And there was also, you know not as much unanimity, or not any unanimity as we experience now among the corporate strata, that it's a go for the guts basically.
There were segments of the corporate universe especially in the industrial sector that still had, were fine with the idea of collective bargaining and with union representation and something like welfare capitalism and over the course of the 70's and the 80's, for a variety of more or less complex reasons, the nature of the game changed and they went completely on the offensive and that's also kind of where we are now.
R.K.: Now it's interesting. You say that the progressives had more influence of Nixon than Clinton or Obama and you tell Bill Moyers that the left as a significant force for shaping terms of debate has been gone for awhile. And in your article it suggests that maybe the 80's that we kind of lost that?
A.R.: Well I think that's probably right. I don't want to stake too much on my own personal narrative, but I know it was an experience of a lot of people. I mean, I'm an old guy. I'm a product of the social movements of the 1960's, basically, and people like us who had been, among other things, those who connected with the social welfare state in one way or another; I mentioned Frances Fox Piven as a key person in this, but there were many others, too.
I spent most of the 70's trying to develop the democratic and egalitarian critiques of the American social welfare state. Reagan gets elected in 1980 and all of a sudden we find ourselves then in a position where we've got to do an about-face and defend the existing institutions, right, against a right wing agenda that wanted to undercut that was impelled by arguments for radically cutting all forms of social protection. I mean, I hesitated on that because it actually got worse after Reagan.
So, it's kind of like a deer in headlights thing. I, for instance, focused my politics on electing Mondale, a lot of good that did, and then Dukakis and then even Clinton the first time around and I think it's really with... so, in that sense I think... and it's true in the labor movement also because this period that I'm describing is also the period of the most intense imposition of concessionary bargaining on trade unions and, by the time you get to the end of the 80's, just about to a point where employers are basically demanding that workers go out on strike to give them an excuse to break unions.
I lived in Chicago for most of the 90's and it was during a period when one of the big labor fights was a hundred miles or so away in Decatur, Illinois, where there were three major employers who either were struck, or locked out the workers at the same time. Some listeners may remember your Caterpillar, Firestone Rubber, and Staley starch, cornstarch, and it was clear then and, I mean, the apparatus of union busting by the early 90's was in complete sway and we've been in that position ever since. So what we've been doing, to cut to the chase, increasingly since the 1980's, and especially by the 90's, is trying to negotiate the best possible terms of surrender or best possible terms of defeat.
And I think what sealed the deal on that was the emergence of Clintonism which had its roots in the formation of the democratic leadership council as an agency of conservative, southern and largely southwestern, but other economic conservative democrats that formed in the party in the aftermath of Mondale's defeat, to craft a re-organization of the democratic party and its principles in ways that were consistent with the imperatives of what we would now call neo-liberalism. And Clinton really was the consolidation of that.
R.K.: You know, you talk about neo-liberalism, neo-progressivism, neo-progressives. What's the difference between a neo-liberal and a neo-conservative?
A.R.: I'll say this, and I've come to this after a lot of reading and thinking and reading of the natterings about neo-liberalism. I'll say two things about what neo-liberalism is: one, as a definition, I like what the geographer David Harvey characterizes it as a combination of two things. One of them is a utopian free-market ideology.
The other is a practical program for radically regressive income transfer, upward transfer of new wealth and income and, as Harvey points out, when the two conflict, when the two principles conflict you can guess which one takes precedent. But another way that I think may be more helpful, and I think most helpful, to think about neo-liberalism as an historical phenomenon is that all it is really is capitalism that has eliminated effective working class opposition.
This is the world as we saw it before the insurgencies of the 1930's and this is where some tendencies among capitalists have what they've yearned for all along and, if there is such a thing as a natural state of capitalism, and I don't think that quite works because I don't believe you can really ever separate the principles of the economy from the broader social structures, but hypothetically, if there was such a thing as a natural condition of capitalism, this is what it would be.
So, I think in some then, I would say that what neo-liberalism is, is ultimately capitalism that has no restraint from any other antagonistic social forces. Now, in contrast with neo-conservatism, I think that's an interesting issue as well because, as I've said in the article, I think what we've come down to now, and this might be one of the ways to think about the distinction between democratic or left neo-liberalism and the republican neo-liberalism, is that we have two parties that are basically most fundamentally committed to giving priority to the financial sector and the investor class right across the board.
The democrats sort of buttressed, or laced that commitment with a conviction in, or with an earnest support for multi-culturalism and new diversity and the republicans laced their neo-liberal commitments to a firm opposition to multi-culturalism and new diversity and I think that distinction is not meaningless. Some of my critics have tried to characterize me as being dismissive of it, as I've said in writing, I think that for most of us who consider ourselves progressive, it's a hands down matter as to whether the democratic version of neo-liberalism that is open to multi-culturalism and diversity is preferable to the one that actively opposes it.
But that said, what that means is that for, I don't know, 80% of the population, hypothetically, 80% of the time, 80% of the things they're concerned about fall within the domain that both parties agree about; access to healthcare, housing, economic security, affordable education, you know, secure in old age, etcetera.
This is the kind of thing that most Americans are mainly concerned about most of the time and of those issues, which are only weakly connected to the struggles over multi-culturalism and diversity, there's not really any solace or base of support for most of us from either party.
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