The Intellectual Hijacking Of The Left

The Intellectual Hijacking Of The Left…

Socialism Has A Problem—In fact a very big problem: it actually loathes itself.  It is a question of an internal power struggle between the forces of thought and those of action.  Although it’s not a prerequisite that a hostile détente must be maintained between these two poles of the movement, it has come to that point especially in the US.  Why? 

Part of the reason the left is so fractured is because of the success of the 1940–1945 war economy, unfortunately.  The war economy of the 1940–1945 was a top-down affair replete with boards of production and scientifically monitored outputs of the economy. In short, during this period of time, the country was essentially handed over to experts from the Pentagon to conduct local drives for pots and pans to be melted down into war materiel.  All of these endeavors were planned and supervised from the top down.

Although the period between 1940–1945 was the apex of top-down economic and social planning via experts in Washington, this top-down change actually began in 1933 as a response to the Great Depression.  As soon as FDR became president, his administration focused on large-scale top-down programs to massively rebuild the nation.  These programs included the WPA, the CCC, and the Rural Electrification Act, to name a few—all of them followed the same model: large programs operating hierarchically from a centralized point of control descending through the ranks to the people with the trucks and shovels serving as mechanical cogs in this machine. 

This has been a critical feature of much of the leftist movement both here in the US as well as with European projects in the greater Western hemisphere.  Socialism has always been a bureaucratic endeavor—a system of theorists, middle managers, and finally workers—supposedly working in perfect harmony with each cog knowing its place in the system.  The Great Depression and WWII solidified the idea to many in the left movement that the only successful model of socialism would be some form of top-down economic and social planning from experts!  After all, experts salvaged the plains states from the dust bowl by returning the land to an arable state, and experts built the atomic bomb—so, perhaps, this was truly the only way or best way for humans to organize?  Unions and other organizations would need to acquire their own respective experts, and everyone would have to fall in line with these prognosticators of the future! 

These prognosticators would proceed to outline our futures based on clear, neat scientific principles.  They would focus the power of the nation’s output on the right goals.  The free market, while still existing, would not be controlled by an invisible hand guided by chance.  No, the best and the brightest would be at the helm controlling the boards of directors for these major corporations.  The regulators at the federal level would now too be experts, and they would harness the scientists, economists and innovators who developed theories to operate this massive society

into the future.  (Perhaps this is why the Democratic Socialist movement models itself on the nice, neat packaging of State Capitalism—and why American socialists still laud it so?)

All of this was occurring simultaneously as forces opposing labor movements were gaining strength again. Post-WWII saw labor once again attempting to exert more power.  In 1945 alone, 3.5 million American workers went on strike.  In 1946, that number increased to 4.6 million—or more than 10% of the entire workforce.  Most of these strikes were over the usual things: better wages, more benefits, and pension plans—along with greater control of the labor market.  By 1947, the anti-labor movement passed the Taft-Hartley Act, thanks to a Republican-controlled Congress.  The Taft-Hartley Act was designed to control labor completely: they outlawed unions striking in solidarity with each other; they outlawed secondary boycotts, jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, picketing, closed shops and unions raising money for federal campaigns.  This act also gave the federal government the right to force unions back to work or to negotiate a settlement.  Most importantly, the Act forced all union leadership roles to remove ties to communist, socialist, or radical anarchist groups—in short, the very groups that engaged in action!  Prior to this law, a large segment of union leaders had dual allegiance, both to a union and Communist, Socialist, or other radical parties.  Unions now had to attest that their leadership was not affiliated with the Communist or Socialist Parties.  This was a terrible blow to unions.  In fact, the strike wave between 1945–1946 demonstrated a successful coordination between the Communist and Socialist Party members and unions.  Something clearly had to be done, so, with control of the 80th Congress, the Republican Party effectively removed the power base of labor with the Taft-Hartley Act.  However, this wasn’t enough for the powers arrayed against labor; they knew they needed to change the entire labor culture.  Their first step was the GI Bill.

The GI Bill was enacted post-WWII.  This program was billed as a way to educate GIs after the war instead of sending them back to the family farm or factory!  Although educating people is great, it should not be ignored that creating this divide between the educated and uneducated further reinforced the class system, resulting in, once again, a damaging attack at the heart of the labor movement—the people bearing the brunt of US production: the laborers.  These young men and women, who otherwise would have gone back to union jobs and progressed along the leftist movement’s trajectory, now had an entirely new trajectory: college and the promise of white-collar office work.  These new college entrees were co-opted into the “expert” class, a phenomenon critical to the next development on the left. 

Acquiring white-collar potential, through acceptance into colleges and universities, these men and women found themselves in a world dominated by experts.  These experts were frequently the very same people who benefited the most from the destruction of the labor movement, and by the 1970s their hostility toward labor was palpable.  Experts soon populated both labor and the boardroom.  In the Taft-Hartley aftermath, labor reorganized into a more expert-based affair.  Labor and capitalism entered the 1950s with a fairly stable relationship.  A sort of détente was established: unions wouldn’t push the values of the Communist Party and capitalists would, to a degree, tone down their exploitation of labor. 

This détente was broken in 1959, however, when the United Steelworkers of America (USA) went on strike!  The strike was due, in large part, to the internal strife between the union leaders of the USA and the United Auto Workers (UAW).  The union president of the USA was David J.  McDonald and his head legal counsel was Arthur J. Goldberg, labor lawyer and former OSS officer during WWII.  McDonald was engaged in a competitive contest over USA’s prestige against the UAW, which at the time had successfully secured greater wages and protections for their employees.  In 1959, McDonald saw his renegotiation of the USA contract as the perfect time to catapult the union to prominence within the AFL-CIO.  Goldberg was his secret weapon.  Goldberg was riding high on his successful merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955, creating the largest single block of labor in the United States.  The steel industry presented an even greater opportunity to enhance  Goldberg’s  record.  However, this did not pan out as planned. 

After 114 days of striking, the USA was left with the following: a $00.0425 USD hourly wage increase on a 20-month contract and the first annual cost-of-living increase in USA’s history. At this time, AFL-CIO President George Meany was virulently anti-communist and refused to support any action that would dare to weaken the CIA’s 1954 National Committee of Defense against Communism.  The USA was in trouble. Even if the Taft-Hartly Act—making solidarity strikes illegal—had not been enacted, Meany was never going to defy anything, such as the CIA’s anti-communist committee, that he thought would put the defense of the nation at risk.  So, trapped between an AFL-CIO president unwilling to call in the full might of his federation of unions and the Congressional act on the other side, eventually the USA had to settle for much less than they were asking.  As Meany crumbled to the will of the defense experts about the dangers of communist incursions into the unions, Meany allowed other—trade—experts to begin quietly to import foriegn steel from South Korea and Japan.  Meany’s myopic obsession to fight communism forced the US steel industry onto a trajectory of  importation instead of negotiation to resolve labor issues.  In short, the Taft-Hartmley Act and belief in anti-communist experts severely weakened labor rights, particularly union solidarity; add to that unions relying on experts who never understood the labor movement, and the result was experts accepting terms that destroyed the US steel industry.

In the end, whereas the UAW saw another decade or two of success until the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, the USA was set on course for a death spiral as cheap steel from Japan and South Korea signaled the first salvo in the importation war against US labor.  (Goldberg went on to become Kennedy’s labor secretary and ambassador to the UN.)  Once again, corporations were back on top; the left’s belief that the only solutions to labor power were employing better lawyers, better economists, and better labor theory experts became ensconced!  For the most part, the labor war had been transformed into one of experts wrangling via academic journals and courts instead of workers participating in walkouts and wildcat strikes.  It was a paper war of words and theories, but not actions.  The neoliberals had an advantage: money, power, and prestige.  Just when labor thought they had finally broke even, the rules were changed.

Although the neoliberal movement had been sidelined between 1933–1944, it was now finally in full swing.  Each president following FDR made peace with the fact that whereas some aspects of the New Deal would be fixed in political granite, they could easily and effectively destroy many promises of the New Deal.  One by one they did so.  After 1945, each succeeding president and Congress began to envelop the New Deal with pro-business legislation and chip away at the culture that had made the New Deal even possible.  This concerted effort to change attitudes, both politically and culturally, helped to legitimize the ever-increasing reliance by presidents and Congress on fully embracing expert advice that eroded the New Deal promises.

Following such expert neoliberal advice, presidents and Congress soon found they could stagnate average wages by simply enacting trade deals with cheaper sources of labor.  New tax laws allowed these oligarchs to retain more of their stolen wealth from labor, thus ensuring their grip on an unprecedented new-found power for decades.  Presidents and Congress altered campaign finance laws to ensure that wealth would be, in fact, the key to power.  Presidents and Congress could now easily break unions, such as the Teamster’s, which Carter did by deregulating interstate trucking, or as Reagan did with the air traffic controllers’ union.  Finally, they deregulated the economic protections of the New Deal, which Clinton accelerated by deregulating the banking industry with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.  These policy actions were hailed as signs of the success of these experts and touted as the path to a New America!  These experts now comprised a new social class themselves but where did it come from?

“The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.  In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities.   Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.”

—SCOTUS  Justice Lewis F.  Powell Jr.’s 1971 Memo to Eugene Syndor Jr., Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 

These experts were the offspring of a complex, long-term plan by large corporations and elite families to create an elite expert class of college and university graduates whom they financed to perpetuate their own existence.  The goal of education was subverted from creating an environment for learning—accessing and acquiring knowledge—to a goal of creating a class of people who could perpetuate a specific ideological system: pro-business.  These experts excluded labor from the discourse; they saw labor as little more than unintelligent bodies on a production line that need to be guided and controlled by the experts.  Even experts sympathetic to the labor movement always condescended to labor as an ignorant entity that needed guidance and a helping hand from the vaunted positions of these experts in academia.  In their minds, labor needed to be molded and made into something new and they spent years trying to confirm their hypothetical conjectures about the racial animus at the core of the labor movement.  And while the labor movement did have issues with race, gender and immigration policy, the fact also remains that many of these divisions were the doing of the experts themselves!  These experts who wanted to control labor pitted one group against another, thus creating these cleavages in society. 

The greatest threat to capitalist power since the formation of the United States has always been solidarity of the lower classes.  In the Southern States, the greatest tool to ensure discord among members of the working and lower middle classes was racial solidarity.  Anyone who wasn’t White was divided into a hierarchy of lower-standing racial groups based on skin tones.  This allowed the southern cotton aristocracy to maintain power even after the fall of the Confederacy.  They subjugated the freedmen through a series of legal and social systems, many of which called upon experts in Eugenics and Race Theory for support.  In the North this same rhetoric was used against immigrants and women who also were in competition over limited labor space.  The same Eugenics and Race Theory experts supported the reasons White male labor members were superior to their immigrant, minority, or female counterparts. 

However, during the 1890s, a group of disenchanted farmers and merchants in the Midwest and Western states developed a new type of politics—Populism!  Instantly populists were thrust onto the political scene.  Although they weren’t totally egalitarian in nature, they were, on average, more accepting of immigrants, women and minorities having a share of power.  They generally sought to unite the interests of a vast group of working and lower middle class Americans, threatening the establishment of US corporate power that was entering its nascent stages of developing a coalition of academics to support its self-perpetuation.  And just like today, the press painted the populist movement as being racist, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic; whereas this might have been true for individual members, this mischaracterization did not represent the goals of populism.  Indeed, just the opposite was true: the experts of the day, working in the fields of eugenics, phrenology and racial studies, developed the hierarchy of races and economic caste system!  This expert-derived framework of racism later became the foundation of the labor movement for decades, right up to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. 

All of this came to a head in the 1970s when labor once again faced the daunting task of fighting an uphill battle.  From the 1950s–1970s, the White male blue-collar worker enjoyed a steady improvement in the standard of living.  This gave the average White male blue-collar worker parity with his white male college-educated counterparts.  In fact, in many cases, workers on the assembly line could afford a comparable lifestyle to their middle-management office-bound counterparts.  This parity was due to the fact that the United States was the only Western industrial nation standing after the carnage of WWII.  The US could supply the world with products from WMDs to refrigerators, but by the 1970s, the Japanese and Europeans were back on their feet.  After decades of growth, the US economy simply ran out of space to grow.  The cost of employing the mass of American labor at ever-increasing rates of pay cut into the growth of profits.  The parity that had marked the working and middle classes, however modest and short-lived, was coming to a rapid end.  While labor was banging its head against a wall, a new school of economics was emerging.  A small group of economists at The University of Chicago(dubbed the Chicago School) had captured the hearts and minds of the middle class; its most heralded member, Milton Friedman (a Nobel Prize winner), was a public intellectual of esteemed importance—with a simple message: Capitalism is Freedom. 

In his many books and lectures Freidman states that the only way to be free is to have total autonomous freedom.  Everyone was going to see themselves as free agents of the economy.  Friedman told people to embrace the fact they could sell their labor.  This act was the ultimate expression of freedom and embodied everything from the air we breathe to the labor workers exchange for money.  Consider Friedman’s explanation of property and ownership: “I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.”  In other words, whereas Friedman’s concept of freedom is a quality equated with the control people experience from ownership of property, his concept of ownership in conjunction with people owning their labor is abstract at best.  Marx decried the fact that workers only really controlled the labor they could sell whereas Friedman extolls this fact as the ultimate form of freedom.  Because the Left was gutted of its radical communist roots in the 1940s and 1950s, the new breed of experts that sprung up to fill the void left in the labor movement embraced Friedman and the Chicago School of Thought, turning the movement on its head and alienating the very culture that bred and developed unions in the first place.  The left was now finally something new—a brand-new Left formed from the ashes.

The left abandoned its working-class well-springs; it pulled up its labor movement roots.  It was now a highly educated cadre of professors, graduate students and other academics and experts whose positions of power in American society precluded them wanting to fundamentally alter that power structure that developed the Expert Class.  They wanted to return to the structure of the 1950s, to reproduce the power dynamics that propelled the growth of the American upper class at the expense of the middle and working classes while pacifying the lower classes with mass consumerism.  President Bill Clinton called it building a bridge to the future—but in reality, it was a bridge to the past!

It was the same rhetoric as always from the experts of the technocracy—the worker’s inability to do well is because the worker lacks the necessary education, not because large corporations leveraged their political power to ensure they could make trade deals with nations such as Mexico where labor has no power!  Thus, thousands of jobs were, and continue to be, outsourced to areas where labor rights are virtually nonexistent.  Furthermore, once these jobs are outsourced, corporations then turn to outside contractors—nonunion—to fill employment gaps stateside.  When these measures don’t work to reduce labor costs and extract even larger proportions of profits from workers’ labor, they rely on the time-honored favorite labor weapon: automation.  This is designed to make workers obsolete by reducing the number of units of labor to achieve the same goal, even if automation is ultimately both less productive and more costly.  They will always break labor first because power is the most important aspect of this struggle. Experts in Labor Efficiency reached back in time and once again resurrected the worst elements of Friedrich Winslow Taylor’s pseudo-scientific management mantra of Scientific Management. They updated it to emphasize automation, education, and labor outsourcing--the more things change, the more things stay the same.

In the 1960s, Philosopher of Science Imre Lakatos proposed that science was a series of what he called “research programs.” (This concept aptly describes the project called the New Left, which was nothing more than dressing up 1950s-era Republican ideas as leftist thinking.)  These research programs included a series of statements or assumptions that consist of two simple formats: softcore and hardcore.  Hardcore statements are like the three laws of motion by Newton or the second law of thermodynamics.  These statements are fundamental to each of their studies.  Softcore statements are ancillary corollaries based on these hardcore assumptions that cannot be altered.  So, for example, though the left might reject specific softcore claims made by experts as wrong, they still must accept the hardcore assumption that experts are the only viable source of information.  In other words, the left is still bound to this problematic notion that experts are the ones with the solutions to labor problems.  This hardcore assumption has infiltrated the left and maneuvered it into believing it must defer to the greater knowledge of experts.  Today’s left leaves no space for a person like Eugene V. Debs, a high school dropout with a correspondence school business degree.  To be considered legitimate by the left, you need at least a master's degree with the correct pedigree!  Why?  Because experts continue to be the golden idols of the left.  We are still clinging to the idea that somehow only experts have the knowledge and ability to lead the left movement.  The only problem is the internet has fractured that once-solidified core of persons in the know.

The left, now, stands even weaker than in the 20th Century.  Whereas from 1970–1999 the cadre of experts might have been attempting to lead the left in the wrong direction, now, two decades into the 21st Century, the left consists only of self-aggrandizing experts with little or no grounded knowledge in their field, beyond that of their academic credentials.  Which is worse is anyone’s guess.  Our experts now come to us directly via instagram, podcasts, youtube, tik-tok, facebook, twitter or….  The substance of their social media posts consists of critiquing opposing factions over disputes that bear almost no resemblance to today’s real and tragic economic conditions of the working and lower middle classes or their struggles.  They don’t present concrete plans or ideas that can be realized for the future.  Instead, these pundits regurgitate the endless so-called wisdom of the modern left—the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, and Free College, for example, all of which are good ideas—but fail to bring depth, and sometimes not even a rudimentary understanding, to these issues.  Watching the faces of each pundit latch onto and repeat with robotic perfection the same dull slogans as their counterparts is a nauseating spectacle.  Yet as impotent as these experts in the new alternative left media have been, improving nothing in the lives of working people with each passing decade as economic injustice cleaves deeper and deeper hierarchical divides in the social structure, they pass themselves off as experts!  They tell their viewers: “You are smart,” “More in tune,” or “Better informed” because you listen to this podcast or watch this youtube video.  The truth is no one’s better informed from watching these videos or listening to these podcasts!  You won’t walk away inspired by any new information or bold responses to your present-day problems.

Instead, these charlatans of the alternative left media have captivated your attention with a shiny new distraction.  They’ve helped to further the goals of the movement’s lobbyist groups by giving a platform to such weak thinkers as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, a laughable endeavor designed to present its founder, Bruenig, as some form of expert in policies for the people!  That is exactly what the labor movement doesn’t need: nonsensical policies from experts who care more about a social media presence than striving to enact policy.  The fact is the labor movement has never needed people such as Bruenig to tell us how to move and where to go.  We’ve been hijacked by the technocracy and told that we must obey and follow their lead.  To which I say Hell NO! 

These are the people who are leading the movement over the cliff into impotency.   These are the same people that have turned the socialism movement into a cosmopolitan left.  I hate to break it to them, but the left already had a decades-long history of cosmopolitanization.  Their problem is it doesn’t sound like or act like a graduate school seminar on political science!  To which I say too bad.  These fools on youtube know nothing about the movement that people working in the trenches don’t already know from experience.  The movement doesn’t need leaders from the top down; it needs bottom-up experts—community members who work with others to create a base that is collective and solidified!  This is something the top-down model will never do; it can’t, because “experts” are not in the trenches with the people.  Experts want to bask in the glory of being interviewed and featured on each other’s podcasts and youtube channels!  To which I say—enjoy.  I will be the guy in the trenches getting things done.

Workers must unite and take back our movement.  We must abandon those who exploit their expertise for personal gain and leave them all to the dustbin of history!  It is time to act and today we start by winning back our movement one person at a time.  The left needs to move deeper into the mechanics of grassroots socialism, which starts at the local level and empowers each individual in the community through collectivization.  Every person in the labor movement is valuable and essential!  It is time to democratize expertise in the labor movement.