Page 3 of
3 The
great silence of a Gilded
Age By Steve
Fraser
story of collective destiny -
Redemption, Enlightenment, and Progress, the
Cooperative Commonwealth, Proletarian Revolution -
don't play well in this refashioned political
theater.
The
end of the Age of
Acquiescence? However, the wheel
turns. The capitalism of the Second Gilded Age now
faces a systemic crisis and, under the pressure of
impending disaster, may be headed back to the
future. Old-fashioned poverty is making a
comeback. Arguably, the global economy, including
its American branch, is increasingly a sweatshop
economy. There is no denying that brute fact in
Thailand, China, Vietnam, Central America,
Bangladesh and dozens of other countries and
regions that serve as platforms for
primitive accumulation. Hundreds
of millions of peasants have become proletarians
virtually overnight.
Here at home,
something analogous has been happening, but with
an ironic difference and bearing within it a new
historic opportunity. One might call it the
unhorsing of the middle class.
During the
first Gilded Age, the sweatshop seemed a noxious
aberration. It lawlessly offered irregular
employment at sub-standard wages for interminable
hours. It was ordinarily housed helter-skelter in
a make-shift workshop that would be here today,
gone tomorrow. It was an underground enterprise
that regularly absconded with its workers'
paychecks and made chiseling them out of their due
into an art form.
Today, what once seemed
abnormal no longer does. The planet's peak
corporations depend on this system. They have
thrived on it. True enough, it has also encouraged
the proliferation of petty enterprises in the form
of sub-contractors, consulting firms, domestic
service companies, fertilizing the soil in which
our age of democratic capitalism is rooted. But
the ubiquity of the sweated economy promises to
alter the nation's political chemistry.
Many of the newly flexible proletarians
working for Wal-Mart, for auto part firms or
construction company sub-contractors, on the
phones at direct mail call centers, behind the
counters at mass market retailers, earn a
dwindling percentage of what they used to. Even
new hires at the Big Three automobile
manufacturers will now make a smaller hourly wage
than their grandfathers did in 1948. So too, the
relative job security such employees once enjoyed
is gone, leaving them vulnerable to the "lean and
mean" dictates of the new capitalism: double or
triple work loads; or, even worse, part-time work,
work always shadowed by indignity and fear; or,
worse yet, no work at all.
Meanwhile, the
white collar Tomorrowland of "free agent" techies,
software engineers, and the like, not to mention a
whole endangered species of middle management,
lives a precarious existence, under intense
stress, chronically anticipating the next round of
lay-offs. Yet many of them were once upon a time
members in good standing of the "middle class".
Now, they find themselves on the down escalator,
descending into a despised state no one could
mistake for middle class life.
"Flexible
accumulation" joins this dispossession of the
middle class to the super-exploitation of millions
who never laid claim to that status. Many of these
sweated workers are women, laboring away as home
healthcare aides, in the food services industry,
in meat processing plants, at hotels and
restaurants and hospitals, because the arithmetic
of "flexible accumulation" demands two workers to
add up to the livable family wage not so long ago
brought home by a single wage earner.
Millions more are immigrants, legal as
well as undocumented, from all over the world.
They live, virtually defenseless, in a twilight
underworld of illegality and prejudice. Thanks to
all this, the category of the "working poor" has
reentered our public vocabulary. Once again, as
during the first Gilded Age, poverty seems a
function of exploitation at work, not only the lot
of those excluded from work.
Might these
developments augur the end of our second Gilded
Age; or rather the end of the age of acquiescence?
No one can know. Yet anger and resentment over
insecurity, downward mobility, exploitation,
second-class citizenship, and the ill-gotten gains
of our Gilded Age mercenaries and their political
enablers already rippled the political waters
during the mid-term elections of 2006. This
primary season has witnessed a discernable
leftward shift of the center of gravity within
even the cowed leadership ranks of the Democratic
Party, a shift driven in large measure by the
sub-prime mortgage collapse and the ominous
rumblings of severe recession.
Anger and
resentment, however, do not by themselves comprise
a visionary alternative. Nor is the Democratic
Party, however restive, a likely vehicle of social
democratic aspirations. Much more will have to
happen outside the precincts of electoral politics
by way of mass movement building to translate
these smoke signals of resistance into something
more muscular and enduring. Moreover, nasty
competition over diminishing economic
opportunities can just as easily inflame simmering
racial and ethnic antagonisms.
Nonetheless, the current break-down of the
financial system is portentous. It threatens a
general economic implosion more serious than
anyone has witnessed for many decades. Depression,
if that is what it turns out to be, together with
the agonies of a misbegotten and lost war no one
believes in any longer, could undermine whatever
is left of the threadbare credibility of our
Gilded Age elite.
Legitimacy is a precious
possession; once lost it's not easily retrieved.
Today, the myth of the "ownership society"
confronts the reality of the "foreclosure
society." The great silence of the second Gilded
Age may give way to the great noise of the first.
Steve Fraser is
working on a book about the two gilded ages. He is
the author of, among other works, the just
published Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.
He is editor-at-large of New Labor Forum
magazine.
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