Since at least the 1970s we have watched the reduction and disempowerment of organized labor in the West, and with it the destruction of one of the most crucial sets of checks and balances on the natural inequality of capitalism, especially when it forgets its own essential need for consumers. In outsource-target, developing nations, labor unions are suppressed by any means necessary including the occasional death squad. The concept is hardly grasped by former communists, and China fails to rise above the Red sweatshop. We listen to the well financed, and professionally orchestrated sobbing of the obscenely wealthy at the horror of taxation – even to pay for their own wars – and their absolute conviction that management should be paid a 1000% or so more than labor. And when propaganda and corruption fails, violence is always the last resort. This brilliant photo essay by Martin Shakeshaft and David Bowmer actually covers the 1984 UK miners strike when Margaret Thatcher supposedly broke the mineworkers union, but it is a pattern repeated over and over by rightwing regimes. And yet this does have a surprise ending.
Music? How about Marilyn Manson doing “Working Class Hero”? Too decadent? Okay, so here’s Lennon.
Was Saturday night better when I stopped thinking and just got drunk I wonder?
the photo essay is great stuff. I marched and picketed with the Harlan County miners in the '70's. Occasional commenter at this site, Mr. Beer N. Hockey has just gone back to work after a three month strike. At my job, we just signed a contract that will carry me through all the way to my retirement (!?!?) I'm a California rust belt refugee. I am a laid off auto-worker and a laid off steel worker.
ReplyDeleteHaving said all of that, Jeez comrade, I come here to dabble at being an old boho, not an old working stiff. Yes, I've been a trade unionist since I was 18, but I joined the White Panthers when I was 16. I've often mentioned "The Long Orbit" as the first science fiction novel to conclude with the signing of a union contract, but I was surprised to see a defense of organized labor at Doc 40. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised.
Somewhat incoherently yours, I have to get up in 4 hours for work.
Thank you kindly, Jon. Gotta to be some foundation to sex, drugs, and rock & roll even in my distorted quadrant.
ReplyDelete"the reduction and disempowerment of organized labor in the West, and with it the destruction of one of the most crucial sets of checks and balances on the natural inequality of capitalism"
ReplyDeleteI sometimes think the single overriding plan for the better part of the second half of the 20th century by those guys was to make sure that, if nothing else, unions were abolished and that organized dissent be removed from common thought. Part of that plan involves making sure that working class kids have next to no economic access to higher education, unlike the 60's, where factory town kids like me had no trouble being accepted at state universities. There may be further and more complex conspiracies, but in those I have complete confidence.
100 dead miners in the Ukraine, a pattern in that part of the world. Like West Virginia in the 20's, no doubt.