"Calamity Song" - Decemberists
(From their new recording "The King is Dead" which features REM guitarist Peter Buck on several cuts. See if the opening riff of the song not reminded you of early REM.)
I really want to have time to read and digest Kevin Drum's longer piece in Mother Jones on the fate of the labor movement and its relationship to the fate of the political left generally. Several questions of course leap to mind -- 1) can labor have a renaissance under the existing legal, economic, and cultural structure; 2) are there legal changes that can be plausibly achieved within the next few years that might help union density improve; and 3) if the answers to questions 1 and 2 are negative, can we nonetheless achieve a more left wing politics in this country, and, if so, how does the absence of a central role for organized labor affect the nature of those politics. Those it seems to me are the salient questions that are raised by Drum's article, the conditions on the ground as we speak, and the broader reactionary moment in which we find ourselves.
I don't have the time right now to deal with these in any depth. Briefly for discussion purposes, although I have always believed in fighting the good fight and not giving into despair or defeatism, I remain skeptical that in the present circumstances that the labor movement can enjoy a socially meaningful renaissance. I hope I am wrong about this, but everything about historical trends, the state of the American economy as we find it, the increasingly consumerist and atomized culture in which we find ourselves, and the dominance of ideas of market efficiency in our discourse argues against the resumption of labor density at meaningful levels, by which I mean where something on the order of 20 - 25% of workers are represented by unions -- to me this is the level that would be necessary to make unions culturally and economically relevant in a way that couldn't be ignored. Alas, the existing legal framework for organizing and the lawless response that it permits employers almost across the spectrum remains an enormous and seemingly immovable obstacle -- certainly immovable if the filibuster remains a fact of life.
On the other hand, I do believe that a more leftward politics is going to prove possible and may do so within the relatively near future. The question then arises what does such a politics look like and what forces, if any, within it will play the role that the labor movement has played for the last eighty years. Can the labor movement survive at something like its current level of strength and continue to play a meaningful, if not overwhelming, role in shaping this politics. These are the questions that I want to get back to -- I'm curious to see if I have any answers.
What's going on out there?
