Posted as a reminder that management and capital often really doesn't care that much what happens to labor and regular people.
In 1911, it was textile workers. In 2026, it's everybody. You may care, for example, about big oil and big ag, but it doesn't care about you. It doesn't care that much about you if you are working for it, and you can't be assured that it cares if your children inherit a planet with the surface temperature of the sun.
Oh, sure, there are some that might, on occasion. But don't fool yourself that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or Jeff Bezos, and their pals, are pulling for you.
146 garment workers—123 women and girls and 23 men, out of a workforce of 500, died in Manhattan's horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Most of the victims were Italian or Jews immigrants 14 to 23 years old. 62 of the victims jumped to their deaths.
The fabric fire in the fireproof building broke out five minutes before end of shift. The doors to the stairwells and exits were locked to prevent unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft
Oh, but don't worry. . . today's oligarchs have your vest interest at heart. . .
The heavy duty, or at least heavy, premium American automobile of the golden age of American manufacturing which Trump seems to dream can be restored through tariffs.
In reality, capitalism is based on the idol of money. The lure of gain gradually destroys all social bonds. Capitalism devours itself. Little by little, the market destroys the value of work. Man becomes a piece of merchandise. He is no longer his own. The result is a new form of slavery, a system in which a large part of the population is dependent on a little caste.
Robert Cardinal Sarah.
I don't use the term "insanity" here lightly. Donald Trump is, I am convinced, rather dumb, obviously economically ignorant, and suffering from dementia. That nearly half the country could vote for him is simply beyond me, but they did, and the Republican Party, which was once the party of business has fallen right into line.
I suspect Americans voted for him as they have a poor grasp of economics themselves and see it only through what they've experienced in their own live and that of their immediate predecessors. Americans, came to view the economy sort of like Billy Joel expressed it in Allentown:
Well, we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line
Well, our fathers fought the second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we’re living here in Allentown
But the restlessness was handed down
And it’s getting very hard to stay
Well we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved
So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
Chromium Steel
And we’re waiting here in Allentown
But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away
Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face
Well, I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be getting up today
And it’s getting very hard to stay
And we’re living here in Allentown
Problem is, a sense of economic nostalgia evolving into economic rage doesn't grasp economics at all.
1968 Oldsmobile 442.
The US didn't become an economic and manufacturing giant because of something really special in the American system or some amazing native genius. It was the simple forces of economics that apply to corporate capitalism, combined with the Second World War, that caused it.
Largescale industry can really only be developed through capitalism or socialism. In Europe, it was capitalism that introduced it in the form of the Industrial Revolution. The US as a manufacturing titan came about as the Industrial Revolution came to the US late, not because we were better at it. The arrival of industrialism in the United Kingdom and a united Germany reflected the eras in which it occurred, and it occurred there first. Capitalism, in the end, just like socialism, seeks to serve itself, and in the case of capitalism it does it by viewing human beings as consumers, as opposed to the socialist workers, and trying to get them to consume as much as possible. It does that by seeking to make products faster and cheaper, amongst other strategies. Seeking efficiency products not only relentlessly advance, but manufacturing methods do as well. But manufacturing method require massive investment of capital. Once machines are in place, the economic incentive is to use them as long as they can be, given the investment. This means that new start ups always have the advantage in equipment, as they are starting with newer stuff.
Added to that, industrial Europe was destroyed during World War Two to a large extent. The Allied air forces bombed German industry into rubble. What was left after the war was taken back to the Soviet Union if was east of the Elbe. The Soviets themselves had suffered massive economic dislocation in of their factories, which were forcibly created in the Communist system. Japan's industry, which was real, but not nearly as advanced as the other major combatants, had been destroyed by the United States Army Air Force. The US, however, remained untouched and with a massive consumer demand built up due to the war and the Great Depression, US industry came roaring back and dominated the globe. . . right up until other countries could rebuilt, which very much started to show itself by the late 1960s.
One of the things nearly destroyed during the Second World War was Distributism. Distributism really came up as a line of thought as a "third way" between Communism and Capitalism during the 1920s and the Great Depression The tensions that came out of World War One saw the Socialist far left dramatically rise in power and take over the government of Russia, and briefly Hungary. They vied for control of Germany, and effectively did take over Poland in a modified form. Wars and struggles broke out in numerous places as Socialism sought to effect global change. In opposition to it rose not only fascism, but extreme capitalism. Distributists sought to effect a more sane and humane path. But when the war came they, and their intellectual fellow travelers the agrarians, put aside their efforts to support the war effort, which in the West meant unleashing capitalism in aid of the war effort. When the war ended, the economic crisis that it had brought about in Europe and the Cold War caused it to carry on, and very successfully, with Distributism being all but forgotten.
Capitalism, however, if not heavily regulated, results in the same end result as Socialism, single entity control of a machine that serves itself. In Socialism the machine claims to serve the workers, but claims to identify itself as the workers. In Capitalism the machine serves itself while claiming to serve "consumers". Neither system really cares about people at all.
American capitalism, particularly after Ronald Reagan, favored unyielding corporate growth, with one corporate machine eating another. As foreign economies rebuilt after the war, or started up after the war, corporations naturally moved manufacturing overseas, and the American government did not stop to do anything about it, believing fully in capitalism. To a certain extent, it favored manufacturing moving overseas as it conceived as many manufacturing jobs as less than ideal, and with some reason to look upon them that way, but just as the nation had a "cheap food" policy that hurt family farmers, it had a "cheap goods" policy that hurt the domestic manufacturing sector.
It can well be argued, and it has been, that something should have been done to arrest the relocation of American manufacturing. But in reality, that day was long ago. It was clear in the 1970s what was occuring, but the nation, lead by a much more sober and serious group of politicians, did not elect to intervene. Now, of course, we have Donald Trump, who doesn't seem to grasp even basic economics and who has made his money, it might be noted, in a highly anti distributist industry.
It's nearly impossible to define what Trump's economic vision is, as he probably doesn't have one. It seems to be ruled by nostalgia and a complete failure to grasp basic economic principals. Trump seems to look back on the econmy of his youth as a natural one, and believe that if tariffs are imposed all the old industries will come home. A very wealthy man, he doesn't seem to care what that does in terms of imposing his tariffs all at once, and if it creates a devastating trade war, so be it.
What Trump has no interest in, however, is disrupting capitalism. He's okay with whipping corporate entities into relocating into the US, or devastating the economy with the thesis he can make it happen, in what amounts to a type of autarky, but the basic evils of capitalism are of no interest to him.
Some closer to Trump envision something more sinister, it seems, a jump starting of an AI driving manufacturing economy. The concept is that tariffs will not only pressure industry to relocate here, but when it does, the next stage in the relentless Industrial Revolution evolutionary cycle will occur. Basically, baseball caps now made in Vietnam (none of them seem to be made here) will be made by robots in the US. Human laborers in Indochina, who depend on their jobs to feed their families, will be made unemployed while factories owning robots here in the US will profit.
It's immoral.
But what of Distributism?
Some of this probably should make any distributist rethink some basic propositions, as frankly Distributism, like Trump's tariff policy, would have the impact of making some things more expensive. Maybe many things. But the economic impact of it would be distinctly different.
Distributism policies, as long noted here, would take the corporations out of retail and agriculture. In agriculture, for the most part, that would not actually have a great impact on prices, save in certain instances (poultry for sure, perhaps pork). But it would also have a levelling effect. Virtually nobody would get fantastically wealthy in these industries, but many rank and file workers would get back up into the real middle class. Therefore the economic impact would be levelling, more than anything else.
Manufacturing, as we've noted here before, is a much tougher nut to crack. We've had some suggestions in the past, but frankly the lesson of the Trump tariffs is that they may frankly be unrealistic. We'd favor partial employee ownership of larger manufacturing entities. We could still argue for that, but it's tough for industries like the clothing manufacturing industry, whose workers are mostly overseas. I suppose it could still be argued for, however. A person here, however, can't be nativist. Economically, that is, it can't be argued that ownership in the corporation by Nguyen is any less important than Johnson, all things being equal.
It'd be pretty hard to effect, however, in countries whose economies are state run. Again, perhaps something could have been done about that, but it would have had to start in 1975, rather than 2025. Trump's policies, which don't fit this mold, are coming all at once, and fifty years too late. That might suggest, of course, that something could be done, but it would have to be done gradually.
If nothing else, however, Trump and his spastic policies might serve to give Distributism a little voice. Corporate Capitalism resulted in the situation Trump seeks to address. There's no reason to believe Corporate Capitalism is going to get us out of it. Distributists have been warning about capitalisms long term impacts for years. Socialism has demonstrated what its were, and that's what killed it.
Perhaps the Distributist Lament can get a little more heard.
In reality, capitalism is based on the idol of money. The lure of gain gradually destroys all social bonds. Capitalism devours itself. Little by little, the market destroys the value of work. Man becomes a piece of merchandise. He is no longer his own. The result is a new form of slavery, a system in which a large part of the population is dependent on a little caste.
Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.
Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off. I worked a full day.
I was the only one in the office.
Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1. Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.
Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s. Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;
Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work. There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did. Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble. Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.
When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism. Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic. But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part. The advance of technology brought us the other part. Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all. The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking. As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric. Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.
Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult. Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible. Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.
One of those is the law, of course. Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.
Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.
Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades. That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve. Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for. I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.
Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer". I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become. It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.
Oh well.
And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are. And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things. Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.
We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...
Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.
Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place
Today is Earth Day, 2024.
In "Red State", which now means more than it used to as the Reds in the Red States are supporting the Russian effort to conquer Ukraine, and hence are aligned with what the old Reds would have wanted, it's not going to mean all that much. I don't expect there to be much in the way of civil observances.
I saw a quote by somebody whose comments I wouldn't normally consider, that being Noam Chomsky, in which he asserted that a certain class of people who are perceived (not necessarily accurately) as something beyond evil, as they're putting all of humanity in jeopardy for a "few dollars" when they already have far more than they need. That is almost certainly unfair. Rather, like so much else in human nature, mobilizing people to act contrary to their habits is just very hard. And some people will resist any concept that those habits are harmful in any fashion.
Perhaps, therefore, a bitter argument is on what people love. People will sacrifice for that, and here such sacrifices as may be needed on various issues are likely temporary ones.
Of course, a lot of that gets back to education, and in this highly polarized time in which we live, which is in part because we're hearing that changes are coming, and we don't like them, and we've been joined by people here locally recently who have a concept of the local formed by too many hours in front of the television and too few in reality. We'll have to tackle that. That'll be tough, right now, but a lot of that just involves speaking the truth.
While it has that beating a horse aspect to it, another thing we can't help but noting, and have before, is that an incredible amount of resistance to things that would help overall society are opposed by those who are lashed to their employments in nearly irrevocable ways. In this fashion, the society that's actually the one most likely to be able to preserver on changed in some fashions are localist and distributist ones. Chomsky may think that what he is noting is somehow uniquely tied to certain large industries, but in reality the entire corporate capitalist one, which of course he is no fan of, as well as socialist ones, which he is, are driven by concepts of absolute scale and growth. That's a systematic culture that's very hard to overcome and on a local scale, when people are confronted with it, they'll rarely acknowledge that their opposition is based on something that's overall contrary to what they otherwise espouse. We see that locally right now, where there are many residents opposed to a local gravel pit, who otherwise no doubt make their livings from the extractive industries.
But I'd note that this hasn't always been the case here. It was much less so before the influx of outsiders who stayed after the most recent booms. And that too gives us some hope, as the people who are of here and from here, like people of and from anywhere they're actually from, will in fact act for the place.
Much of this, indeed the lion's share, could be fixed by reordering the economy to be Distributist.
That may seem extreme, but then, in the modern world, this is extreme, and frankly, we're in an extreme situation that we need to find a way out of or events of one kind or another will take us out of them for us.
To be more extreme, we'd note what Cardinal Sarah has above, once again, the barbarians are alrady inside the city.
I've started off with agrarianism, and I mean it, but I'd also note that an aspect of agrarianism is distributism. All agraraians are distributists, not all distributist are agrarians. We'll start with distributism.
What the hecks is it, anyway. We'll, we'll turn to an old Lex Anteinternet post, where we discussed that (we just bumped that post up here).
Because what people don't have, is well. . . anything. People are consumers, and servants. They lack something of their own, and they accordingly lack stability. Increasingly, on certain things, including economics and science, they lack education.
And, like the ignorant and have-nots tend to be, they're unhappy and made.
The unhappy and mad masses always make for ignorant revolutions, whether it be the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the revolutionary period of the Weimar Republic that concluded with the Nazis coming to power. Not having anything, they're willing to try something, whether that something be Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Donald Trump.
It was Jefferson who noted that republics were grounded in yeomen farmers, for the reason that they were independent men. Through Corporate Capitalism, we've been working on destroying the yeomanry for quite some time now.
The failure of people to have their own has been significant in creating the crisis that we face today. People who worked for other entities, and that's most people, find themselves either adrift without them or slaves to them. People live where they don't want to at jobs and careers they don't want to, in conditions they don't want to, even if they do not fully realize it, as their corporate masters compel them to. It gets worse, all the time, and people are powerless against it.
Indeed, not only are they powerless, but they can be compelled to act against their own best interests, and often do. People who love one thing as their true selves, will work to destroy the ability to do it for their corporate masters. You don't have to look much beyond the Wyoming legislature to see this, where some advocate policies that would deprive average Wyomingites to access to public lands, for example, something that only serves the interest of the wealthy.
