‘Middle Class’ decline mirrors fall of unions in one chart (US)
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Huffington Post (US) reports
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/union-membership-middle-class-income_n_3948543.html
Not sure what leftcoms like the ICC will say about this."Middle class" here is defined as "the middle 60 percent of households" by income. So what's really been talked about is the middle 60 percent of income-receivers, most of whom will of course be members of the working class properly defined.In the olden days, the ICC would probably have said it was a conspiracy by the unions, at the behest of the capitalist state, to reduce their own membership and so effectiveness so as to allow the income of the workers concerned to fall. These days they would more probably point to this part of the news item as confirmation of their view that workers are better off without unions:
Quote:Studies have discovered that during the economic recovery, non-union workers fared considerably better than union workers in fields like manufacturing and private construction. Also, during the 1982 and 1991 recessions, states with fewer union members were found to recover more quickly than states with a strong union presence.What should we make of it? First, that the middle 60 percent of incomes is not a very meaningful group. Second, that "middle class" is not a useful description of it as class is determined not by income but relationship to the means of production. Third, that a group's declining share of total income does not necessarily mean (as the title, but not the small print, of the graph suggests) a decline in their real income.
There's an interactive graph here:http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/03/union-membership-and-inequality/Which does show a strong correlation. But then correlation is not causation but in this case there would be a good case to think so..
It's another interesting but different graph, showing this time how, since the 1960s, the share of national income of the top 10% has gone up at the same time as the percentage of workers unionised has gone down.I'm not sure, though, that we can conclude that the share of the top 10% went up because the percentage of workers in unions went down. We certainly can't argue that if union membership hadn't declined then the share of the top 10% would not have gone up. That would be to attribute to unions a power they don't have.Unions may (and do) have the power, when first set up, to increase the wages of their members (and some others) and then to more or less maintain this in the long run (pushing up wages in boom times and slowing down wage cuts in slump times), but that's as far as they can go.Not even governments can reducee income inequality. Reformist governments have tried but failed and given up. Instead, in recent decades, governments have helped capitalism's tendency to increased inequality, by reducing taxes on profits and high incomes. Government anti-union legislation, making unions less effective in their limited sphere, may have been a factor but only a minor one.Union membership will have declined in line with the decreased share of manufacturing (where they were well organised) in GDP. But even if union membership hadn't declined I think the top 10 percent's share would still have gone up.
Weren’t there SPGB members who argued unions could not increase wages beyond a certain value, instead only able to stop wages from falling below a certain value?
Also if the ICC believed unions were trying to reduce their own membership, this notion seems a bit far-fetched.
jondwhite wrote:Weren't there SPGB members who argued unions could not increase wages beyond a certain value, instead only able to stop wages from falling below a certain value?I don't know, but in the 1920s there were some members who argued that the trade-union struggle was not part of the class struggle but merely a "commodity struggle", which elicited this response in the Socialist Standard of the time:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1920/no-195-november-1920/commodity-struggle-or-class-struggleA similar position is taken up today by some "ultra-left" groups (quite a few in fact) who dismiss the wages struggles as merely variable capital trying to realise its value.
jondwhite wrote:Also if the ICC believed unions were trying to reduce their own membership, this notion seems a bit far-fetched.That was my caricature of their implacable anti-union position. They see unions as agents of the capitalist state and all permanent organisations formed by workers as unions, and they have argued that workers would be better off without them and should rely instead on ephemeral temporary strike committees.I imagine that they would interpret the graph as proof of the uselessness of unions and would find some convoluted way to attribute to the unions some responsibility for what it shows.
As unlikely as ephemeral temporary strike committees sound, something called a pop-up union is reputed to have been formed by Occupy Sussex in Sussex University quite recently where existing trade unions already existed. Whether this is anything more than an isolated incident remains to be seen. This is something I'd like analysed in the Socialist Standard.
Hadn't heard of it before, but as a registered trade union the Pop-Up Union would anathema for the ICC. They would see it as an agent of the state like all other unions.http://popupunion.org/Breakaway unions and ginger groups are not new in the history of the working class or even of the SPGB. In the 1930s a Party member was prominent in setting up a breakaway busmen's union from the TGWU (now Unite), the National Passenger Workers Union and later, after the war, in setting up another breakaway union from the TGWU in the docks. Other Party members remained in the TGWU. So there were Party members in rival unions. Ken Fuller in his history of the London busworkers Radical Aristocrats writes:
Quote:In Snelling's case, his own party's anti-Communism possibly played in his decision to form the breakaway, although at a public meeting called to discuss the new union by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in July 1938 he was opposed by W. E. Waters, also of the SPGB.Fuller gives the source for this as Lewisham Borough News of 26 July 1938. I haven't seen this report but it sounds as if it might be worth tracking down.The Party decision seems to have been not to intervene, but to leave individual members, as well as individual workers, to join the union of their choice (as long as they joined a union). A reflection, I suppose, of our general position of not trying to take over workers' struggles. Though it has always been our position not to support breakaway "socialist" or "revolutionary" unions, as was once the policy of the old DeLeonist SLP and of the Communist Party at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s.Not that the Pop-Up Union seems to be setting itself up as a rival to the existing unions, more as a ginger group allowing membership of other unions, to influence them. Which is what the IWW has become as well. Since some members are in the IWW I wouldn't have thought that whether or not to join the Pop-Up Union would be up to individuals members, but I can't see the Party adopting the policy of encouraging such unions.But is the Pop-Up Union still going?
I think Aditya Chakrabortty is spot on in some of his articles. Today, he writes in the Guardian:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/rust-belt-middle-class-wiped-outIt seems he is very aware that there are just two classes in society – them and us – that “the middle class” is just fiction:“The Trump vote contained rednecks and inhabitants of the rust belt, just as south Wales and Sunderland turned out for Brexit – but in neither case was that the whole story. It also seeks to turn a larger and wider economic process into a smaller and more trivial culture war. It pits the middle classes against the working classes, and the poor whites against the poor blacks. All the while, since 2008 the single biggest economic story across Britain and the US and other rich countries has been achingly slow growth and austerity for the masses, alongside state-subsidised riches for the very wealthiest.”He quotes Engels: “the battle of all against all”.How very apt for our times.
Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian coutries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.
Subhaditya wrote:Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian coutries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.What if there is mass unionisation, can the workers organised stop wages falling as a proportion of profit?
Subhaditya wrote:Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian countries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.Middle class is a fallacy created by the capitalist class, and workers do not own anything in the capitalist society, we do not even own a lot in the cemetery. Those houses are just rented to a bank for 30 or 40 years, and the banks hold the lien, and in some places the state owns the land, and peoples continue renting the land to the state, it is an eternal cycle, in some third world countries people are better off because they own the property and the own the land. We are all workers, or wage slaves.In the USA in 2008 the so called Middle Class lost their jobs, their false illusion were vanished, they lost their inflated homes, they lost their car, and credit cards, and they were making lines to collect unemployment, and some had to move with their parents, and then, they came to the conclusion, that they were wages slaves. The expression: I am a member of the middle class and you are a member of the working class, it just an illusory expression to make some members of the working class to feel that they were better off than others members of the working class, but they were in the same hole, working for a bunch of thieves That conception of the 1% vs the 99% is just another construction of the capitalist class, which keep peoples fighting for reforms, and the so called inequality, , the real situation is that the majority of the human beings are slaves and produce everything, and one small group does not work and they steal our labor, they are just a bunch of thieves, worst than the ones that they keep in jailsOur society is divided in two classes only: The capitalist class and the working class, and our interests are different and they can not be reconciled, and passing laws and regulation the antagonism is not going to be resolved, we must expropriate the expropriator, and send them to the fucking hell, they are our class enemies, and when we vote for them, we become their tailgater and their lackeys, we do not need them, they need us
jondwhite wrote:Subhaditya wrote:Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian coutries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.What if there is mass unionisation, can the workers organised stop wages falling as a proportion of profit?
We do not need small pleces of bread, we need the whole pie. We are the producers, they do not produce anything. We are the ones producing their profits.
mcolome1 wrote:jondwhite wrote:Subhaditya wrote:Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian coutries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.What if there is mass unionisation, can the workers organised stop wages falling as a proportion of profit?
We do not need small pleces of bread, we need the whole pie. We are the producers, they do not produce anything. We are the ones producing their profits.
So what is the purpose of trade unions or organised labour?
jondwhite wrote:mcolome1 wrote:jondwhite wrote:Subhaditya wrote:Thomas Piketty said in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century that USA will be the first developed country to lose its middle class (middle 40%) then some time later European countries will follow suit finally Scandinavian coutries will lose theirs… but he also believed before that transpires huge political unrest will take place… it will not happen peacefully.All their wealth will trickle up to the 1%, the middle class will lose ownership of their houses.What if there is mass unionisation, can the workers organised stop wages falling as a proportion of profit?
We do not need small pleces of bread, we need the whole pie. We are the producers, they do not produce anything. We are the ones producing their profits.
So what is the purpose of trade unions or organised labour?
This is the stand of the Socialist Party and the WSM in regard to Trade Union, or Workers Union https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/trade-unions
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