Abstract
This is the fiftieth anniversary of an extraordinary moment in American and global politics. Our two lead articles (and cover illustration) invoke 1968 and assess the lasting consequences of a year-long series of mass strikes, battlefield denouements, urban insurrections, assassinations, cultural revolutions, presidential abdications, and violent repression that encircled the world from Washington, D.C. to Prague, from Mexico City to Paris. Above all, it was a year of great expectations that the prevailing post-war order might be overcome, replaced by something more egalitarian; that steep hierarchies might be leveled; that war machines might be muzzled; that imperial exploitation and domination might succumb to popular mobilization and armed resistance; that legalized racial and other forms of discrimination might become bad historical memories; emancipation seemed imminent.
A half century on, Reuel Schiller and Joshua Freeman measure not only the distance traveled since those heady days but the direction in which we have marched. Schiller analyzes why the struggle for economic justice faded after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., why his death marks a tragic narrowing of the vision that inspired the last struggles of his short life: the Poor People’s Campaign and the Memphis sanitation workers strike. Freeman notes the democratic accomplishments that followed the upheavals of that year, but also more mordantly records how little of what was dreamed about was actually realized, and even more sobering how the seeds of our current age of disillusionment were sown back then.
None of the other articles in this issue allude to 1968. But it is helpful to introduce them using that perspective. Suburbia in that era was largely a white family’s land of middle-class aspiration, where ranch houses accommodated a consumer republic’s version of the American dream. By the time 1968 rolled around, it had also become an incubator of youthful discontent where an entitled generation rebelled against its stifling conformity and could no longer abide the violence of American hypocrisy in the jungles of Vietnam, in the cotton fields of the South, on the mean streets of the urban ghetto. As Phil Neel demonstrates, the landscape of suburbia has been entirely uprooted; it looks like alien territory where dreams go to die. White, affluent enclaves still exist but otherwise the demographics have changed. People living outside the urban core are often black, from foreign countries, and working class or poor. Where once there were only bedrooms and commuter trains, now there are factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and the blasted wastelands of small-town, ex-urban opioid-central. Neel argues that this new social and political geography is apt to produce, as it did, for example, in Ferguson, Missouri, its own more explosive and differently motivated set of discontents.
When the world turned upside-down in 1968, there was no question that the American economy dominated the world, and that it had produced, in part thanks to that domination, a long era of post-war material well-being. Wealth was more evenly distributed than it had been before or would be in the future. The power of organized labor helped ensure that dispensation. Now we are apparently living through another economic boom. But as Arthur MacEwan and John Miller explain, it is utterly unlike its ancestral look-alike. It rests instead on low wages and a nearly extinct labor movement, on the downward mobility and precarious work lives of young and old alike, and on the unprecedented skewing of income and wealth in favor of a privileged few. Rather than lording it over its economic rivals abroad, the country retreats behind the walls of a fear-filled economic nationalism. Economic progress is made only faintly plausible when “recovery” is measured against the bottoming out of the recent Great Recession, forgetting that, compared with where matters stood in 1968, the country has shamefully moved backward. Boomtime or not, the United States is a developed country undergoing underdevelopment.
Corporate America has always played a weighty, often determining role in our political life. This was certainly the case in 1968 and at least some of the uproar of that year evinced a deep-running suspicion of the business world. People like Nelson Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, George Romney, and others occupied conspicuous positions as governors and senators. However, these men (and they were all men with the possible exception of Claire Booth Luce) were deeply experienced political creatures. They did not claim that their lives as businessmen made them uniquely qualified to govern. And most people like them who hailed from the country’s leading financial institutions and the Fortune 500 preferred to “serve” out of sight, not in the electoral arena, but running the great bureaucracies of what we now loosely call “the deep state”: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Treasury Department, and other centers of power free from public scrutiny. Nowadays, however, we have grown accustomed to the sight of business tycoons, lacking a scintilla of political experience, offering themselves up as “public servants” and for the highest offices. And they do so brashly, suggesting that is precisely their lives as entrepreneurial autocrats commanding their own business empires that makes them best qualified to set things right in the political arena. Lily Geismer explores how this phenomenon of the business mogul as political leader came to be and why it is such an authoritarian threat to democracy, to all those great expectations that made 1968 a promissory note to remember.
Italy was hardly spared in the upheavals that wracked Europe in 1968. It was then that the country’s post-war political order, godfathered by the United States, began to splinter. The Italian Communist Party was itself shattered in part by the convulsions that year which challenged Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, especially the overthrow of the Czech government and its reinstallation at the hands of the Red Army. The “Red Brigades” punctuated the political disintegration far more profoundly than the fatal theatrics of the Weathermen in the United States. Italian politics has continued to devolve ever since, living through governments with the life expectancy of a fruit fly, suffering through the kleptocratic regimes of Silvio Berlusconi (the Italian version of the business leader as Napoleonic savior). Out of the chaos a new movement now aspires to rule. Richard Drake examines the origins of the Five Star Movement, describes its remarkable demographic amplitude, and tries to make sense of its oscillations between left- and more right-leaning populisms.
Few remember that the labor movement—at least its most militant sectors—was an active player during the turmoil of 1968. A strike wave larger than any since the end of World War II, one largely driven by rank-and-file insurgents deeply affected by the spirit of rebellion sweeping the country, shut down coal mines, textile factories, the post office, and, along with many other sites, the communications network run by AT&T. The Communications Workers of America emerged (CWA) in the vanguard of a labor movement uprising that lasted into the mid-1970s. To this day, the CWA retains its fighting élan. But as Dan DiMaggio tells us in his analysis of the strike against Spectrum, the telecommunications industry is evolving rapidly and in a direction that is undermining the union’s base of operations. DiMaggio wrestles with the alternatives now confronting the union. And the CWA is hardly the only union facing a dire predicament. Max Fraser’s column looks at the long-march of the business community to undo organized labor in the public sector, a fate that may soon be sealed by the Supreme Court in the Janus v. AFSCME case. And in an accompanying riff on the plaintiff in that case, the winner of the first Joseph S. Murphy Student Essay Prize, Alyssa Bonilla, explores how a symbolic analysis of Janus, the Roman two-faced god, can complement the left-brain approach of the labor movement.
We claim no close connection between anything that happened in 1968 and the plight of palm oil workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, or the battle of working people on the Gulf Coast to resist the predations of Big Energy. Nonetheless, an article by Eric Gottwald on the ways “sustainable production” certification ignores unsustainable working conditions shows how local union-community organizations in Indonesia, together with trade unions from the Global North are confronting on-the-ground exploitation at the core of the production of this ubiquitous component in consumer products ranging from French fries to cosmetics. In her column “Roots of Rebellion,” Mariya Strauss once again unearths one of those unnoticed battlegrounds where the spirit of resistance lives on as fishermen and others in the Louisiana bayous take on the biggest energy corporations. Sarah Jaffe’s “Under the Radar” complements Strauss’ report with other instances of fight-back, from Philadelphia residents reclaiming public control of their public school system to a little-known struggle by trailer-park residents to fend off financial speculators.
As a mass movement, the struggle to protect the environment was just being born back in 1968. The first “Earth Day” happened in 1970, an outgrowth of the spirit of 1968. The movement’s endurance and growth since is remarkable and heartening during a long period in which other struggles subsided. In his column for this issue, Sean Sweeney argues that the focus of the fight in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico is to rebuild the island’s power generation system under public, not private, auspices.
At a time when U.S. labor is taking it on the chin, our Books and Arts section includes a broad examination of systems of labor justice throughout the Americas—Labor Justice across the Americas, by Leon Fink and Juan Manuel Palacio, reviewed by César F. Rosado Marzán; and a study of workers at call centers worldwide—Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce, by Enda Brophy, reviewed by Karen Gregory. It also includes a review by Adom Getachew of an extraordinary art exhibit currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers” and a review by David Nack of “Divided We Fall,” a documentary film by Katherine Acosta about the Madison, Wisconsin uprising of 2011 that tried valiantly to stop the destruction of the state’s public-sector unions by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. And Matt Witt in his regular “Out of the Mainstream” column on books and films you may have missed highlights a number of films on frontline activism, ranging from U.S. cod fishers to French women soldiers in Afghanistan.
We end with a grand finale: three arresting poems by Danez Smith, the reigning two-time champion of the Rustbelt Individual Poetry Slam, and author of Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award.