The American Governments role in class struggle.

Great Debates
1

I am currently reading A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (about halfway through, highly recommended) and in the first few chapters he discusses the American Revolution and the government that came out of it. He claims that the revolution was incited by colonial elite becuase the exclusive trading rights held by Britain were hurting them economically. After winning the revolution they set up a government to control the masses and maintain their power.

He provides ample evidence in my book for these claims. Showing discontent in the army with soldiers grumbling about fighting a war for the elite. Government breaking strikes and allowing companies to monopolize. The Supreme Court interpeting the 14th amendment to apply to corporations. Restricting voting to property owning males. Engaging in wars of conquest to open up foriegn markets and protect invested capital. I believe it can be pretty much accepted that the government was on the side of the rich until WW1 and I would rather not debate this but if you wish you may.

But something happened between WW1 and the present. It seems that the government has at least shifted towards the working class individule and away from the interests of the wealthy elite. Government heavily regulates business now, everyone can vote, unions are protected, welfare is abundant, and there is a minimum wage. This brings us to our question to debate Has the American government shifted towards the working class individule and if so why?

A few theories that I have come up with in no particular order:

Number one: The government is still squarley on the side of the wealthly elite and the concessions given to the working poor are to maintain a steady working force.

Number two: The tide of the class struggle has shifted to the working people. Socialists and Communists are right a united working class is more powerful than a small wealthy elite.

Number three: The rapidly expanding economy after ww2 used up the vast labor oversupply and reliable labor became a sought after commodity.

Number four: The wealthy seeing the economic collapse of the Great Depression tried to set up a welfare state to protect themselves from a general rebellion and it snowballed from there.

The cynic in me wants to go with option number one or four. The capatilist in me says number three is the most likely. And option number two gets laughed at by years of capatilist=good education. Thoughts?

2

Government heavily regulates business now? Airline “DEREGULATION”
Media “DEREGULATION”
“PUBLIC” utility “DEREGULATION”
And they are going to privatize Amtrak!
Where’s the heavy regulation?

Everyone can vote?
Tell that to the thousands of Blacks disenfranchised by the Sovereign State of Florida in 2000.

Welfare is abundant?
Bill Clinton took care of that, my friend.

Minimum Wage?
Not a living wage. $5.15/hr is definitely “minimum.”

Unions are protected?
From what? How many people do you know who are in a union?
Unless you live in a state with tons of Manufacturing or industrial jobs, like Michigan, you don’t know many. I know maybe three people, and they all work for Northwest Airlines. Unions are falling apart.

And this business about changing the overtime rules? Sure…concessions to the working class.

More like concessions to the ruling class.

George II lowered the amount employers withhold from paychecks, ostensibly to stimulate the economy, to give America’s families more money to spend. You know how much I got?

ONE DOLLAR!!!

“Here’s a Dollar, kid,” Bush and his Republican toadies said to me, “Go stimulate the economy for us. Spend this at Wal-Mart.”

In summary, I’ll have to go with option two, as soon as all my working class friends stop watching Fox News.

3

Zinn’s book is one hell of a read. I also highly recommend it.

That having been said, there’s actually something to each of your theories, simply because the history you’re trying to examine can’t be boiled down to one simple factor. So let’s take a look at each in turn:

Entirely true. But it’s not just a feature of the US government, it’s something every government in a class-based society does, to one degree or another, depending on the amount of forces they’re able to effectively control. The state in a class society isn’t neutral - it’s the product of that society and therefore reflects the interests of the class that runs things. The greater the challenge from the classes it rules, the more the government is likely to grant reforms and concessions. If you compare the amount of vacation time between most European workers and US workers, or even look at that ridiculous corporate welfare giveaway Bush calls a “tax cut”, it’s pretty easy to figure out how threatened corporate America is feeling right now. But that hasn’t always been the case, which ties in to Thesis Number Four. I’ll expand on this theme at that point.

In a very general numerical sense, the tide has turned. People who have to work for a living far outnumber the people who pay them to work for a living. But sheer numbers don’t make class struggle - the class has to become aware of its position in society, what its interests are, and how it can fight for those interests. While that happened on a massive global scale in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, that tradition of struggle and fightback was rooted out by World War II and the Cold War in the forties and fifties. It’s taken a long time to recover from that, but it’s happening in bits and pieces.

Well, World War II used up a lot of that vast labor oversupply as well - in the form of civilian and military fatalities. Preparations for war absorbed a lot of the labor oversupply too. No one would deny that there was an economic boom, fueled by the reconstruction efforts in Europe, Russia, and Japan and followed by the arms race, from the end of the war until the late Sixties, but the Seventies saw the oil crisis, inflation, and so on, while the Eighties began with the PATCO mass firing and stock market booms that benefited at best only a handful of the newly rich and superrich. The Nineties saw the dismantling of welfare, layoffs of hundreds of thousands, and a decline in real wages (the amount of goods one could actually buy with a paycheck). The latest statistics indicate some 9 million out of work - and that may not include people who’ve given up looking for a job at all. It’s pretty clear that the postwar boom has long been over, and labor isn’t as valued a commodity now as it was even thirty years ago.

Absolutely. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs of the Thirties were designed to do just that. The Communist Party was immensely popular, with millions of adherents and members, and was beginning to present a serious challenge an already weakened ruling class. But Roosevelt didn’t pull all this off because of any political shift to the working class; it was to save capitalism in the US from being overthrown entirely. Once that danger was past - and the war had been won - the US government could go on the offensive, witch-hunting Communists and socialists out of the unions and public life in general. The PATCO disaster in 1981 really spelled the end of effective union fightbacks for the next two decades.

In short, it’s hard to imagine the US government has turned to the working class individual when it’s clearly hindered their ability to organize in their own interests and continued to attack workers’ living standards. The state, as I mentioned earlier, is a product of a class society and is therefore a weapon in the hands of the class that runs society. That class will use the state to defend its own interests above those of the classes it rules, and the US government is no exception.

4

benthames- Please tell me you aren’t saying that the condition of the worker is the same now as it was during the 1800s?

Theres proof right there that a shift occured, government during the 1800s let businesses have unsafe work conditions, monopolize the market, and hell the government even bought millions of dollars worth of shoddy merchandize during the various wars.

Thousands of blacks vs a majority of Americans during the 1800s.

Welfare still exists. Food stamps still exist. Unemployment benifits still exist. Medicare still exists. Social security still exists.

5.15 at 40 hours a week is 210 dollars roughly, factory workers were being paid less than a dollar a week in some cases up till WW1.

When was the last time a couple dozen people died during a strike from the police and army attacking them?

Olentzero

Yet we haven’t seen the big businesses revert to their old practice workers still have an 8 hour day, conditions are safe, and unions remain. I think this is one of the more important reasons for the improvement during the 1800s and early 1900s there was more workers than a business owner could have dreamed of. Immigrants were coming in droves from Europe, Asia, and in 1865 millions of blacks were freed and needed work. They could treat them as bad as they liked becuase they had to work to live and there were so many of them.

5

The eight-hour day may still be on the books, but it’s violated left and right. Conditions are far from safe - the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an average of 6,000 workplace fatalities a year, declining slightly from 6200 in 1992 to 5900 in 2001 - a drop of roughly 5%. The BLS also reports only an 8.5% overall rate of unionization in 2002 among workers in private industry. That’s a pitiful number compared to most European countries. Yes, there are regulations concerning the length of the working day and workplace safety, but those are so full of loopholes in the first place and enforced by more or less toothless government agencies in the second that for the most part they’re meaningless. The amount of effort corporations put in to keeping unions out of their workforce makes the existence of unions a moot point for most workers, and the way some unions’ leaders actually collaborate with a corporation’s executives makes the existence of a union a moot point for its rank-and-file members. What is, is a terribly long way from what ought to be.

6

Just found a very interesting article on hours worked for the US workforce on the BLS site. Haven’t managed to read the whole thing just yet, but a cursory look at several of the charts is very revealing.

Page 2 - Table 1 shows that the total full-time working population of the US worked an average of 43 hours a week in 1995.

Page 3 - Chart 1 shows a steady increase in the percentage of people who worked 40 or more hours a week from 1976 to 1993, and a decline in percentage of people who worked between 35 and 40 hours a week.

Page 6 - I love this one. In 1995, over 60% of men who earned over $2,000 a year - how many of us here are not in that category? - worked 49 hours or more per week. The text table right below it shows that some 21 million people - roughly 20% of the working population if you compare it with the figures in Table 1, page 2 - worked 49 hours or more per week.

Page 7 - Chart 4 shows increases across the board in percent of men and women who worked more than 49 hours a week between 1985 and 1993.

Page 8 - Table 3 shows that over half the non-agricultural and non-agricultural workforce works at least 40 hours a week.

Page 9 - the text table shows men worked an average of 100 hours per year more, and women over 200 hours more, per year in 1993 than they did in 1996.

In short, the eight-hour workday is nothing more than a really neat-sounding idea for some 50 million US working people.

7

Per the OP, I’d like to propose an option 6.

Namely – the 1850-1930’s wave of immigration combined with the XIII and XIX amendments to the constitution (voting rights for all) changed the demographics of the voting public;

that led to increased use of the poor as a voting block (go watch Gangs of New York for a good example);

which then lead to higher priced political campaigns to energize the larger voting base;

which in turn reduced the ability for smaller, more radical political groups to raise funds and maintain their voice, resulting in our quasi-two-party system of government;

which increases voter apathy resulting in the return of power to the wealthy elite.

OTOH, capitalism needs a working class or it won’t work. Someone has to do the messy grunt work and the only objective change to the system since 1776 is that the workers are a little safer and get more benefits. In turn, this makes for healthly, more productive workers – so both wealthy and working class benefit.

And so IMHO, to answer your question: “Has the American government shifted towards the working class individual and if so why?”

Answer: Nope, because the system needs cheap, politically disenfranchised labor to work properly.

8

Posted by Able User:

No, Able. That’s just the problem. In the present stage of economic development, American capitalism does not need labor. At least, it does not need American labor. Read Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations. Janitors and such – laborers who do work that can only be done on-site – are still needed, and their jobs are safe. Same with personal-service providers – retail sales clerks, waiters, etc. But every manufacturing job that can be outsourced to a third-world sweatshop will be. Modern transportation and communication systems make this possible. The problem in America today is not that the working class is being exploited but that it is being marginalized.

9

Hardly! If you’ll look at the PDF document I linked to at the Bureau of Labor Statistics site, you’ll see in Table 1 that 107.6 million people age 16 and older were in the nonagricultural wage and salary workforce. Compare that with the estimated resident population of the United States on 1 Jan 1996, which gives a figure of 264 million people. That’s 40.7% of the US population as a whole, and roughly 56% of the population over the age of 16 - not a marginal figure in either case. While you are correct that if a job can be moved overseas to where the labor is cheaper if at all possible, there are many factors that need to be taken into consideration - like the infrastructure of the country in question, whether factories need to be built or existing structures can be taken over, whether there’s room to build new factories if they’re needed, and how willing the recipient countries are to accept further foreign investment.

Abe is correct in stating that capitalism needs a working class to function, but he’s wrong in stating that both bosses and workers benefit. Sure, the standard of living may improve for some over the course of their lives or at most a generation or two of their family, but it hasn’t improved for all workers, either universally or even in the US alone. And this is precisely because American workers, regardless of the level of their income, are indeed exploited - their ability to perform work is used to generate profit for someone else. They’re just as exploited as Asian workers in a Nike sweatshop or South African diamond miners.

10

treis suggests the following theories to account for the fact that the United States, despite long periods of Republican ascendancy, still has some welfare-state guarantees:

I don’t think any of these is entirely correct.

There is something to theory #1. The employers, for obvious reasons, would much rather have their workers be healthy and safe, so long as they themselves do not have to pay too much for it.

#2 is wrong. The American working class, at present, is not united in political action, does not even show very high voter turnout. (Not that that can’t change . . . but that’s how it is now.)

#3 is anachronistic. But it describes a former situation that casts a long shadow over the present, as explained below.

Regarding theory #4: It is true that the New Deal, which gave rise to the modern American welfare state, was enacted in part to prevent the rise of socialism, but also simply because FDR believed it was necessary to get the country moving again. Otto von Bismarck did introduce a welfare state in the German Empire with the express purpose of forestalling revolution; but Bismarck was not leading a republic.

Let us remember that the government is the only institution in American society which is answerable to the whole people even in theory. What that means is that, once a given social guarantee or entitlement is enacted, it becomes part of The Way Things Are and a politician runs a great risk by calling to abolish it; on the other hand, there is much less risk in simply allowing the value of, e.g., the minimum wage to be slowly eroded by inflation. Raising the minimum wage to a real living wage would be a course of action requiring initiative and presenting real political risks.

As for Social Security – there’s a massive constituency of seniors who rely on it, and an even more massive consituency of working people who expect to need it someday, so why would any statesman dare to touch it? What’s wrong with the system, it seems to me, is that the Social Security payroll tax is regressive rather than progressive – but, once again, changing that feature would take initiative and involve risks.

So, in answer to the OP, what it comes down to, more than anythng else, is political intertia – the tendency for things to remain at rest or in motion unless affected by significant forces. That’s why the working class has such protections and guarantees as it has; and that is also why it doesn’t have more.