ass.
present a challenge to democracy, and technology has only accelerated each.
Coz Capitalists have an app which they can use to fuck you in the ass even when you are on the toilet.
In making this argument, we see ourselves engaged with a budding American political economy community that uses comparative and historical lenses
lenses? No. Blinkers.
to understand the effects of structural forces. Our story challenges the progressive view of history in which modern democracy is a “developmental” or “evolutionary” achievement toward a more “advanced” outcome.
Fair point. Teaching History can make you just as stupid as teaching Poli Sci. Democracy is what you get when a dominant coalition resolves its own internecine rent contestation through some, more or less gerrymandered, voting mechanism.
Instead, modern democracy might be an outcome of a particular historical political economy of industrialism that began in the nineteenth century and may be ending—ushering in great uncertainty about the future.
This is nonsense. America is ageing and non Hispanic Whites may become a minority. Technological changes mean the country, like other advanced economies, will see more 'subsidiarity' and 'Tiebout sorting' in some places while others will experience depopulation. The Federal Government will become weaker abroad and at home. Biden may, in his first eighteen months, both surrender American hegemony abroad and the willingness of the Federal Government to intervene to protect Voting Rights at home. He will have rolled America back to what it was before he was born.
The democratic politics of the future must reckon with the consequences of these dramatic developments if it is to survive.
The democratic politics of the present has survived by becoming more and more shit. If it aint broke, why fix it? A type of politics which just keeps stupider and more paranoid can carry on indefinitely- especially if you have an ageing population. Sooner or later there is fiscal crunch and a technocrat is put in just so as to keep the lights on.
The Organization of Popular Politics
In the advanced economies, the golden age of democracy coincided with the age of industrialism, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and the politics of economic cleavage to which it gave rise.
Hitler's Germany was 'advanced'. Stalin's Russia became advanced. Japan and South Korea and Singapore are advanced- as is China, in many respects- but they simply didn't have any fucking politics of economic cleavage at all. The UK and the US may have had these features to some extent but there were other factors- Race in the US and the Empire for the UK- which meant that 'cleavage' had little salience almost all of the time.
The plain fact of the matter is that. because of 'efficiency wages' and 'duality' in 'industrial districts', big corporations paid their own workers very well while relying on 'dis-integrated' small firms for components and ancillary services. In other words, the Labor movement was always split between an 'Aristocracy' and a low wage underclass. In the early Seventies, the 'Aristocrats' broke the power of the State to enforce a Prices and Wages policy (which was needed to stick with managed exchange rates, exchange controls etc) and happily voted for Thatcher and Regan even after Scargill's coal strike or the Air traffic controllers slitting their own plump throats etc. Continental 'Corporatism' could not deliver 'solidarity wages' but, in France, yielded feather-bedding. However, Germany did get a social compact though it appears to have pissed that advantage against the wall by failing to do infrastructure and by pursuing a crazy Energy policy. But all that is irrelevant. The fact is Europe could only converge to the Anglo-Saxon model by converging to its Racial problem and 'original sin' of Imperialism or ethnic cleansing or whatever.
Once labor unions were legalized, they made the decision to participate in democratic politics and became the most important lower-class interest organizations in the country.
Then the First World War happened and Eugene Debs was put away for a long stretch of porridge. But factionalism amongst the Socialists and between Unions had already put paid to the myth that Democratic Socialism was not an oxymoron.
Anyway, it turned out that the Workers of the World didn't want to unite. They wanted to fuck up furriners something fierce. The truth is there has to be cooperation between bosses and workers. But the economic interests of Nations, or even Regions, can clash- which means industrialized War of which the US Civil War was the first expression.
Our contention is that unions were critical in sustaining mass democracy
Though India has had mass democracy with only a miniscule proportion of the electorate in paid employment. On the other hand, the Unions in Spain played a part in so fucking over that Republic that Franco took power and kept it for decades before restoring the Monarchy.
by virtue of their role in organizing, mobilizing, and sustaining a politics that embraced a broad pro-democratic coalition,
Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries like Democracy. There is no coalition for some fucking Dictator or Commissar. One good thing about Democracy is that it gives the Government the legitimacy to really fuck over Union Chiefs who go crazy. After all, the same guys who voted to go on strike also voted for the administration which will enforce the law against Union thuggery.
which they were able to do on the basis of materialist demands that went beyond the specific interests of their own membership.
Very true. The Teamsters were always campaigning for Transgender rights. London dock-workers created the Notting Hill Carnival as a way to welcome the Windrush generation from the West Indies.
With the decline of unions and of an industrial workforce on which they were based in the second half of the twentieth century,
the Mafia makes less money off the Teamsters. The Federal Government doesn't have to do a deal with Lucky Luciano to keep the docks open during war-time.
no alternative organization has been able to articulate a unifying coalition with similar force.
So Obama's Organizing For America was completely shit then. Good to know.
As one of us has argued, democracy cannot be seen simply as the achievement of the working class in the first-wave cases in Western Europe and the United States.
It wasn't their achievement at all. Universal manhood suffrage was either a product of 'Jacksonian' or 'Napoleonic' policies focused on the agriculturist or else a Tory dodge to get in the bigoted upper working class as a counterweight to the radical. urban, educated middle class. Female suffrage helped the Right, not the Left. Incidentally, India could have had universal suffrage in 1930 same as Ceylon but the Muslims wouldn't bite. France only gave women the vote in 1945. This prevented it going Red.
Nevertheless, sustaining democracy did require the buy-in not only of conservative parties, as political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has argued, but also of the working classes.
Why? Would they refuse to vote otherwise? Who says no to an entitlement?
During the period of industrialism, unions became the dominant organized voice of the working class,
but that voice was shrill and shite. Workers didn't mind if that type of ranting screwed a bigger pay-deal out of the bosses, but they certainly didn't want those nutters to have any power to fuck up foreign policy or stuff that mattered to the Nation. The same was true of Women who tolerated Academic Feminists only so long as they kept whining on about how random dicks are incessantly belaboring them and bashing them senseless.
unifying its interests based on a materialist dimension and supporting democracy.
Because democracy keeps getting raped in alleyways and needs a lot of hand-holding and emotional support from burly shop-stewards- right?
In the post-industrial period, by contrast, the structure of the working class has changed and its voice has been fragmented, reducing its power and political effectiveness, and opening the way for internal divisions.
But that happened long ago! By 1984 only 17 percent of 30 year old were Union members. In 2006 it was 6 percent. Boomers- of whom I am one- thought they sucked ass big time though, no doubt, we'd take extra money if they could get if for us while still resenting the dues we had to pay.
During the era of industrialism, the key role of unions was to prioritize materialist demands in the political arena along a dimension on which issues could be negotiated and compromises reached.
Their job was to create a strike fund and thus gain a threat point in collective bargaining. When they stopped being able to do so- partly because of infiltration by Lefty nutters- they were disintermediated.
There was a time when some Professors thought their job was to turn students into a vanguard for the Left. But the students just got high and babbled nonsense. Then they demanded that they get credentials for jacking off which, because they now had market-power, is exactly what they got. These two cretins are stuck teaching stupider and stupider cretins just as their Professors were stuck teaching them.
Dominant factions of the labor movement championed democracy as a political vehicle, and the struggle along the materialist dimension was quite successful, with rising prosperity for all, culminating in a politics of class compromise of different versions across the industrial democracies of the Keynesian welfare state.
Then the population began to age and savers took back power from borrowers. This meant free exchange rates, low inflation, cheap Chinese tatt to contain 'cost-push' inflation, asset stripping to release value for institutional investors etc, etc. To be fair, Keynes had admitted that his model would work better in Nazi Germany than an Anglo-Saxon democracy. Still, it was only when the A-rabs rebelled against Bretton Woods that Keynes's cozy racialist dream came crashing down. Why couldn't the wogs and nignogs not simply have let the White working class of the 'Advanced' countries live a little longer in their dream world?
As economist Albert O. Hirschman argued in The Passions and the Interests (1977), material interests came to be seen and championed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought as “containing the unruly and destructive passions.”
That's not rocket science. The reason we don't get drunk and set our workplace in fire is because we would then not earn any money and thus would not be able to pay our mortgage and then our spouse would leave us for a guy who had less 'unruly and destructive passions'.
Students know this. They can be plenty unruly and destructive on campus but once they get a well paid job they have to be all buttoned up and Caspar Milquetoast and shit.
Another way to put this is that bosses pay an 'efficiency wage'- i.e. a premium on transfer earnings- so workers have an incentive not to get drunk and stick things up their bosses rectums while laughing hysterically.
It is no coincidence that the illiberal alternate political cleavage of resentment and scapegoating has been especially appealing
to stupid Lefties who blame everything on Capitalists unless they are also anti-Semitic in which case...
where deindustrialization has occurred and where unions have been in retreat and no longer organize or lead the political struggle and at a point when materialist advance has been halted for so many.
So, even if Unions are really sweet and kind, they still can't help improve society unless they can get their members high wages and benefits. The problem here is that Unions know about bargaining but don't know about how to raise productivity. They are merely parasitic on Capital.
Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, in Political Man (1960), also points to the danger of the passions. We do not accept Lipset’s analysis that the working class is particularly prone to authoritarian attitudes and intolerance; in Latin America, for example, it was the middle and upper strata who abandoned democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, while the working class held fast.
But, because of Castro, Che Guevara etc, Latin America was fucked no matter what happened. Lefty nutters had convinced themselves that they needed to have a Revolution to make their dicks bigger or their orgasms better and then some wonderful magic would happen and everybody who was not a Capitalist would become very very rich while reactionaries were reduced to renting out their rears for a couple of pesos at a time.
Still, the passions of resentment—the intolerance and scapegoating that Lipset points to—are an alternate line of appeal to those seeking to mobilize a following along a different line of cleavage.
These guys are very tolerant of Republicans- right? They aint scapegoating Trump for all Democracy's ills.
In the United States, some degree of democracy preceded the rise of unions,
This is not to say that unions have always been virtuous.
At the same time, it is important to recognize how, in the twentieth century, U.S. labor unions played the important role of helping to foster a multiracial worker coalition that served as a bulwark for democracy.
In fact, by building political coalitions around materialist politics and preempting a politics of racial and cultural resentment, labor unions in the modern era continue to be critical to the maintenance of democracy in the United States.
Thus, although unions may not have had the same dominance in the United States as elsewhere, they became the core constituency of the most important political party on the political left. In this sense, the Democratic Party
With the advent of post-industrialism since the 1970s, however, these fundamental structures of interest articulation have been dramatically transformed.
We have argued that in the period of industrialism,
it is a tautology that industrialism means 'rapid growth of the industrial sector'.
the rapid growth of the industrial sector and the economics of Keynesianism
which was a function of War-time and post War, Bretton Woods, fixed exchange rates and thus exchange controls, restrictions on capital flows, gold ownership etc. But all this was predicated on A-rabs and Nig-nogs and Gooks of various types shutting the fuck up and doing what they were told. Communism- Soviet and Chinese victories over Imperialist Capitalism- is what put paid to Keynes's world. Still, if Nixon or the British Labor Party had been able to use a Price and Incomes policy to contain inflation then Anglo-America might have evolved in a properly Fascist direction with a State mandated National Federation of Labor and Conscription and endless wars in resource rich parts of the world populated by dusky folk.
underwrote a social contract and facilitated a supportive positive-sum coalition.
Positive-sum? The Anglo Americans toppled Mossadegh- a Social Democrat- in Iran so as to keep getting cheap oil from a 'Shah'- i.e. an Emperor. But then the Shah got above himself and persuaded OPEC to jack up prices. Even getting rid of him didn't help coz Ayatollahs came to power. Keynesianism was well and truly fucked each way from Sunday. The fate of the British Raj had overtaken the Blue Collar Yank.
In that environment, unions were the predominant organization aggregating and articulating the interests of a mass coalition and playing a key role in supporting democracy.
Especially in Vietnam- right? If dominoes start falling, the terms of trade move against the Teamsters and Joe Lunch-pail's standard of living might fall.
In the post-industrial period, the Republicans actively weakened unions “directly”—through political decisions—
like preventing them using monopoly power to extort money from all and sundry
but they were also weakened “indirectly” as a by-product of economic policies, which Democratic administrations also sometimes adopted.
because Democrats have to live in the country too. Letting the Unions fuck everybody over means they too get fucked.
The key pro-democracy coalition became fragmented.
In the way that the key pro-democracy coalition of rapists and muggers gets fragmented when muggers rob rapists or rapists sodomize muggers.
The Biden administration’s more recent turn to a pro-union orientation is a step in the right direction in building a broad coalition for democracy (though Congress might end up stifling even the most incremental pieces of labor legislation).
Will Unions spend a lot of money on organizing? Perhaps. They have a business model like anybody else. But it must compete with other business models. Arthur Miller- the death of a salesman guy- tells as story of a Union guy who got on the wrong side of Lucky Luciano and had to lie low. Later he was able to get back in the game in the garment sector. But his old adversaries sneered at him. They were going bankrupt in any case. So the Union guy became a salesman for some sweat shop and proved so good at his new job that he became very rich. Still, he'd give money to various stupid Lefty causes. Come to think of it, Miller's dad- an illiterate immigrant- had become a millionaire before the Wall Street crash. If only he had invested in Hollywood, Miller could have fucked not just Marilyn Monroe but fresh talent on a weekly basis.
Regardless, the reality is that unions are unlikely to return to their historic role in a post-industrial era,
because workers won't pay more in dues then they get in pay increases. This is simply a bad business model. All that can happen is some type of enterprise union which knows about Labor Econ and incomplete contract theory and how to raise productivity and get a share of capital gains and so forth. But stuff like that would happen anyway at the margin.
in which anti-labor policy has been ratcheted up over decades
because it was shit
and the structure of the workforce has so changed with the nature of the global economy.
which wasn't shit at all. Global stuff just kept getting better and better.
The challenge is to build an organizational basis for a mass pro-democracy coalition across many fragmented interests—
this involves actually doing some organizing- not writing shite for the Boston Review
a coalition that understands that democratic institutions are its best chance to achieve the good life, advancing equality in terms of both economic and racial outcomes.
Why stop there? Why not build an organizational basis for a good after-life? If you can con people into thinking that an Earthly Paradise is possible why not go the extra mile and get them to buy into a perfect after-life where everybody has sex with the super-star of their choice regardless of distinctions of race, class, gender or ontological status? For me, this would involve heavy petting with She-Hulk.
There is as of yet no clear path to this outcome, but the first step is to recognize it
Very true. To save Democracy we must all build an organizational basis for my blissful marital life with She-Hulk- if not here on Earth then in that perfect world we can all commit ourselves to one day clearly envisioning beyond the borders of Reality.
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