Recent Articles

Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class

On Political Organization: From the New Deal to the New Left [197kB PDF format]
The United States is the only nation in the “advanced” capitalist world without a significant left party. Although labor and socialist/communist parties have long existed—many cities had workingmen’s parties; the Socialist Party made important electoral inroads at the turn of the 20th century; and the Communists were key organizers of the mass industrial union and other social movements in the 1930s and 1930s—in general Americans have been tied to the two-party system. The question is whether the absence of a left political formation of significant influence and constituency is a function of “American Exceptionalism”—as was first argued by the German sociologist, Werner Sombart whose book Why There is No Socialism in the United States first appeared in 1907, when the Socialists were in a phase of rapid growth—or whether far more concrete, “subjective” influences have prevented the sustenance of a left party of national influence. Sombart’s essential argument is that in the absence of a feudal tradition class consciousness was never formed; in other words historical materialism applies only to Europe. America’s artisan and yeoman past, which constituted a sustaining myth of individualism; its surfeit of natural resources, which permit cheap energy and cheap food; its mobility opportunities, which parallel Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis; its populist urban political machines, which absorbed class discontent; and its ethnically diverse working class all constituted unbreachable obstacles to class solidarity. With two major exceptions—the Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1948, and the Green Party’s 2000 campaign in behalf of Ralph Nader—by the end of World War II progressives and many radicals had been swept up in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition or had conceded that radicalism was incapable of attracting a popular constituency.

A Mills Revival? [89kB PDF format]
More than forty years after his death, in 1962 at age forty five C. Wright Mills remains one of the most influential, admired and despised social thinkers of our time. Yet there is one one full length biography of him in print, that of his former literary executor, Irving Louis Horowitz, who treats Mills's importance with considerable scepticism, to say the least. His books were translated into 23 languages and widely reviewed in the mainstream media as well as academic journals. He was praised and condemned with almost equal measures. His influence on the student and anti-war movements of the 1960s was massive and he is deeply admired in Latin America but, while roundly criticized, he was never recognized by many of his American colleagues in the social sciences as a major thinker. I believe this disparity can be explained by Mills's refusal to be tucked away in the academy. Consigned to a kind of academic purgatory for the last three decades of the 20th century at a time when social theory has migrated from the social sciences obsessed with case studies and social "problems" to literature and philosophy, when he was rarely discussed and almost never cited, C. Wright Mills remains an absent presence. Every sociologist knew his name and, in their political unconscious, recognized his salience, but were deterred by fear and careerism from following his path as a public political intellectual.

Subaltern in Paradise [117kB PDF format]
In her widely disseminated article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", written more than twenty years ago, Gayatri Spivak urged her interlocutors to consider the condition of post colonialism. While so-called "third world" nations are formally independent, their economies remained tied to global capitalism. And within these countries, the poor and especially women remain silent and un-or under represented. In any case they rarely represent themselves, remain under the domination of men, in the first place their husbands and their fathers. Spivak argues that westerners cannot speak for those driven to silence by repression; despite good intentions their ability to speak for themselves is hampered by liberal concern. Yet, new struggles against global capitalism has produced a new discourse of human rights in which the universal has once more taken its place in the lexicon of emancipation. While Spivak's admonition remains salient to our times, it must be mediated by new conditions. While people historically excluded from participation, at any level of the national state must, in the end, engage in self-activity to overcome the burdens of domination and exploitation, the repressive structures of state and patronat control, especially in rural areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America require a response from those privileged to acquire a global vision.

On the Future of American Labor [111kB PDF format]
There is now a vigorous debate, in the era of labor's decline, concerning the future of the American unions. Some have argued that revitalization requires the replacement of the so-called service model of unionism which focuses mainly on meeting the needs of existing members by an organizing model that emphasizes expanding membership. This article argues that, even if organizing is important, the main problem is that unions have remained subordinate to capital and to the Democratic Party. Unions need to regain their independence, but the top leaders are probably not capable of reversing the transformation of members into clients. What is needed is an independent labor-oriented catalyst that raises the question of the democratization of the labor movement, chiefly from the bottom.

USA: The Fight Shifts to the Local Level [164kB PDF format]
Under the radar screen in the emerging new American empire, which is preoccopied with global domination, the struggle for urban space is among the most dramatic within the United States. Long neglected in the post-war era of suburbanization, disinvestment and dispersion of the once highly concentrated urban industrial base, cities have once more become a focus for intense social and political contestation. Capital views the city as a new field of internal investment but there is no question of providing high-quality public goods such as affordable housing for ordinary working people. Instead the city is a place for gentrification, providing luxury bedrooms for thousands of the small, but expanding professonal managerial class, commercial space for Wall Street firms, expensive restaurants, entertainment palaces and opulent private universities. This phenomenon of privatization affects almost every sphere of everyday life: public goods are reduced to squalor; private goods loom over the urban landscape. And faced with shrinking revenues local governments alter the few protections that remain for tenants;occupying too valuable land working class residents are evicted or, what amonts to the same thing, are confronted by rents they cannot afford and "voluntarily" flee to the suburbs or to the periphery of the metropoles. Perhaps New York is the pinnacle of this constellation but similar configurations occur in major financial centers such as Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Retreat to Postmodern Politics? [172kB PDF format]
From the dawn of modern capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries to the present liberal political philosophy presupposes the leading elements of the capitalist mode of production as the unquestioned context of theorizing: the market, private ownership of the means of production, and, since the introduction of the British parliamentary system and the American constitution, the inviolability of liberal democratic state institutions. However much they are imperfect, these are considered the best means, in a complex urban industrial society, by which the underlying population may participate in government decision-making. The main questions for political theory have always been how to reconcile one of the entailments of both private property and the market-- economic inequality--, with the late 18th century presumption that in a democratic society, citizens should be equal in terms of state decision-making. Intrinsic to dominant liberal democratic theory is the idea that the fundamental function of citizenship is to confer consent on different factions of the ruling elites. Some theorists, most famously Isaiah Berlin, have gone so far as to argue that any concept of the collective will de facto deprives the individual of her liberty because it sets limits on acceptable political behavior.