Michael Perelman wrote:
I agree with what Gene Coyle said, although not with his terminology.
I regard the crisis in the manifestation of deeper contradictions that may
be pestering over a long period of time. The Taft-Hartley law was the
opening salvo in a long struggle to roll back the New Deal.
Why 1947? Why not 1941? Taft-Hartley was merely the enactment of policies that the
NLRB was already enforcing. And the policies of the National War Labor Board had
already nullified rank-and-file militancy during the war years.
Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the
Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960.
Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II
The 1960s were
a setback to this project, but it picked up with a vengeance during the
1970s.
The gutting the Full Employment Bill (passed as the Employment Act of 1946) and of
the 1949 Housing Act were setbacks to the project. A case can be made that they
mark the *end* of New Deal reform and emergence of the "growth coalition" as the
alternative.
Alan Wolfe, America's Impasse: the Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth.
Be that as it may, the post war growth coalition fashioned policy that was firmly
within the boundaries of the "corporate-liberal" formula that emerged from
developments centered around the antitrust policies between 1890 and 1916, which
assigned to the corporation the primary task of managing the market, and to the
state the secondary task of regulating the corporation.
Martin J Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916:
The Market, The Law and Politics.
Gabrial Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American
History, 1900-1916.
James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and
Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913.
So why should the current crises be rooted in the passage of Taft-Hartley and not,
say the passage of the Federal Reserve Act? (Or any other historical regression?)
Taft-Hartley didn't weaken the labor movement in the USA; the weak labor movement
make Taft-Hartley possible.
Michael Nuwer
The Confiscation of American Prosperity fortuitously came out in October
2007, while the stock market was peaking. I concentrated on the period
following the 1960s, but Gene's starting point is also a good place to
begin. Class warfare increased profits, which followed a Minsky-like
trajectory to hedge financing and finally Ponzi status.
But the underlying problem was not finance, but rather an ongoing neglect
of basic forces of production, both human and produced. Kindleberger once
wrote: "Details proliferate; structure abides."
I'm not alone in making this point, but it has certainly not been center
stage in much discussion lately. Gene deserves credit for bringing it to
our attention.
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