With the Occupy Wall Street movement calling on supporters to join their strike on Tuesday, the Up w/ Chris Hayes panelists discuss the interests that unite the participants and beneficiaries of such a protest.
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Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.
How did we get here? With "Twilight of the Elites," Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.
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The dilemma for workers in America is that the labor unions
are embracing a political philosophy that is over 150 years old. Organized
labor-force strategies that may have worked at the turn of the century (strike,
walkout, worker revolt, and the power of collective bargaining that arises from
application of same) no longer work very well today. The lion has lost its
teeth because it has been chewing on too much old, hard Marxist/socialist philosophy.
The market for labor, the number of people seeking available
jobs, has expanded to include the entire world. Labor movements were partially
effective and grew in strength early on in the last century because the
Nation-states where insulated and more autonomous than today. Today, the world
labor pool has grown, the markets are interconnected, and the transportation of
goods produced by labor to diverse markets throughout the world have expanded
and improved.
In the Marxist philosophy that developed in the 1840s describing
the relationship between capitalists and labor, although fundamentally correct (at
the time) when viewed as a class struggle between competing interests
(Capitalist v. Worker), the solutions proposed to prevent the exploitation of
labor by capitalists (“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but
your chains.”) is harder to apply in the world of today where diverse
governments are competing against each other for market share and dominance.
The labor movement cause is long overdue for a philosophical
upgrade. The relationship between capital and labor today is not, nor has it
ever been at its core, a schism of Capital v. Labor, but of mutually dependent
symbiosis, a symbiotic relationship in which capital cannot produce without
labor and labor cannot produce and thrive without capital.
The class struggle still exists, but the sooner both capital
and labor embrace there interdependence and come together in unity for their
mutual benefit, the better for everyone.
But in a world where the supply of labor greatly exceeds the
demand, the problem of capitalist exploitation of labor will persist for some
time without well- reasoned rule of law providing balance between competing
interests.