Has labor forgotten the past or has it just been sleeping or both? For what is happening today had already happened in the years between 1919-1929. Overproduction in general, as a matter of fact, was one of the largest micro organizations whose poisons were set free by the economic crash of 1929. We prided ourselves on being the most productive nation on the planet. More and better goods were produced at greater speed and efficiency during the 1920s than at any time in our history.
This was a good thing only if the producers could sell what they made or grew, and during the ‘20s they could not. They could not sell enough at home, wages were low and falling because of the loss of union power and membership so workers could not afford to buy the very goods they were producing.
The triumph of the industrial Republicanism after the end of World War I had nearly killed the labor movement. But, after World War II, with the help of the New Deal and some new labor laws, labor fought back and had regained new power and good wages with benefits.
But the anti-unionists have never given up. They changed tactics, using such things as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), buying state governments, and now American City Council Exchanges that aims to control the city governments, which will write anti-labor laws to break unions. As wages go down or cease to exist, people turn to credit and then public or private help and when that dries up some will turn to crime.
At this time, a new labor movement of some type is the Have Nots only chance to win higher wages of $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage, single payer healthcare, pensions and free education. Remember that this is all owed to the people of the world by the people who are profiting off our Commons and not paying rent for the use of these Commons, which are roads, bridges, air, water, oil, gas, protection of investment in other countries, the enforcement of laws, patent rights, and our courts.
The money and means to make the world a better place for all is there. We, proletarians, just need the will and the commitment to make it happen, and a strong labor could be the tipping point.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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