"We're Workers," Says Jon Stewart; or, May Day 2009
A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart once again did what the people who are actually paid to do it often don't. In his interview with that hired flunky of the financiers, Jim Cramer of Mad Money, Stewart raked the financial networks for their shameless boosterism of easy money before its collapse last year.
The large volume of commentary on this interview, including on this website, largely missed what in my view was Stewart's most searching statement: "When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we're workers..."
On this May Day and in the midst of the economic crisis, it is worth remembering that we are, most of us, workers.
This dimension of our identities, of our very existence, is not currently prominent in our political discourse, popular culture, or academic institutions. Alone among the major democracies, the U.S. does not have a major political party focused on issues of class and labor. As a result our politics shies away from open conversation, let alone conflict, over these issues. During the presidential campaign last year only Sarah Palin openly (and, of course, opportunistically) used the term "working class" in her speeches. Modest tax increases on the wealthy are routinely denounced as "class warfare," while virtually no mainstream commentator describes the hardened anti-unionism of some of the country's largest companies, and the ongoing pillaging of the public coffers by financial firms, in those terms.
Our centers of knowledge and learning don't fare much better. My guess is there are far fewer departments in our leading universities of labor or class studies than departments of women's studies and African American or other race and ethnicity studies. In recent decades the academy has been far more enthusiastic in its support of scholarship in gender, race, national origin, and now sexual orientation--all vital areas of study--than of class relations and power.
This wasn't always the case. Until the mid-20th century, this country was the scene of some of the liveliest politics of class and labor anywhere. Socialist and anarchist parties, powerful unions, and organizations of farm workers and tenants were major political actors. Cultural luminaries like Steinbeck, Guthrie and Chaplin were openly allied with or sympathetic to these movements, as were many faculty and students at major universities. This class consciousness eroded over the last few decades as unions settled for deals on wages and working conditions instead of seeking political power independently of the two parties, and the Cold War and McCarthyism effectively purged the ranks of radical intellectuals and cultural workers.
The trajectory of this erosion is neatly captured by the evolution of Labor Day in the U.S. The international May Day actually began in the U.S. on May 1, 1886, when hundreds of thousands of North American workers mobilized to strike for the eight hour workday. Since then, May 1 has been celebrated everywhere as a demonstration of labor solidarity and power--everywhere, that is, except in the U.S., which, thanks to a decree by President Cleveland in 1894, marks Labor Day on the first Monday in September, and which most of us treat as a long weekend of TV and end-of-summer barbecues.
Perhaps the economic crisis will serve as a reminder that, for all of our politically significant differences and multiple identities, most of us share the reality of having to work for wages so that we can live.
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Great article and so true.
In Australia we have a Political Party that was formed out of the working class in the early 1900's, particularly because of the great shearers strike where sheep shearers refused to work for Sheep Station owners because of poor wages and conditions.
The Labor Party in Australia won Government last year over the "Conservatives" based on a major difference in policy, the Conservative Governments introduction of "individual contracts" (The Workchoices Act) between workers and employers. Well, it turn out to be totally disasterous and workers were stripped of conditions that were contained in awards and agreements fought for by the Union movement. At the last Federal election the majority of Australians tossed out the Cons and voted Labor into Government. The Prime Minister of Australia John Howard (an avid G W B supporter) even lost his own seat and is no longer in Parliament
It can be done to have a political party that is the care taker for the working class or as it is now called "The working moms and dads", small business owners, students, severely disadvantaged, the elderly and the unemployed.
I know the Democrats in the USA are in some ways closely aligned to the same principles of the Labor Party in Australia and they need to continue to recognise workers are the backbone of any society.
As we say in the labour movement "Maintain the rage"!!!!
One of the reasons you won't hear honest debate on class and workers' rights is that corporations have won the media war. In the Reagan years, they successfully infused their philosophy into mainstream media, depicting organized labor as destructive, corrupt, and vaguely communist. Ralph Nader has chronicled the corporate takeover of our educational facilities (gifts and sponsorships to legal, medical, business, science and journalism schools and universities), and large media holdings including TV, radio, print, and motion pictures. They influence through lobbyists, commercials, sports sponsorships, and rock concerts. Meanwhile, they engage in wage suppression, exploitation of impoverished foreign workers, pollution, and market manipulations. Everything is geared towards the next quarter's profits. We are well on the way to another era of feudalism, and no one in the MSM is willing to admit it.
A very good set of points. As a European, I'm often puzzled when speaking to Americans (or reading US journalism) by several things:
1) the apparently widespread conviction that the US doesn't have a class-system, when it so visibly does;
2) the strange (to me) shift in terminology whereby the social group I call the 'working class' is referred to in US discourse as the 'middle class'. That may seem a small thing, but it's pretty poisonous in its effect;
3) the lack of public critiques of capitalism in public discourse. Every western European nation is a capitalist society (with bells on), despite what the Republicans often like to imply. But there are vigourous critiques of that capitalism even within the mainstream press, and one of the ways this is played out is through discussions of each country's class systems. I rarely if ever seem to see this in the US, and even highly educated Americans often seem to shy away from such discussions.
All very odd.
We are taught from a very early age that there are no class distinctions; it's the 800 lb. gorilla in the room when some of us get discern reality from myth. Also, any talk of class separation is almost always tainted with words that are connected to dictatorial totalitarianism.
See Sanjiv Gupta's Profile
Thanks for your comment. I think an important reason for the differences in political culture between the US and western Europe is the lack of openly left political parties large enough to be influential. There's no shortage of small organizations and progressive individuals, but that's generally not sufficient to break into the mainstream discourse. One hopes that events like the ongoing economic crisis will change the parameters of debate.
BYE BYE UNIONS !!!!
BYE BYE 8 HOUR WORK DAY !!!!!
BYE BYE FAMILY AND REST !!!!
BYE BYE CHANGE TO IMPROVE EDUCATION !!!!
HELLO 60 HOUR + WORK WEEK !!
HELLO NO BENIFITS!!!
HELLO NO INSURANCE !!
Some companys charge hourly employee extra for health insurance so the Managment get their insirance at a lower price of free.
Hello.
Here's my opinion, for what it's worth:
http://www
Good stuff Michael. Straight forward, plain language, truthful. I recommend it.
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Thanks, that was a fun read! You have a talent for writing about complicated things in a funny, insightful and accessible way. I don't quite agree with your statement in Part I that socialism wouldn't work because it's against human nature in some fundamental way. Most of us obey traffic laws most of the time even though as individuals we're typically interested just in getting where we're going as quickly as possible. Of course there's other reasons socialism may never work, and certainly the totalitarian variety is history.
Wow! That was amazing! When I moved to the states from Germany some 30 years ago and questioned some of these social inequalities (especially around the Reagan years), I was called a dirty socialist and banned into the closet (well, not really, but it felt like it). I am so glad that people are starting to see what capitalism is really all about. Unfortunately, as long as we have to deal with the Republicans and their followers, this will not change. Maybe Mr. Sullivan can write another article and help us out with some insightful ideas.
Thank you, Mr. Gupta. I am still waiting for the president to address the trade agreements that have eviscerated this country's working class. The bleeding has to stop.
I think part of the problem may be that we dislike admitting that we have a class system in this country. It isn't the Middle Ages "nobility & peasant" type & we do have more mobility, but it is still a snobbish, culturally stifling system which pits person against person. If you have money you are somebody, if you have none you are nobody. It doesn't matter really, but some people think it does.
The MSM is complicit in that it punishes anyone who dares to discuss economic issues in terms of class. If you dare to do so, you are inciting class warfare and are painted as a socialist or communist. We've always had de facto class warfare in this country but it has been particularly acute--and unilateral--since 1980. One side has been expected to take it lying down and not make a sound. Our European counterparts don't have the same qualms about raising class.
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Thanks for reading and for your comment. I agree that the U.S. does not compare favorably with much of Europe with regard to this, as noted also by our European friend above. Apart from the absence of influential leftist political parties, the U.S. population is also hampered by the decline in the strength of unions here. Unions in some European countries are more powerful by comparison, though even there they've weakened over time.
I am a socialist and I am ready to rumble. The corporate media can paint me any way they like.
Agreed.
And let's look at the Overlord class in the U.S. - their wealth is NOT from work. They inherit a lot of it, which just goes on in "investments" (Wall Street Gambling, real estate, etc.) to produce even more money. Money they receive in association with a job (notice, I did not say "work") goes into the same "investment" stream.
On the Oligarchy's tax returns "Unearned Income" is much greater than "Earned Income." Ergo, Congress keeps getting wrapped up with capital gains taxes and estate taxes, and other mechanisms that the rest of America has little use for.
What this means is our whole "culture" & "society," and therefore "governments" are geared towards fooling those who survive on Earned Income to focus their energy on things, thoughts, and events that benefit the Unearned Income class. We are indeed "peasants," who bow low when the Lord passes, and we spend our time fighting anyone who the Lord tells us to fight.
It's all planned. And it's working as planned.
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Thanks for reading. I agree that an understanding of who makes mostly unearned vs earned income is critical. This is where it gets complicated, however. Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley has examined tax returns from the previous century, and concludes: "The evidence suggests that top incomes earners today are not “rentiers” deriving their incomes from past wealth but rather are “working rich,” highly paid employees or new entrepreneurs who have not yet accumulated fortunes comparable to those accumulated during the Gilded Age." (See "Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the U.S." at http://www
Thanks Sanja for an excellent article. As a passionate former student of history at UC Berkeley (cue the conservative insults) I believe the main problem is the historical narrative we teach in our public schools. We educate teens that rights were given to groups not fought for in violent struggles. We absolutely have to correct the past before we can move forward
Great post. Liberal voters need to start demanding change from Democratic politicians and stop electing corporate shills whose only claim to progressivism is being pro-choice. Until that happens nothing will change. Unfortunately, we are nowhere near that point.
"Our centers of knowledge and learning don't fare much better. My guess is there are far fewer departments in our leading universities of labor or class studies than departments of women's studies and African American or other race and ethnicity studies."
Wrong.
The whole point of Universities is "The Class War and How To Come Out On Top of It."
The important thing is that the spawn of the wealthy get a shiny gloss of superficial knowledge on their foreheads so they can pretend to be superior when spending out their trust funds abroad or taking over the family business -- and the rest of us get a fighting chance to compete for seats in the professional schools, to be their lackeys.
Oh "centers of knowledge and learning" my eye. Education just a fairy tale they tell the rest of society to justify their perpetuation of the class system in America.
Every effort has been made to make sure our universities are just finishing schools for the wealthy.
I've worked in enough consulting firms that if someone says he's from Harvard, but he wasn't a scholarship student, then there is no reason to believe he's any brighter than the kid in the mail room who got his associates from the local community college. Whenever I'm introduced to someone with an Ivy League education now, I think, "well, heck. George Bush went to Yale and got an MBA from Harvard."
Oh I forgot the other purpose of Universities -- it's a system to convince nubile coeds to provide a narcissistic supply of adulation to dirty old geezers.
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Thanks to you both for your comments. @wagadog: Certainly universities, like other large institutions in our society, do the work of perpetuating the class system. However, like other institutions, they also do other things that any viable society would need to provide, e.g. education in the humanities, sciences, the arts, and so on. Unless we're willing to dismiss as hopelessly contaminated all the knowledge generated and accumulated under capitalism, we must have some organizations devoted to learning. In my view what we should call for is massive increases in funding to public universities so they can compete effectively with private ones with their huge endowments. @meko: your characterization may well apply to many private schools, but the U.S. also has a very large number of community colleges and public universities.
The U.S. is a fantastic example of the Working Class being indoctrinated to work and vote against their own interests all the more worrying for the fact (as you point out) that there was until relatively recently a massive interest in class struggle and an educated, involved and motivated radial streak a mile wide in the country which has been throttled.
I'm married to a graduate of two ivy league universities who didn't know who when I went on a rant about it one night just kept saying "Who" and "What" when I was throwing out names like Goldman, Berkman, Debs, the Farmers- Labour movement and events like the Steelworkers strike.
To reach that stage in a planned education and know nothing about events that major in your own nations history is lamentable and a sad indictment of the U.S. education system.
But Cesare Chavez did not go to Harvard and neither did Emma Goldman or Eugene Debs.
Nowadays the "radical elements" are courted by the top schools in to write papers about our phallocentric culture in carefully segmented-off womens' studies departments, or to write about the history of the labor movement in their history classes.
This serves many purposes. One, it gives the ruling class an excellent opportunity to keep an eye on the innermost thoughts of the radical elements by the papers they produce in class, or, if necessary, graduate school and beyond. They are kept busy competing with each other for a dwindling number of seats in narrowly defined academic fields. Or, they go to law school or business school or medical school or nursing school -- where they are simply indoctrinated to serve their corporate masters, in exchange for at least having health insurance and relatively steady work.
The important thing about university education is to keep the most intelligent people from having their own ideas, and acting upon them.
Which is why Pink Floyd asks:L "Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
Well said, Mr. Gupta.
".... our wealth is work .... " - Jon Stewart. Truer words were never spoken, indeed. I have spent a fair amount of time trying to state what Mr. Stewart stated in four simple but powerful words. Kudos.
If you work for wages you are working class. This is news to Americans. Thats why we are such easy prey for our corporate masters. We are unconscious.
This should not be news to any Americans but the role of labor in the nation's success & progress has to be taught & most don't get a hint until college. It would be great if concepts of labor & class struggle were introduced & repeated from middle school on. That would be a revolution in teaching.
I agree maddy. But look at this thread. Just three of us here. I am an uneducated man so I don't know what they teach in college. But I know that many, probably most of the people who post here have a degree. And I very rarely see any sign of class consciousness on these threads.
Americans are ashamed not to be rich. We are taught the myth that anyone can be rich and powerful if they work hard and are smart. "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?" is a common question. So people vote aspirationally. Even if they can't be proud of their social status, they can take pride in voting like a rich man.
So true.
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