The year 1959 ends the Fifties in more ways than one. One phase of the initiative of American capital comes to an end and a new one that will characterize a large part of the Sixties in the United States begins.
Not only does the 1960 election result in the switch from a Republican to a Democratic administration, but a new set of choices are opened up in terms of institutions and political economy, that imply a new phase in the relationship between capital and the working class. The event that precipitated this change was the big steel strike of 1959.
After the great working class struggles of the Thirties and Forties, the capitalist offensive took the form of industrial decentralization, ghettoization, and direct union repression through the Taft-Hartley Act. These measures, however, did not eliminate working class initiative nor did they overcome working class reaction to attempts to harness its struggle. The wildcat movement that developed in the automobile sector between 1953 and 1955, defeated Walter Reuther's attempt to establish a bargaining truce by accepting a five year contract. Throughout the entire decade factory struggles took place not only around work conditions but also in defiance of established union leadership. The spreading of cost-push inflation theories and the renewed popularity of the stagnationist analysis of the thirties reflected capitalist awareness of the situation of endemic conflict that existed throughout the fifties. In 1959 capitalist initiative had to come to terms with the "paradoxes" of the previous decade: inflation that could not be controlled and one of the lowest rates of economic development in the capitalist world.(1) In 1959, the one hundred and sixteen day long strike of the steel workers convinced American capital that it was time to start on a new course. The old methods were no longer working. During the bargaining, management proposed freezing wage increases for a year and pushed for the introduction of statutory rules to limit wildcats and slowdowns. But the strike defeated such a proposal. (2)
It became clear that, at the factory level, the capitalists could not win and were running the risk of protracting indefinitely a vicious cycle of permanent conflict within a context of economic stagnation. The only way out was to establish a new relationship of forces at a global level and to contain the class relationship within the limits of a process of economic development. Some time later in announcing the "New Dimension of Political Economy", Walter Heller would say: "Gone is the countercyclical syndrome of the 1950's. Policy emphasis had to be redirected from a corrective orientation geared to the dynamics of the cycle, to a propulsive orientation geared to the dynamics and promise of growth." (3)
On the whole, J.F. Kennedy's electoral campaign was not characterized by any specific theme or any concrete proposal.(4) Rather, it was centered around a single, extremely vague slogan which was repeated in every speech: "It is time to get this country moving again". But he was very concrete when he spoke at a steel workers convention against a proposed thirty-two hour week: "The Communist challenge requires this nation to meet its unemployment problems by creating abundance rather than rationing scarcity". The long term strategy was beginning to unfold. The working class insurgency was to be controlled by transforming it into the motor force of a process of general economic development. However this could take place on only one condition, i.e. that the state intervene more directly in the management and stabilization of class relationships. Within this framework, the New Economy and the institutional reforms of the "Kennedy era" came into being.
It was not long before the practice of direct state intervention in collective bargaining got underway, determined to block the development of workers struggles at all costs. For the first time, except during the war, a railway strike was blocked with a law that imposed compulsory arbitration. For the first time since 1954, the steel workers were forced to accept a settlement without a strike. The contract which allowed for no wage increase was reached through the direct intervention of the government. The same day that Kennedy was acting tough with the big steel bosses in the famous controversy about the price increases, the Taft-Hartley Act was imposed on the West Coast maritime unions. Labor secretary Goldberg was right when he proclaimed that: "Labor and management will both be making a mistake if they believe that the Kennedy administration is going to be pro-labor".
Kennedy's objective in these disputes was to establish the power of the executive in determining the relationship of forces between the classes and in the last analysis to guarantee the stability of this relationship by preventing the spread of working class struggle. To accomplish this task however, it was not enough for the government to be a third party in collective bargaining. Its political role could be successful only if the state also undertook the technical management of economic development. As far as the structure of the government was concerned, certain institutions that had been in existence since the Employment Act of 1946 had to be revitalized. The Council of Economic Advisers for example, was reactivated as an effective institution of economic planning. But more importantly the "fact that the federal government has an overwhelming responsibility in regard to the stability and the development of the economy" had to be recognized. (5)
The Keynesian measures of the Kennedy administration are well known. The basic concepts of the New Economy are an updated version of the Keynesian theory of aggregate demand. Terms such as "tax drag", "GNP gap" and "monetary twist" became part of the current economic vocabulary. But behind the various fiscal and monetary measures to increase demand there was a definite political reality. Development was a means to maintain equilibrium in class relationships. Le, economic development to guarantee power. "In the Alice in Wonderland economics of growth, it has been observed, it is essential to run as fast as one can, just to stay where one is". (6)
The income policy proposal and the guidelines contained in the 1962 Economic Report to the President epitomize the idea of balanced development. On one hand, wage increases are permitted and used to propel the development process. On the other, it is necessary to "bring home the idea that wages are not simply purchasing power, but costs."(7)
In underlining the innovative aspects of the Kennedy economy's usage of Keynes, economists have stressed "qualitative" elements and in particular "supply policy", namely training programs and the whole manpower policy.
Although manpower policies were part of the new practice of economic planning (at least in terms of forecasting manpower needs(8)), at this stage, however, they were totally subordinated to the needs of economic growth. The manpower problem was still seen only in terms of global employment or unemployment. Both the training programs and the "war on poverty" programs were looked at from the perspective of adjusting certain peripheral elements to the central needs of economic growth. It was assumed that once these preliminary obstacles were eliminated, the economy would move to a stage of "pure growth".(9)
But at this point economic theory passes into the realm of pure ideology.
In a lecture at Harvard in 1966, Walter Heller, the well known architect of the Kennedy economy, triumphally announced that: "Economics has come of age in the 1960's. Two presidents have recognized and drawn on modern economics as a source of national strength and presidential power. Their willingness to use, for the first time, the full range of modern economic tools underlies the unbroken U. S. expansion that in its first five years created over 7 million jobs, doubled profits, increased the nation's real output by a third, and closed the $50 billion gap between actual and potential production that plagued the American economy in 1961"(10)
From a strictly economic point of view he was right. From the same point of view, however, it was impossible then to forecast the crisis that the economic theory of the boom was about to encounter in a few years. But, by simply looking around, it was clear that these figures were telling nothing about the power relationship between classes. The "victory" over unemployment had left behind at least one unsolved matter: "the negro problem". A solution could not be found by merely implementing the law or through the traditional channels of civil rights ideology. The problem was political and consisted in the growth of a new black mass movement.
In the light of subsequent events, the period from the Birmingham demonstration (1963) to the Watts revolt appears as the prehistory of the movement. Already in this phase some distinctive traits started to develop and indicated that a mass movement was in the offing. "Birmingham marked the entry of the Negro poor into the protest movement; this is its most important consequence".(11) 'The revolts in Birmingham, Savannah and Charleston, marked the dimensions that the movement had already reached. Open violence was not a new element (even though in Jacksonville the Molotov is used for the first time); new was the fact that the attack was unmistakably directed against the police.(12)
By the time the revolt spread to the big cities, starting with Watts, another new aspect became apparent, i.e. the end of the leading role of the Civil Rights Movement.
The immediate reason for its loss of control was the difficulty of coping with the sudden and partly unforeseeable expansion of the movement and its unpredictable direction, at least in this phase. A more fundamental, "structural" reason was that the "negro" of the 1960's was a different sociological figure, with needs and demands that went beyond the mere cry for legal justice. The figures of this sociological transformation have been studied extensively: the revolution in agricultural production that, in the span of a couple of decades, expelled 20 million people from that sector; the emigration, between 1940 and 1966, of almost 4 million blacks from the Southern states; the concentration of half of the black population of the U.S. in the Northern cities.(13) The poles of attraction for the black work force consisted of the assemblylines and the service sector of the big cities. Its prevalent life condition was the ghetto.
By 1969, in the major urban concentrations (over 1 million inhabitants) one of every four inhabitants was black. On the assembly-lines in Detroit the majority of the workers were black. It was at this point that the Civil Rights Movement lost its historical function. "While the Civil Rights Movement and the heroic efforts associated with it were necessary to break the official legality of segregation, it should be recognized that in a sense this particular form of racism was already obsolete, as its base in an exploitative system of production had drastically changed."(14) The question was no longer that of making sectors of the black middle class a part of "the system". The movement demanded a strategy and a leadership with a working class perspective. At the beginning of the Sixties, the most notable legal successes of the Civil Rights Movement ironically also marked its death.
Not only did the black movement transform itself but the capitalist initiative and the government in particular were also moving toward a new solution of the problem. In fact, the encounter between the black and capitalist initiative opened a phase of working class struggles which was to characterize the second half of the Sixties. Johnson's "Great Society" was at hand.
For some time before, the attention of those who were dealing with the "negro problem" had already moved away from the traditional Civil Rights' approach and had focused on the relationship between blacks and work. The problem, it was argued, was to stabilize this relationship. "Jobs are the fulcrum on which a strengthening of the family, and through the family of the Negro's role in American society ultimately rests".(15) 15 A legally established equality of opportunity would not be enough to make blacks part of the system if not accompanied by their insertion in the relationship of production. As sociology informs us, the institution of work is a source of social stability and respect for authority, precisely what blacks are lacking. At this stage, however, the relationship of blacks to work was still seen in terms of the "new dimensions" of the Kennedy economy, that is to say in terms of global employment. The solution was sought therefore within a project of economic growth which provided wider job opportunities. Needless to say, once the black revolts had exploded and the movement had grown, the debate in the administration centered around specific proposals of a political nature.
The famous Moynihan Report and the ensuing controversy on the subject of the black family cannot be understood outside the climate that the Watts uprising created. On the part of the government there was not only a clear awareness of the failure of the Civil Rights Movement, but also a widespread sentiment that the "negro problem" could no longer be solved in terms of an all encompassing "war on poverty". In fact Kennedy's "war on poverty" (apart from its social democratic overtones and its income-distribution ideology which seemed to be so popular in those days) was no more than a program to sustain demand in line with the general Keynesian economic policy. But now the most pressing problem for the country was to avoid being "doomed to succeeding summers of guerrilla warfare in our cities".(16) This situation called for action that went "beyond the original provision of food and clothing and money, to far more complex matters of providing proper attitudes toward work, reasonable expectations of success and so forth". (17)
The administration decided to intervene on a large scale in the inner cities, bypassing local governments and inefficient welfare agencies. (18) The result can be seen in the explosion of the welfare rolls. The data speak for themselves: in just one decade, from 1960 to 1970, there was an increase in the number of families receiving assistance of 225%! The highest increase came after 1964 and indicated the turn that welfare policies took at this point.
It has been satisfactorily shown that welfare policies have always been a cyclical answer to social disorders.(19) Bearing in mind this general criterion of interpretation, three phases can be distinguished. First, a phase of expansion of welfare assistance during the New Deal, whose primary function was to counteract economic depression by stabilizing the average income and thus increasing demand. Second, a phase of containment, during the Fifties, whose aims were to maintain low wages and incomes, especially in the Southern areas, and to favor a migratory movement of blacks to the Northern regions. Finally, the "Great Society" programs whose purpose was to establish political control over the communities threatened by black revolts.
Under the ideology of "poor people's participation in decision making", several federal programs attempted to build a network of controls through the formation of a new breed of local political organizers. Their role was to guarantee the management of social pressure. In other words, it was an outright attempt to unionize the ghetto, so that the struggles could be chanelled into a practice of collective bargaining. Sargent Shriver was right when, in 1966, he suggested that the Economic Opportunity Act was "for the poor what the National Relation Act was for the unions . . . It establishes a new relationship and new grievance procedure between the poor and the rest of society".(20)
The design was partly successful in the sense that it created some bargaining counterparts or agencies such as the National Welfare Rights Organization. In addition these initiatives were to produce a new generation of political cadres who were to constitute the backbone of black local reform politics in the 1970's. More important than that, from our point of view, is the fact that these initiatives provided a very favorable terrain for the development of social struggles. The Welfare Movement was not just an aspect of capitalist initiative but primarily a mode of expression of a new cycle of working class struggle. It was the basis for the amplification and circulation of social struggle, for the homogenization of demands, and, ultimately, for the process of recomposition of the working class.
Behind the ideology of participation loomed the prospect of political power, and federal funds on many occasions actually financed revolutionary programs and radical militants. This was certainly not forseen. Adam Yarmolinskey of the Task Force on the War on Poverty candidly conceded that "the failure of the original Task Force to anticipate the violent reaction of poor people and poor neighborhoods to the opportunity to affect their own lives through community-action programs . . . the power potential, constructive and destructive, of the poor themselves was largely overlooked."(21)
It is very clear at this point that the "poor people's struggle" had little to do with any kind of lumpenproletarian rage, as it has often been interpreted to be. A deeper analysis of these struggles will inevitably lead us to the problematic of the working class struggle in the second half of the Sixties. The moment the welfare struggle met the factory struggle, a new cycle of confrontation between workers and capital began.
More than any other image that of blacks reappropriating social wealth and "chanting Black Power", has come to epitomize the struggles of the 1960's in the U.S. For the expert of social psychiatry such an image has substituted in the American "social consciousness" the fear of recession of the 1930's and the trauma of atomic war of the 1950's. For the New Left this image often represented a revival of revolutionary folklore around the theme of the revenge of oppressed and dispossessed masses.
It is hard to separate the analysis of the black movement from the ideologies which have surrounded it, or also to speak about a homogeneous and unified black political movement. The umbrella of Black Power has covered many different experiences, often contrasting in practice and goals. From the participatory reformism of CORE with its slogan "black power means black business", to the Black Panthers' sophisticated debate over the forms of armed struggle; from Eldridge Cleaver's lumpenproletarian and anti-colonial struggle, to the practice of local government and electoral politics. Stokely Carmichael's ambiguous definition of Black Power is a good example of the continous fluctuation between revolutionary rhetoric and practical reformism which has characterized the whole history of the movement.(23)
Richard Nixon, then a candidate for the presidency, was not too far from the truth when, while announcing his program of "Black Capitalism" he suggested that "much of black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties-terms of `pride', `ownership', `private enterprise', `capital', `self-respect'. . .This is precisely what the federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward black ownership, for from this can flow the rest-black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and yes, black power, in the best, the constructive sense of that often misapplied term".(24) Although it points out the ideological confusion of some of its leaders, Nixon's rhetoric cannot obscure the social reality of the black movement. It would be wrong to look at the black movement only in terms of its barely surfacing ideology or its partial attempt to deal with electoral politics.
Setting aside revolutionary myths and reformist ideologies, the black movement was much more than just another component of the class reality of the 1960's. Its central role far outweighed its actual dimension and organizational consistency. In commenting on the traditional term "ethnic minority" which had been applied to black people, James Boggs observed that "In politics what matters is not numbers as such but rather the strategic position of your forces". (25) From this point of view, it is not difficult to see that the present cycle of working class struggle started in the streets of black ghettos and that the black movement provided its contents and often its leadership. In what sense?
The key to the problem is the transformation into working class that black labor-power underwent during the Sixties. We are not referring here to the structural changes that brought waves of black immigrants from the South to the assembly lines of the automobile factories or to the services sector of the large urban concentrations. Nor are we concerned with the sociological problem of territorial or occupational mobility. Rather the fundamental fact in understanding the class dynamic of this period is that, what was previously reserve labor-power in the Sixties became an active subject of struggle over income. From the struggle for work they moved to the struggle against work.
This phenomenon does not necessarily imply that blacks entered a stable work relationship. On the contrary, the promises of the Kennedy economy were never fulfilled and the problem of black unemployment remained unsolved. The novelty is in the very fact that, around the issue of income the black movement succeeded in connecting those in the factory with those kept out of it. Reappropriation of wealth in the community and struggle over wages within the factory were but two sides of the same struggle for higher income which was waged independently and irrespective of any work relationship. The relationship between income and work was totally severed.
The black struggles demonstrated that the wageless were part of the working class. They unveiled the factory-like organization of society where ghettos, unemployment and poverty were not a byproduct of the system nor a transitory malfunction, but a necessary element in the social reproduction of capital. Most importantly, they brought working class struggle to the society at large, and at that level they forced its recomposition. By recomposition we do not mean only the extension and the massification of the struggle but primarily the homogenization of its subjective contents. In this sense these struggles connected welfare, reappropriation, and armed struggle with the factory. To use traditional terms, they united the factory and the community.
For these reasons the contents brought forward by the black movement circulated very rapidly, particularly in 1968-69. They were carried to sectors which had been previously considered marginal and excluded from the cycles of working class struggles per se, i.e. students, prisoners, and women.
The contents of the black movement were often reflected among students in an ideological form which is too well known to require recapitulation here.
At the base of the prison reform movement of the early Seventies lies the cycle of prison rebellions that started in the late Sixties. In these the political organization of black prisoners both played the leading role and provoked organizational allies in other parts of the prison population. When it is remembered that the capitalist initiative set in motion by the War on Poverty began as an attack on juvenile delinquency designed to remove social "bottlenecks in the process of citizen building," we see that the prison rebellions belong to the same working class offensive. The chickens come home to roost.
For women the black movement has been much more than just a cultural antecedent. In the relationship that blacks were able to establish between wage earners and wageless, women could subjectively identify the relationship that existed between factory work, office work and housework. This analysis of their material conditions was conducive to the formation of an autonomous feminist strategy. In particular, the welfare problem provided a concrete relationship between the general struggle over income and the specific struggle of women, where the two coincided.
There is another reason why the welfare struggle was a central element of working class subjectivity and relevant to working class recomposition. The relationship that exists, or rather that capitalists try to establish, between productivity and workers' remuneration loses any meaning when it comes to welfare payments. Ultimately, these depend only on the intensity and determination of the struggle. This is the single most significant element in this cycle of struggles. In it lies the origin of the working class refusal to accept the traditional role of the unions as the institutional guarantors of the link between productivity and wages. Here is also the reason for the persistence of the struggle even during the economic crisis which the capitalists unleased to reestablish order among the variables of the system.
From society to factory, from the ghettos to the assembly lines, a macroscopic datum can exemplify the reality of this process of class recomposition. For the first time, at the end of the Sixties, a growth of the welfare rolls corresponds to an increase in unemployment.(26) This had never happened before. For the first time, unemployment did not work to curtail the struggle by creating a reserve pool of labor-power. The struggle was not stopped but merely transferred to another sector. If not over wages in the factory, it was over welfare payments in the community and vice versa. The circuit is complete.
It comes as no surprise therefore to find blacks in a position of leadership in the plants during the 1968-69 conflicts. Many of the leaders on the assembly lines had their first political experiences in the Detroit ghetto revolt of 1967. In many ways the experience of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers is indicative of the working class subjectivity of the whole cycle.(27) It is among these black vanguards that the condition of blacks in its entirety is understood from an unequivocal working class perspective, and that on this basis the organizational practice is oriented.
The large mass of black workers embody all the characteristics of unskilled workers. They are very mobile, one day employed at the assembly line and the next day unemployed in the ghetto. They struggle interchangeably for wages and for welfare payments; they have no attachment to work, on the contrary they refuse the work discipline whether imposed by the speed of the assembly line, by the foreman or by the union representative. They see their income not as a reward for their productivity but as a means to satisfy their needs. They have learned that the only determinant of their income is their own capability to organize and lead the struggle.
The DRUM, FRUM, ELRUM were the initial forms of organization. They were plant organizations and purposely and exclusively black. They had to be all black because they wanted to be autonomous. The old social democratic slogan "Black and white unite and fight" no longer served the purpose. It didn't even save the face of the unions. At that point what counted was not vague solidarity but concrete leadership of the struggle. And once this began on a new basis and for new objectives, it provided the ground for unity. The "extremist" demands (large wage increases and drastic reduction of work time) brought forward by these groups summarize quite well the new quality of the struggle. These demands best exemplify what can be called workers'autonomy. Autonomy means that the struggles are waged outside and often against the unions and that the objectives of the struggles are themselves autonomous. The size and the quality of the demands are measured only in terms of the workers' own needs and are ultimately aimed at achieving a subjective recomposition of the working class.
1967 is not just the year of the Newark and Detroit revolts. It is also the year that marks the resumption of factory insubordination. Not by chance these two facts coincide chronologically. In fact 1967 opens the most recent cycle of working class struggle. Let us compare a few data. The number of days lost in work stoppages during 1967 is 42 million, the highest since 1959 and double the figure in 1966. From 1966 on there is a constant rise. Difficult years on the bargaining front had been predicted for some time. The times when Kennedy could brag about his achievements in fostering labor peace after a long period of labor unrest, were long gone by the middle of the Sixties. In November 1966, Fortune, in an article entitled "Labor's Rebellious Rank and File", observed that workers' pressure on union leadership had started to turn into open rebellion.(28)
What was the labor truce of the previous years based on, and what was the origin of the present insubordination? Collective bargaining and the contracts that followed were all centered around the issue of fringe benefits and totally neglected the question of hourly wages. The result of this policy was that in 1966, fringe benefits averaged over 25% the cost of cash wages. Union leadership seemed confident in the promises laid out in Kennedy's economics and consequently put no provision against inflation in the longterm contracts. Instead they focused on job security, early retirement plans, job reclassification schemes and the like, with the result that real wages started to decline.
The wave of strikes in 1967 demonstrated that the fear of rank and file rebellion was not without foundation. From the General Motors wildcat strikes to the massive transportation strikes, workers manifested their unwillingness to accept a de facto reduction in their wages, even if that meant bypassing the union leadership. Moreover, the outbreak of strikes did not just call into question outdated bargaining procedures and sell-out contracts. At stake was government policy itself which the Council of Economic Advisers firmly stated at the beginning of the year: "The only valid and non-inflationary standard for wages advances is the productivity principle".(29) President Johnson himself appealed to unions and workers to maintain at all costs a stable relationship between wages and productivity. By 1967 the Kennedy-Goldberg guidelines collapsed, demolished by the workers' struggle. At this stage workers' autonomy was starting to make headway.
Rather than describe single struggles, we will try to underline some general characteristics of the cycle as a whole. An extraordinary element was the broadened scope of the conflict and the degree of participation in the struggles. During 1968 and 1969, the statistical curve of days lost in stoppages does not show signs of slackening. Instead, in 1970, it reaches a peak at 66,400,000 comparable to the 69 million of 1959 (the highest level since 1949). But there is an important difference. While in 1959 the number of workers involved in stoppages was only 1,800,000, in 1970, the same figure is 3,305,000.
These simple data indicate that larger sectors of the working class were involved in the struggle in 1970. This does not tell the whole story however, since these data do not disclose the social level of the struggle. Welfare played an essential role in the process of recomposition of the working class. Integral to this process were for example the struggles against increased transportation fares (in New York in 1970 groups of passengers collectively jumped subway gates in protest of the new fare); the rent strikes which often lead to direct armed confrontation with the police, and the more recent meat boycott (although initially supported and sponsored by the Administration with the false perspective of keeping the meat prices down, it rapidly "degenerated" in a struggle waged by neighborhood organizations against both the supermarkets and the rising costs of living).
Even at the level of the plant the figures above do not provide a full picture of workers' insubordination. There are forms of struggle that, although they do not imply direct confrontation as in the case of strikes and stoppages, are no less symptomatic of a continuous workers' refusal of the capitalist organization of work. Passive resistance such for example often foreshadow open conflict. Very high levels of absenteeism accompanied this entire cycle. In automobile factories, it was necessary to hire part-time workers on Mondays and Fridays in order to guarantee continuity of production. In 1970, H. Roche, president of GM, openly accused workers of betraying management and the public with their growing absenteeism, continuous stoppages and lack of cooperation. A "position paper" produced by GM during the 1970 contract negotiations, stated that "discipline had broken down in auto factories, and plant managers observed alarming increase in tardiness, loitering,failure to follow instructions, and abuse of employee facilities. Production schedules were disrupted repeatedly by crisis situations and strikes, while careless workmanship appeared to be increasing". (30)
More than the increased numerical participation, the novelty of this phase lies in the introduction to the struggle of larger and larger strata of the tertiary sector. As a result the "theory of the middle class", one of the most cherished tenets of American sociology, begins to show its limitations. The traditional, descriptive concept of working class has to give way to a more appropriate definition based on the practice of circulation and homogenization of the struggle.
Teachers for instance, used to be a professional category which was deeply imbued with a "public service" ideology. The education boom of the 1950's and 1960's, however, dissipated any professional illusion and revealed the wage-earner status of teachers and their subordination to the needs of capitalist reproduction. (This is .especially true for elementary and high school teachers whose salaries are often inferior to those of factory workers). The teachers' struggles of the Sixties demonstrated a subjective awareness of their status. In 1968 alone there were 88 strikes. The most notorious took place in New York and manifested both the potentialities and the contradictions of the struggle. The big Newark strike, three years later, left no room for doubt as to which were the opposing sides. On one side, black and white teachers fought decisively to impose their need for higher wages. On the other side, hiding behind the rhetoric of community needs, were the corporate interests which were then promoting "black capitalism" in response to the 1967 ghetto uprising. In 1972 and 1973, these struggles reached their highest levels in Chicago, St. Louis and most of all in Philadelphia with an unprecedented mass participation and militancy (774 arrests in three days).
In some instances struggles outside the factory became a model in form and content, for all kind of struggles. A case in point was the 1970 postal workers where workers all over the country paralyzed the postal system with an "illegal" strike against the federal government forcing it to use federal troops to move the mail. The struggle was waged not only against the federal government but also against labor unions whose mediating role was totally rejected. Workers' assemblies disavowed union leaders and set up, particularly in New York, autonomous committees. All these highly publicized facts had a great impact on the struggles that followed.
Since the Fifties the ratio of union membership to the total work force steadily diminished and in recent years has stabilized at 23%. In the Sixties, union membership, in absolute terms, increased from 17 million to 19 million due to the unionization of new and growing sectors of the labor force such as state and municipal employees, teachers, service workers, etc. Those who forecast a resurgence of American unionism point to such unions as the American Federation of Government Employees, State and County Municipal Workers, to Teachers Federations etc.(31) These unions in general represent the most progressive, socialdemocratic, wing of the labor movement, and thus constitute one of the best hopes of liberals.
The relationship between leadership and rank and file, however, is very volatile in these sectors since membership in these unions is much less tied to professional consciousness than was the case for the early industrial unions. For this reason unions are used as a means to organize and spread the struggle, but are easily bypassed when the circumstances require.
This brief survey of the most significant struggles of this cycle poses a central problem of the present phase, i.e. the question of the relationship between working class and unions. Not only could it be said that rapport has been deteriorating but in many instances there has been an open rift. Never before have unions been the object of such criticism. In 1968, more than 30% of the contracts, an unprecedented figure, were rejected by the rank and file. In September 1973, UAW skilled workers for the first time in the history of this union, voted down the contract previously agreed upon by union and management. The more the struggle brings out the particular interests of the working class, i.e. the refusal of the capitalist organization of work, the more unions appear as mediators of class interests. The more the struggle over income is accentuated, the more unions reveal their institutional role of tying wages to productivity, and the more the unions appear to workers as an institution of capitalist society. Their function is more to harmonize workers and capital than to express the real political needs of the working class. The celebrated episode of Lordstown and the wildcats in the summer of 1973, can be analyzed from this perspective. The dynamics of these struggles are totally independent of any union planning. In Lordstown workers imposed a renegotiation of the contract already agreed upon by the UAW and GM, while at Chrysler and Ford, wildcats anticipated and in part determined the outcome of the contract. These struggles cannot be considered any longer as a "rebellion" among the membership. In their form and contents they already represent an alternative. The events at Lordstown have spurred an unending literature on workers' dissatisfaction and "alienation". Bourgeois sociologists have suddenly discovered "blue collars blues" and the "Lordstown syndrome" and are pouring out recipes to cure this "illness". But workers dissatisfaction with work is not a psychological attitude. Lordstown is the latest example, perhaps the most striking, of a trend that has characterized the entire cycle.Refusal to work is the present connotation of working class self-activity. It is the element which defines class relationship in an advanced capitalist country. It must necessarily be the content of any organizational proposal.
A recent radical interpretation of American capitalist initiative explained Nixon's policies as an attempt to respond to the repercussions of the Vietnam war.(32) The war expenditure "overheated" the economy and Johnson's government was unable to control inflation because of popular opposition to tax increases. Consequently, Nixon had to resort to recession in order to bring the economy under control. At the same time inflation produced a decrease in real wages and therefore a revival of wage demands. To sum up this argument: it was the "popular opposition" to the financing of the Vietnam war that made the economy unmanageable and led to the Nixon's government of repression.
The interpretation appears to be, to say the least, incomplete. This is not to say that the international role of the US and the integration of international capitalist markets should not be studied and analyzed in detail. Our decision to emphasize capital-labour relations within the US has both a polemical and methodological purpose. In the abovementioned interpretation, ideology precedes the analysis of facts. It starts from a value judgment on the amorality of the war, singling out those forces that conducted the opposition to the war, and from there derives the rest of the analysis. How ideological this viewpoint is, is demonstrated by the fact that a great distinction is made between the protest against the war and the workers' struggle for higher wages, which is considered economist and reformist. Actually from capital's point of view, Vietnam only becomes a ruinous enterprise when the opposition represented by the peace movement coincides with the particular working class struggles over income (not to mention Vietcong military victories).
Moreover, struggles over wages are not just a "result" of inflation. If wages are strictly dependent on capitalist economic cycles, why didn't they "respond" to the recession as they had always done? If the struggle is provoked only by a decrease in real wages, why were other economic mechanisms such as economic crisis or unemployment unsuccessful in re-establishing equilibrium on the wage front? In fact one of the most striking features of the present cycle is that wages have not ceased to increase even in the presence of an economic crisis. During the 1969 recession, wages increased from 6% to 7%. In previous recessions, wages have always markedly decreased: from 8% to 0.4% in 1948; from 6% to 3.3% in 1954; from 5.4% to 3.3% in 1957-58; and from 4.3% to 1.3% in 1960-61. The reasons for this change have already been investigated: at the foundations of this cycle a macroscopic process of recomposition of the working class imposed certain fixed options on capital. Not by chance has capital's attention focused on increasing wages. If it were a matter of overheating or common inflation, they had the tools (at least theoretically) to control the economic mechanism. But now capital has to face new phenomena and economists are not ashamed to openly admit it. Commenting on the incredible performance of wages, Arthur Burns admitted that "The rules of economics are not working in quite the same way they used to." What was shocking to the economists as Fortune was to comment later, was not that the recession occurred but that "it proved so appallingly ineffectual."(33) As Paul McCracken put it, "there may be some fundamental and pervasive and deeper pheomenon of social dynamics at work here, the nature of which we may not yet fully understand."
To put the blame on increased union strength at the bargaining table and look towards a new balance of power among democratic institutions was not enough. The nature of the new social dynamic and "the new rigidity in our economic structure . . . is not so much an increase in the relative power of unions as in the power of labor as a whole."(34) Only this direct confrontation between working class and capitalist organisation of work can explain the origin of Nixon's New Economic Policy. "By August 15, it seems clear, a majority of businessmen-and a majority of economists too-had decided that the rules of economics had best be suspended until someone could figure out why they were not working."(35) Only from the perspective of this "suspension" can one interpret the N.E.P., the wage freeze, the Pay Board (the new agency formed by business, government and unions to monitor the freeze), in short, the whole structure of the Nixonian state, the state of the crisis.
Nixon's electoral platform was practically non-existent and lacked both a strategic perspective and a long term program. Nixon's pragmatism was not an accidental characteristic of his new Administration but a real requirement of the political moment. Nixon is the embodiment of capital's tactics. The element of continuity in his administration, granted all its profound contradictions and uncertainties, is to be found in its adherence to practical politics, i.e. in its attempt to contain working class insurgency in order to provide a background for the resumption of capitalist initiatives on a new longterm basis. For Nixon to "suspend" the rules of economics meant to adapt state institutions to the urgent need to disrupt working class recomposition. It meant direct state intervention in the matter of class composition and not merely guaranteeing, as it has until that moment, a macroeconomic equilibrium between growth and employment.
For this reason Nixon's policy had to follow the same path that the struggles had taken, starting with the famous question of welfare which had proved to be a total failure from a capitalist point of view. First of all the legacy of Johnson's Great Society had to be wiped out. Those measures and those agencies were already obsolete, not so much because they did not accomplish the goals for which they were created, but because, as pointed out above, they became a means for financing and organising social struggles. H. G. Philips, acting Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, assessed the failures of that agency: "Some programs were premised on a belief that the problems of poverty are political rather than economic." Federal money was used to provide, in his words, "patronage for local cadres of political activists." The Legal Service Programe, for example, \went beyond its intended purpose. "Some of these lawyers who are paid with federal funds have taken the view that their mission is to change the fabric of society through law reform. They have brought class-action suits challenges to constitutionality of laws, suits to put more people on welfare. They have organised rent strikes, aided political action groups. They have organised prison inmates, helped peace organisations and the gay Liberation Movement, and have represented ineligible clients. All this is not helping the poor it is purely political. "(36) The first thing to do, therefore, was to cut funds, and to dismantle or cut back anti-poverty agencies.
Even more important was finding a new global solution to the problems that the welfare explosion had created. The encounter between the conservative politics of a Republican administration and the liberal orientation of the social sciences, produced a new "social philosophy". Although its proposal created a great deal of controversy, they still remain very important for understanding where capitalist "social planning" is headed.
Welfare struggles made it impossible to continue with the same policy. A new way to handle the matter was required because of the radically changed nature of the problem. What had happened that made Johnson's assistance plans impractical? There was no doubt that the situation could not longer be seen in terms of "war on poverty". The Johnson Administration itself had already realised that at the heart of the problem was the urgent need to control social movements before these found political outlets. Its answer, however, was to create an infrastructure of social services in the hope of containing social insubordination by providing opportunity for productive activities. At the root of this policy was the idea that the problem was transitory. In the long run, economic development would absorb these marginal areas. Education, training programs, social promotion would facilitate the transition. Since these agencies did not serve the purpose of containing, of "unionizing", this social sector, they failed in their immediate objective. They actually created more problems than they solved. Step by step, the welfare system lost all its paternalist functions and became a means of acquiring income. "Across the nation it had become a general rule that as poverty declined, welfare dependency increased."(37) This is the key that Nixon's social scientists discovered. It was not poverty any more, it was a problem of dependency.
Social struggles have identified the state as the bargaining agent from which to demand income. The members of a typical welfare family can not simply "be helped to help themselves." They demand from the state the guarantee of a stable income. For many, to be on welfare is not just a step in the direction of obtaining a wage; it is an income now, and without having to work. This is the objective around which stuggles have developed. It was the anti-puritan demand of wanting to be dependent, that provoked the welfare crisis. Moynihan's perception of the problem leaves no doubt as to the reasons for a massive intervention in the welfare sector: "Welfare dependency became a `crisis' in the mid1960s not because it was consuming large amounts of money, or involved large numbers of people. The amount of money was trivial, and the numbers not that large. Welfare had to be defined as a crisis because of the rate at which the rolls commence to grow. `The heart of it,' Robert L. Bartley writes, `is that such growth has powerful overtones of social disintegration. "(38)
Nixon accepted the challenge set forth by the struggle. Putting aside Johnson's utopias, he confronted the problem on its own terms. An "income strategy" began to take shape in the proposal to Congress of a guaranteed income, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP).
In practice and in theory, the issue was not new for American capitalism. During the Fifties, for example, a guaranteed wage proposal appeared in the Steel Workers and UAW platforms. These plans consisted of certain unemployment benefits and were eventually approved elsewhere (as in the case of the longshoremen). But the guaranteed wage was no more than a form of unemployment insurance and, in any case, was applicable only to the more unionised sectors and tied to existing wage levels.
After the debate on automation and the resulting fear of its negative effects on employment, the idea, this time of a guaranteed income, surfaced again. Nevertheless the proposal put forward at the beginning of the Sixties remained very abstract in that they were linked either to post-industrial utopian society or to social democratic incomedistribution ideologies.(39) (It was not by chance that these ideologies reappeared in the McGovern campaign and were definitively defeated.)
Nixon's FAP is a different story altogether. In its basic form the idea was borrowed from the concept of a "negative income tax" elaborated in the Forties by the conservative economist Milton Friedman. A person pays the state in accordance with the amount of income he/she has. If income is below a certain level, the state pays a tax, so to speak, to raise income to that level. The principle is seemingly quite elementary but hides a very definite strategy. The mechanisms by which these negative taxes are distributed provide an incentive to work. Working does not exclude the possibility of receiving state support which decreases gradually as income decreases. To make a long story short, with this system a subsistence level can be reached only if one combines income from working with the state's negative tax. In its original conception the system was supposed to provide an automatic mechanism for keeping free market forces in balance (it was conceived explicity as a critique of Roosevelt's welfarism). For Nixon's strategists, it is not this aspect that counts but rather that the negative income tax could become a strategy for social planning.
First, this system eliminates the bureaucratic service apparatus which, as we have seen, ended up aiding the struggle. The new system has the advantage of being impersonal and therefore less political. Secondly, it establishes a more direct relationship between income and work. The debate on the amount of the negative income tax is a crucial one. The ceiling has to be low enough so that it does not provide a feasible alternative to working. This was the principal defect of the welfare system which only sparked the explosion of welfare rolls. Critics have charged that the FAP would substitute welfare with "workfare". This aspect cannot be underestimated. Obviously the plan is not designed to establish a relationship between income and productivity, but it does forge a direct link between income and work. It should be stressed that work means any kind of work and the social discipline that work implies. According to the good old theory, digging holes and filling them up again helps to cool down revolutionary passion. (The great majority of recipients will increase the ranks of the underemployed, already a large part of the labour force in certain areas such as New York.) Finally and most important of all, whether or not this system succeeds in forcing people to work, its ultimate objective is to stabilize a given sector within a specific social hierarchy.
Since the struggle forced the state to deal with the demand of a guaranteed income, the State responds by attempting to control and reshape the demand of making it a form of wages within a well-defined wage hierarchy. Once welfare struggles manifest their working class nature, capital is forced to acknowledge them and place the welfare sector within the stratification of work. This does not necessarily imply that it becomes a part of the laborprocess. It does mean, however, that it is organised from the work viewpoint, i.e. from the viewpoint of a rigid working class stratification.
As a wage disengaged from productivity or, in some cases, from work, the guaranteed income is determined only by the necessity of political control over working class recomposition. Paradoxically, guaranteed income becomes a means of regulating the labor market. There is nothing left of the income distribution experiments of the KennedyJohnson era. Nixon's design is realistically aimed at dismembering the political homogeneity of the working class. His project, although temporarily defeated by Congress, is bound to reappear, perhaps under a Democratic administration.
Nixon's guaranteed income is an overt attempt to isolate the different social sectors that were recomposed by the struggles and makes the communication between factories and communities more difficult.
However, for this strategy to be effective, it must apply to the whole gamut of factory struggles and push back the wage explosion around which they concentrated.
Nixon's initiative on this front has two immediate objectives: to defeat the wages attack, and to reassert union control over the workers. These two are not at all contradictory. The first step in this initiative has been to apply some "traditional" but always effective measures, such as an increase in unemployment. According to official statistics, unemployment reached 6.5% in 1972.The most affected areas were those where the struggle had been most intense; Detroit, Cleveland, etc., were listed as depressed areas. Among blacks and young workers the rate doubled. For young blacks it reached 50%.
At the factory level the attack takes the form of an intensification of work. The short-term capitalist strategy does not foresee a technological dismemberment of the work force. Kennedy's rhetoric notwithstanding, no major technological leap occurred during the Sixties. The 1973 data indicate that only 33% of U.S. machine tools are less than 10 years old, the lowest level since the 30% of 1940, that followed after 10 years of depression.(40)
The increase in productivity in the Nixonian phase is obtained through stricter work discipline, increase overtime, and intensification of speed-up. It is not by chance that the Lordstown struggles and those in Detroit in the summer of 1973 focused on these themes. In Lordstown, General Motors claimed to have the fastest assembly line in the world and in Detroit people were working 12 hours a day including Saturdays.(41)
More than unemployment and factory repression, the most relevant aspect of the Nixon Administration are the institutional transformations. Nixon's New Economic Policy launched on August 15, included the institution of a wage freeze, and a Pay Board in charge of implementing it. The economic editorials commented at that time that Nixon had suddenly turned Keynesian. In fact, his program has nothing to do with the income policy of the early Sixties. In theory and in practice, the income policy approach has been surpassed by events. It is no longer possible to conceive of a process of economic growth which can maintain a stable relationship between social productivity and wages, and an equilibrium between different productive sectors. The actual outcome of the Keynesian policies of the Sixties has been to foster working class recomposition. They have sparked off an international cycle of class struggle of enormous proportions, and in so doing have provoked a stasis in capital's accumulation.
The new capitalist strategy entails, a dis-equilibrium among productive sectors, and therefore a political dismemberment of the working class. Capital is forced to place foremost certain leading economic sectors to the disadvantage of others, even if this means economic instability, as long as it can preserve the necessary level of accumulation at an international level.(42)
Under these circumstances, rigid guidelines for wage increases are useless. The Pay Board enforced only formally the productive guidelines. In reality, it managed collective bargaining, sector by sector, according to which sector presented a more favorable relationship of forces. This is what the freeze was all about.
Yet, it would be impossible to understand the Pay Board and the institutional changes without examining the new role that unions play.
Once the reationship between wages and productivity is severed, the unions, whose task was to guarantee this relationship, lose their traditional role in the system. Unions can no longer constitute a side of the balance of power within a dynamic equilibrium of institutional forces. Their relationship with the state cannot even exist in terms of "collaboration" towards the maintenance of social peace. Unions must became part of the state; they must take part in government. They must "govern" the working class.
This explains the creation of the Pay Board and the LaborManagement Committees during different phases of the NEP. Wage controls are not guaranteed by general guidelines but by the institutional relationship between unions and government, by the de facto entry of the unions into the government.
This new arrangement provides for an extreme flexibility in bargaining procedures, allowing a wide range of options in each individual settlement and at the same time enforcing the differences among sectors.
The new role that Union have in the State obviously requires a certain amount of internal adjustment with changes in their organization and relationship to the working class. Some "backwardness" which in the past slowed down bargaining procedures has to be eliminated. One of the major difficulties consists in the extreme decentralisation of the labor movement. This facilitates autonomous actions on the part of the locals, often in contradiction with the policy of the International unions.
Union reforms will entail a greater intervention of the Internationals in local bargaining and "improved" ratification procedures in order that contracts not be as easily voted down by the rank and file as in the past. In short, this will require the greater "autonomy" of union leadership from day-to-day grievances, a great professionalisation of union leaders, and the usage of more advanced techniques in order to maximize efficiency. Unions must be able to function like business enterprises in all respects.(43)
In conclusion, the progressive cleavage between working class and unions is due to both workers' dissatisfaction and the new "managerial" requirements of unions' role. Furthermore, labor must reconsider the contents of its new tasks and strategy. Before this question can be answered, another aspect of the present capitalist reorganization remains to be examined.
During the Kennedy-Johnson era, while economic policies were being modelled after Keynesian macroeconomics, sociological ideologies were trying to prove their credibility in the first experiments with social policy. For the first time, sociology was accepted as a viable tool for analysis and State intervention in social planning. Moynihan's career as a government functionary is a case in point. Social sciences tried to tackle the problems of poverty, unemployment, crime, and, most of all, ethnic and racial conflict. Their task was to find ways, if not to eliminate, at least to control, social conflict. Even in this case, however, sociology took for granted the possibility of adapting social composition to economic growth. The ideological character of these premises was highlighted by the social struggles which defeated the project of the "new economics" at its very foundations. Sociology was in turn forced to abandon global synthesis and relegate the race question to "benign neglect". During the present phase, the sociology of work becomes the center of attention. The emphasis put on the organization of work is not merely an answer to the problems created by the "Lordstown syndrome", an often recurring complaint about workers' lack of motivation and boredom. The sociology of work provides a new approach to the more general problems of social organisation. The perspective of industrial organisation is closer to the present capitalist needs of social planning than the previous, descriptive analyses of the sociology of classes.
The sociology of work has always been prescriptive in character, to serve the needs of factory management and therefore always less prone to "sociological imagination". Most of all, the methodology of the sociology of work corresponds to the present capitalist thrust to intervene directly in the social milieu in a planned way, whether to control the welfare system, to re-organize the educational system, to regulate the labor market, or to transform the nature of work on the assembly line.
Economic development does not automatically produce an adequate social composition. The reverse is true. A certain class composition is now an essential prerequisite for development and therefore must be planned and organised.
At a factory level, the new sociology criticizes the "human relations" approach as a poor substitute for Taylorism. The "human relations" theory grew out of the ideological premise that it is enough to give workers "better" treatment and create a social system inside the factory. The shortcomings of this theory are that it supposes that the workers can adjust to machines once the environment is transformed, and does not consider the work process itself. This approach has been so inadequate that in many cases it has been replaced by an updated version of Fordism. (The GM Vega plant in Lordstown is precisely that.) At least Fordism guarantees an increase in productivity, if not in the satisfaction of the workers.
The only possible alternative to Taylorism and "human relations" "must arise from the assumption that it is insufficient to adjust either people to technology or technology to people. It is necessary to consider both the social needs of the workers and the task to be performed."(44)
A step in the right direction consists of going beyond the present techniques of "job enrichment", "job enlargement", "job rotation", etc., since they represent only limited solutions. They are concerned only with the horizontal structure of work and leave out the vertical hierarchy of industrial enterprise, and thus the global organisation of work. Every work place has to become an "experiment in design". Autonomous work groups, integrated functions, self-government, job mobility, rewards for learning, wages linked to workers' ability rather than to their jobs, are few a of the possibilities to be explored.
There is no doubt that many of the solutions proposed by the advocates of "job design" are utopian. But an underlying trend is evident: the necessity for total experimentation. There is no longer a stable relationship between the worker and his job. He is not defined any more by the specific function he performs. Nor is the division of tasks defined by the technological division of labor.
The "job design" theory incorporates the lessons taught by the working class struggle. The technological division of the working class has not been a barrier for its recomposition. The organisation of work cannot therefore be determined once and for all, but must be extremely elastic and open to fast and continuous readjustments.
In the last analysis, the organisation of work becomes a political matter, determined solely by the relationship of forces at any given point in time.
For these reasons it becomes clear that the organisation of work is not the prerogative of individual management. The proponents of "job design" are well aware of that as they talk about "social efficiency" and not just "industrial efficiency".(45) In addition to management, the State and the unions have a fundamental role in the design of jobs.
The State has the task of promoting full employment not merely by means of fiscal and monetary measures, but through federal and local programs which regulate the labor market and plan the relationship between technological development and the quality of labor supply.
The union's role is to guarantee the political conditions for experimentation. The new contents of the unions' policies and the meaning of the political organisation of work now became clear.
Since the stratification of the working class does not follow technological lines for the reasons mentioned above, unions become the only guarantee for stability and an integral part of any project of job design.
Capital's answer to the progressive. homogenization of work is the institutionalization of change in the working conditions. The participation of labor in work design is to maintain political control over the working class. Labor's "government" of the workers thus covers the full range, from the State to the factory. An immediate consequence of all this is the crisis of one of the fundamental tenets of the New Left.
According to its proponents, a Workers' Control strategy entails a "qualitative" shift in the nature of workers' demands from wages to working conditions. However, the new unions' interest in the conditions of work, far from being revolutionary, reflects the new needs of the capitalist organization of work.
(January 1974)
1 Alvin H. Hansen, The Postwar American Economy, N.Y. 1966.
2 George McManus, The Inside Story of Steel Wages and Prices, 1967.
3 Walter Heller, New Dimensions of Political Economy, 1966, p. 62
4 Theodore Soresen, Kennedy, 1965
5 W. Heller, op. cit. p. 45
6 George Lekachman, The Age of Keynes, 1968, p. 208
7 W. Heller, op. cit. p. 44
8 Andrew Shonfield, Modern Capitalism, 1968, p. 186
9 Perspectives on Economic Growth, ed. W. Heller, 1968
10 W. Heller. op. cit.
11 Charles Silberman, Crisis in Black and White, 1974, p. 143
12 Frances Fox Piven and R. Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 1972
13 Ibid.
14 Harold Baron, "The Demand for Black Labor", Radical America, Vol 5, 2
15 Charles Silberman, op. cit., p. 234
16 L. Rainwater, W. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of controvesy.
17 Ibid., p. 20
18 Piven and Cloward, op. cit.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., p. 270 "Indeed, Walter Reuther played no small role during the planning of this initiative. It was he who in 1965 coined the phrase 'community unions.' Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, (1969).
21 Ibid., p. 274
22 Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark, 1967, p. 35
23 R.L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, 1970.
24 Quoted in Ibid. p. 229
25 James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, 1970.
26 Piven and Cloward, op. cit. p. 341
27 Radical America, special issue on Black Labor, March-April 1971
28 Murray J. Gart, "Labor's Rebellions Rank and File". Fortune, Nov. 1966
29 Quoted in Monthly Labor Review, March 1967, p. 57
30 Emma Rothschild, Paradise Lost, 1973, p. 125 See also "The Cirsis of the Auto Sector, below pp.
31 Brendan and Patricia Cayo Sexton, "Labor's Decade-Maybe", Dissent, Aug 71
32 F. Ackerman, A. McEwan, "Inflation, Recession and Crisis," Review of Radical Political Economy, Aug. 1972
33 C.J. Loomis, "The New Questions about U.S. Economy", Fortune, Jan. 1974
34 L. Bewman, "The Emerging Debate about Inflation", Fortune, March 1972
35 Ibid., p. 51
36 U.S. News, March 5, 1973, p. 13, (our emphasis) These lawyers were only tools (often cumbersome ones) of the autonomous forces that for a time they were permitted to represent. The legal victories gained with the criminal and penal code for example owned as much to the struggles of jail-house lawyers as they did to the work of federally funded attorneys.
37 D.P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 1973, p. 35
38 Ibid. p. 25
39 The Guaranteed Income, ed. by R. Theobold, Doubleday, 1967
40 BusinessWeek, Nov. 10, 1973, p. 43
41 E. Rothschild op. cit.
42 While this article was written the "oil crisis" was unfolding. Although no direct analysis of it is made in these pages, the continuity between Nixon's restructuration of the economy and the subsequent international crisis should be apparent. See below, pp.
43 Derek C. Bok, J.T. Dunlop, Labor and the American Community, 1970
44 Work in America, 1973, p. 19
45 Ibid. p. 23