The historian Jon Wiener wrote, in his review of your book, that after the working class stopped talking about class struggle, the financial class doubled down on class struggle and began winning big. So he sees part of the issue, I think, as a failure of nerve on the part of the left and the labor movement. Do you think that’s fair to say?
Well, I think that’s a complicated question. One must always recognize, even in our own age, and certainly back during the First Gilded Age, that the element of fear, and real legitimate fear, plays a role. If you want to talk about today, the One Percent, corporate America has become powerful in part because as the country has industrialized, the wherewithal for resisting the power of organized wealth has diminished.
The unions that were formed in the nineteenth century, and of course culminating during the New Deal during the 1930s, are a pale shadow of what they once were. They used to provide a defense mechanism. Without them, it’s harder, it’s dangerous, it’s very risky. Let’s say you’re an undocumented immigrant worker, which makes up 12 million people in the American economy, at super exploitative wages. They’re working for employers who they know are violating every wage and hour law on the books. But if you’re one of those people, are you going to have the courage to stand up and report your employer? Maybe not; you’re risking deportation. So fear plays a real role in this. The National Labor Relations Act, which presumably gave people the right to organize, has steadily been whittled away by Congress over the years, and especially Republican presidents over the last 25 years. So in a variety of ways, fear is part of the picture.
To what extent is the ‘60s notion of personal freedom or liberation part of the acquiescence problem, or at least part of the fragmenting of resistance? It sort of turned into consumerism, didn’t it?
I think it did. I think there was, pardon the expression, a dialectic at work. What began as a kind of liberatory impulse, and, for instance in the case of feminism, identified the family and the patriarchal family in particular as the site of a very intimate, personal oppression, and that one had to open up this private zone to private scrutiny in order to liberate women. And the whole counter-culture, which began to talk about personal liberation, some of which defied the kind of repressiveness and inhibition that had characterized life up until then, came into the hands of corporate America as a way of mining that psyche through the avenues of consumer culture.
So private rather than social emancipation becomes the goal, and you can achieve that emancipation in a thousand ways in the marketplace. You can achieve it in your fantasy life. You can achieve it in a variety of ways; corporate America became so sensitive to it that it was even prepared to make fun of itself if it could find a niche market that would buy into that ironic advertising. All corporate America cares about — they’re amoral, I don’t mean anti-moral, just amoral — all that matters is the bottom line.
What role did the Reagan revolution play in all this, the social-cultural changes like money worship, celebrity worship, that sort of thing?
Well, I think the Reagan era is obviously crucial. It’s a turning point in the history of resistance turning into acquiescence. Part of that is what you allude to, just to be very practical-minded about it; the administration practically begins with the breaking of the air-traffic controller strike, which was the signal to all of industrial and corporate America that it was open warfare on unions, kind of the green light to do that.
And of course there was this transvaluation of values. You had a free market during the era of the New Deal that had been constrained by various social and state inhibitions. Under Reagan, we begin to buy into the notion that freedom and the free market are the same thing, and that the way to unleash that freedom is to deregulate the whole economic arena, which gave license to… we began to worship the big financiers, the titans of finance, the Michael Milkens, the Carl Icahns, the Ivan Boeskys, the “greed is good” world, because they became the paragons. They became the pioneers of a new kind of market freedom. And we began to treat them, and the media began to treat them, as kind of savants, as gurus, as heroes, which was very different from the way the culture had treated them a hundred years earlier.
Well, I think that’s a complicated question. One must always recognize, even in our own age, and certainly back during the First Gilded Age, that the element of fear, and real legitimate fear, plays a role. If you want to talk about today, the One Percent, corporate America has become powerful in part because as the country has industrialized, the wherewithal for resisting the power of organized wealth has diminished.
The unions that were formed in the nineteenth century, and of course culminating during the New Deal during the 1930s, are a pale shadow of what they once were. They used to provide a defense mechanism. Without them, it’s harder, it’s dangerous, it’s very risky. Let’s say you’re an undocumented immigrant worker, which makes up 12 million people in the American economy, at super exploitative wages. They’re working for employers who they know are violating every wage and hour law on the books. But if you’re one of those people, are you going to have the courage to stand up and report your employer? Maybe not; you’re risking deportation. So fear plays a real role in this. The National Labor Relations Act, which presumably gave people the right to organize, has steadily been whittled away by Congress over the years, and especially Republican presidents over the last 25 years. So in a variety of ways, fear is part of the picture.
To what extent is the ‘60s notion of personal freedom or liberation part of the acquiescence problem, or at least part of the fragmenting of resistance? It sort of turned into consumerism, didn’t it?
I think it did. I think there was, pardon the expression, a dialectic at work. What began as a kind of liberatory impulse, and, for instance in the case of feminism, identified the family and the patriarchal family in particular as the site of a very intimate, personal oppression, and that one had to open up this private zone to private scrutiny in order to liberate women. And the whole counter-culture, which began to talk about personal liberation, some of which defied the kind of repressiveness and inhibition that had characterized life up until then, came into the hands of corporate America as a way of mining that psyche through the avenues of consumer culture.
So private rather than social emancipation becomes the goal, and you can achieve that emancipation in a thousand ways in the marketplace. You can achieve it in your fantasy life. You can achieve it in a variety of ways; corporate America became so sensitive to it that it was even prepared to make fun of itself if it could find a niche market that would buy into that ironic advertising. All corporate America cares about — they’re amoral, I don’t mean anti-moral, just amoral — all that matters is the bottom line.
What role did the Reagan revolution play in all this, the social-cultural changes like money worship, celebrity worship, that sort of thing?
Well, I think the Reagan era is obviously crucial. It’s a turning point in the history of resistance turning into acquiescence. Part of that is what you allude to, just to be very practical-minded about it; the administration practically begins with the breaking of the air-traffic controller strike, which was the signal to all of industrial and corporate America that it was open warfare on unions, kind of the green light to do that.
And of course there was this transvaluation of values. You had a free market during the era of the New Deal that had been constrained by various social and state inhibitions. Under Reagan, we begin to buy into the notion that freedom and the free market are the same thing, and that the way to unleash that freedom is to deregulate the whole economic arena, which gave license to… we began to worship the big financiers, the titans of finance, the Michael Milkens, the Carl Icahns, the Ivan Boeskys, the “greed is good” world, because they became the paragons. They became the pioneers of a new kind of market freedom. And we began to treat them, and the media began to treat them, as kind of savants, as gurus, as heroes, which was very different from the way the culture had treated them a hundred years earlier.
