MY MORNING WALK

It was twenty-seven degrees in Chapel Hill when I got up this morning at 4:30.  After drinking some decaf, I put on my long johns, my thermal underwear, a turtleneck, two sweaters, sneakers and socks, a scarf, a hoodie, my reflector vest, and two pairs of woolen gloves and set out on my morning walk, looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy in Ghostbusters.  Despite being quite protected from the chill, my thoughts were so disordered that I could not manage a sustained train of thought as I walked.  Nearing the conclusion of the walk, I finally began to arrange my broodings into something resembling a coherent narrative, and I am going to try in this post to set them out.  I hope you will be patient with my meanderings.  These are difficult times.

There are two structures of domination and inequality in virtually all societies, the first social and the second economic, neither of which can be reduced to nor explained as a function of the other, although they everywhere and always interact in endlessly complex ways.  The oldest and most pervasive structure of domination is male domination of women.  This is often accompanied by racial and ethnic domination, as well of course as by xenophobic fear and loathing of the other, of foreigners, of immigrants, of those who pray or look or eat or walk or talk or even smell differently.  The other structure of domination, the economic, takes many forms.  In a capitalist economy it manifests itself as exploitation by those who own or control the means of production of the vastly larger segment of society that, owning nothing, must sell its labor for a wage.  Neither of these structures, I say, is explainable merely as a subordinate form of the other, though many of the social theorists whose work I most respect have thought that it was.

The United States, like every other society, exhibits, and has always exhibited, both structures of domination and inequality, but chattel slavery and its sequals, which is the defining feature of American society, has given American society and politics a distinctive character.  It is in this way that America truly is, as its apologists endlessly claim, exceptional. 

The most striking changes in American society during my adult life have been two: First, a series of so-called liberation movements by those who have been socially dominated – The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Lib, Gay Liberation [latterly the LGBTTrans Movement], as well as the Latino/a Movement and the Native American Movement – and second, the progressive increase in the inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, an increase mirrored throughout the advanced capitalist world, as chronicled by Thomas Piketty.

I have on a number of occasions noted in my blog posts that the liberation movements seek the perfection of American capitalism, not its overthrow.  That is to say, taken as a whole, they seek to eliminate the first structure of domination from American society while leaving the second structure intact and unaltered.  The demand for full integration of African-Americans into American society, after all, is simply a demand, if I may put it in a sort of statistical shorthand, that the percentage of Black men and women going to college, serving in the military, holding positions of leadership in business and government and the academy become equal to the percentage for White men and women.  “Equal pay for equal work,” the battle cry of the Women’s Movement, is, when one thinks about it, a demand that women be exploited at just the same rate as men, no more and no less.  These movements are, let me emphasize, vitally important, and their successes have dramatically improved the lives of countless scores of millions of Americans.  Their successes are still only partial, fragile, and – as we are about to see – perpetually under assault by those who would undo them.  Let me speak personally:  I will go to the barricades to defend my son’s right to marry whom he chooses.

What of the other structure of domination, the economic?  Here the story is not nearly so happy.  After a brief time in the post-World War II era when economic inequality decreased, we are now well into a return to the historically extremely high levels of exploitation and inequality that gave The Gilded Age its name.  I assume that anyone reading this blog is well aware of this development, so I shan’t cite statistics.  Let me simply reiterate a point I have made many times:  It is the structure of capitalism, not the educational or other failings of the less well off, that is to blame for the inequality in American society and for the stagnant wages of those who in the old days were identified as The Working Class.  The American economy is quite capable today of producing more than enough to provide everyone in this nation with a secure, decent, even comfortable material existence.  What is quite definitely not the case is that American capitalism is capable of providing everyone in American with a secure, decent, comfortable existence while also providing a substantial and growing rate of profit to the owners of the means of production. 

 

Perhaps the data from one statistical chart will be useful here.  I take this from the Economic Policy Institute.   For the first twenty-five years after WW II, productivity and hourly compensation rose almost exactly in tandem.  For the past forty years, hourly real wages have been essentially stagnant while productivity has more than doubled.  Even under the exploitative conditions of capitalism, the well-being of the Working Class could today have been dramatically better than it in fact is.

 

What is to be done?  Well, I made a very nice career out of teaching at universities, so far be it from me to pooh-pooh a college degree, but it is simply nonsense to suppose that college for all – even free college for all – is the royal road to Working Class affluence.  It is, to be sure, the royal road to instant jobs for doctoral students.  A dramatic increase in the number of young men and women going to college would immediately create lots and lots of jobs for those enrolled in doctoral programs.  But while the number of unemployed PhDs would dwindle, the number of unemployed college graduates would balloon.  Even Bernie seems not to have grasped this elementary fact.

 

Look:  the American economy needs, and will always need, large numbers of men and women doing jobs for which a college education is not a prerequisite [I leave to one side the fact that many of the jobs now requiring a Bachelor’s Degree – such as Corporate Executive, for example – can be performed quite well by those without the B. A.]  Let me try a little thought experiment to show you what I mean.

 

As I have mentioned, on January 21^st, I will go up to Washington, DC to take part in the “million women march” [despite Jerry Fresia’s doubts, which I share.]  Here is the way it is going to go.  On January 20^th, I will call a local company to arrange for a cab to the airport.  An operator will take my details, and the next day a cab will come to my condo building to drive me to RDU Airport.  There, I will first show my ticket and a photo ID to a TSA agent, and then take off my shoes and my belt and go through a TSA screening under the vigilant eye of another TSA agent. At the gate, my ticket will be scanned by an airline employee, after which I will board the plane, to be greeted by one of several cabin attendants.  The plane will be flown by a pilot and a co-pilot. When I deplane at Washington National [I refuse to call it by its official name], I will stop for breakfast [it will still be wicked early], where I will be served by a waitperson who will bring me the food prepared by someone in the kitchen.  Then I will catch a cab to somewhere as close as I can get to the assembly point for the march.

 

By my count, on this brief trip, I shall rely directly on the labor services of at least twelve people, only two of whom [the pilots] are required to have Bachelor’s Degrees, and should I happen to be flying on a regional airline, probably they don’t need more than an Associate’s Degree.  I very strongly support the right of these twelve people to pursue college level studies, but doing so will not transform the jobs they now perform, nor under the standard conditions of capitalism will it somehow drive up their wages.  Each one, individually, may gain materially from completing a four year degree, but it is not possible that all of the people in America – two-thirds of the total adult population! – who do not now have college degrees can collectively rise into the ranks of the upper middle class.  That is an example of what we philosophers call The Fallacy of Composition.  It is true that America is productive enough to pay all of them, right now, “middle class” salaries for doing their essential jobs [how else am I going to get to Washington].  But not so long as the American economy is capitalist.

 

Well, what does all of this have to do with Trump and the disastrous election?  Let me try to put it as simply as I can.  About a generation and a half ago, the Republican and Democratic Parties made a pair of devil’s bargains with the electorate.  The Republican Party offered Working Class and Lower Middle Class Whites a chance at continued social domination in return for continued economic exploitation.  The voters would get to continue to dominate women, Blacks, Latinos, and Gays, and the plutocrats would get to continue their very profitable exploitation.  The Democrats cut a somewhat different bargain.  They offered social liberation to African Americans, Latinos, and Gays, in return for preserving and enhancing the economic status and security and returns to the Upper Middle Class of college educated professionals.

 

Because of the oddities of the American electoral system and the generally low level of voter participation, this turned out to be a pretty good deal for both Parties.  Were it not for the weirdness of the Electoral College system, the Democratic Party’s bargain would have turned out this time to be a good one.  Clinton is apparently on track to win the popular vote by several million.  They just weren’t quite in the right places.

 

Now those of us on the left have to decide what we do going forward.  Let’s face it.  Collective ownership of the means of production is not in the cards, at least not in my shorter and shorter lifetime.  For structural reasons, having to do principally with the loss of manufacturing jobs and the automation of those that remain, a vigorous rebirth of the union movement that led to that tracking of wages with productivity during the first quarter century after WW II is going to be very, very difficult.  I am totally committed to the effort, but I am not under any illusions about its prospects.

 

It is essential that we fight to preserve the rights and protections that the Liberation Movements have secured over the past half century.  Indeed, in these next four years, that may be the most important thing we can do.  It is a rearguard action, to be sure, but in a war, when you have lost a big battle, a rearguard action may be the best option.

 

Once the leaders of the Democratic Party have time to collect their wits and examine the returns in detail, they will almost certainly conclude that their thirty-year-old bargain still remains their best bet.  After all, they did win the popular vote decisively.

 

I suppose it all comes down to one fundamental question, the answer to which I do not know:  Is it possible to form an alliance between those who have been used by the Republican Party and those who have been used by the Democratic Party in which social liberation is joined with economic liberation to make a common front against capitalist exploitation?

 

I just do not know.