Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. Barring some unforeseeable development on a par with Katrina in terms of scale, the GOP is going to romp the mid-terms on a much reduced turn-out. The capitalist media will say that this is because of the Tea Party 'movement', or because the president moved too far to the left in a centre-right nation. Left-wing anger, and the disillusionment of working class constituencies previously supportive of Obama, will be ignored.

Obama's dual constituency in the 2008 election comprised the majority of the working class, and the dominant fraction of big capital, particularly the finance, insurance and real estate industries (the rentiers in other words) who gave Obama $37.5m toward his campaign. In the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, the signs are that much of the working class component of that electoral coalition will fail to mobilise for the Democrats. This has already been foreshadowed in the Massachusetts by-election, where the core working class vote collapsed - and, of course, the media blamed it on Obama's excessive radicalism over healthcare, despite Massachusetts favouring socialised medicine by a wider margin than most states.

There will be almost no discussion this election as to what has been done, what has continued to be done, to the American working class. The generational stagnation and decline of working class incomes, and the stomach-wrenching fall [pdf] in the share of produced wealth going to the working class, has worsened under Obama's watch. In this recession, bosses have taken the opportunity afforded by the crisis to slash jobs and downsize in a way that is massively disproportionate to the impact the crisis has had on their profitability. David McNally reports:

The best description I have heard comes from an economist who I won't name for the moment because he's a real shithead. But he did nail this one when he said, "What the United States is experiencing is a statistical recovery and a human recession." That's precisely what's happened. A few statistical indicators have moved up, but for the vast majority of working class people, the recession continues.

If you add in the nearly 10 million who are involuntarily underemployed--they're taking part-time work because they can't find full-time work--you've got about 27 million people unemployed or underemployed in the U.S. economy right now. That translates into an unemployment rate of over 17 percent, and for Black and Latino workers, it's an unemployment rate of around 25 percent.

According to the Economist, one out of every six U.S. workers has taken a wage cut in this recession, and amazingly, four out of every 10 African Americans has experienced unemployment during this crisis. Looking at food stamps, an additional 37 million people went onto food stamps in the U.S. in 2009, and 40 percent of those recipients are working for a wage. They're not unemployed--they're simply the working poor that can't make ends meet.

As for the next statistic I'm going to give you, this one was so overwhelming that I did check it to be sure. Half of all U.S. children will now depend on food stamps at some point during their childhood, and the figure runs at 90 percent for African American kids. Imagine that--in the heartland of global capitalism.

The "new normal" is signposted by a catastrophic drop in income in the last year, and a long-term doubling in the ratio of "economically insecure" workers. This intensification of the rate of exploitation is a logical way for the ruling class to proceed, but it may not be good for the system as a whole. A section of the US ruling class is aware of the problem this poses for consumption, and therefore for the system's capacity to reproduce itself. Ben Bernanke argues in a speech published today that depressed wages and incomes, resulting in falling consumption and diminished revenues for local state budgets, is "weighing on economic activity". On that basis, he urges continued stimulus spending at federal and state levels.

In the coming elections, the GOP will naturally bluster about cutting spending, throwing red meat to this astroturf 'movement' they and their business allies have helped create. But few will buy this: the GOP co-engineered and voted for TARP, after all. And any stimulus spending they can attack is pittance compared to the truly astonishing transfer of wealth to the banks, which itself discloses the fatal dilemma posed by the current crisis. This transfer of wealth was not ostensibly just for the benefit of one sector of capital. The whole system in the neoliberal era has been financialised, so that manufacturing and service capital, along with a sector of the actually existing middle class, is substantially dependent on financial revenues. But that transfer really didn't rejuvenate the system, even though the attack on the working class has temporarily boosted profit margins. It just staved off the worst. And now the final act of the transfer, that being the cuts in social expenditure and privatization (the whole thing is an act of accumulation-by-dispossession), risks further slashing spending power and thereby prolonging and deepening the crisis.

However this conundrum is resolved, it will not be in the interests of the working class. David Harvey has written of how capitalists would usually rather retreat behind the flood barriers and watch everyone else get washed away in the deluge than sacrifice some of its wealth to boost consumption and save the system. Only under significant working class pressure do they ever take the latter option, and such pressure is not a significant factor in American political life at the moment. It is certainly not expressed in elections, as electoral insurgencies are very capably and swiftly stamped on by the Democratic Party machinery. The Democrats' hegemony on the working class vote (to the extent that workers vote) may have been eroding, but it has not been successfully challenged from the left since it was first consolidated in 1932. Only the Progressive Party came close, and they didn't come very close. Instead, most workers simply do not vote. It is also true that the Republicans have in the past taken an expanding layer of (esp. white) working class voters, partly on racist grounds as per the misnamed 'southern strategy'. But the main factor - as Kenworthy et al [pdf] have shown - is the disorganisation and de-unionisation of the working class since the 1970s, which led to millions of workers seeking individualist solutions to their material needs, sometimes identifying with a conservative agenda of low taxes as being more advantageous to their immediate economic wellbeing than social spending.

The main problem for the American working class is not a lack of class consciousness. It is the weight of the accumulated outcomes of successive class struggles over several generations. At each phase, workplace organisation has been smashed, left-wing political movements broken up and the remnants coopted. Chris Hedges argues that America needs a few good communists, and he's right. But a few won't cut it, and they won't be sufficient unless there's a movement of working class militants they can relate to. What do I mean by 'militants'? Well, a militant is a worker who has experience of dealing with management, who has learned how to stand up to them and how to protect her rights as well as those of her co-workers, and who has learned the need for a strategy, for planning, for meetings, for leafleting and so on. There are such people in America, but there aren't enough of them, because the strength of the ruling class has hitherto been such that being a militant, or being organised politically in any way, can be unrewarding and often downright hazardous. However, if this crisis continues to see a weakening in the global power and cohesiveness of the US ruling class there will be opportunities for a renaissance in the labour movement. Every US worker should be praying for the fall of the empire, and the opportunities it will bring. And then the conversation will change, and we won't be hearing about how Obama, the president of Goldman Sachs, is too left-wing for such a conservative country.

One of the most interesting meetings at the very well-attended Historical Materialism conference was that addressed by Kim Moody on the effects of crisis on labour. (I should mention that the meeting was also addressed by two Turkish comrades on the impact of recession on female labour but, alas, that is for another post). For, although organised labour threw its weight behind Obama's election, it has so far been unable to extract much advantage from it. The two key policies that labour was pressing for was healthcare, and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the union movement in America has been in crisis for upward of thirty years now, and it has yet to recover. All the major unions have experienced substantial declines in membership, all are experiencing a profound financial crisis in part because they had investments that have turned to ordure during the crisis, and all are trapped in an impossible model of 'business unionism' that has consistently crippled the American working class. American labour has thus lacked the ability to put enough pressure on Obama to see its key policies through. Obamacare is proving to be a corporate-driven shambles, and the EFCA will be seriously watered down.

Moody tracked the origins of this crisis to the late 1970s when, beginning in 1979, there was a sudden nosedive in membership, strike rate, NLRB negotiations and - as a consequence - wages. Part of the background for this sudden crisis of unionism in 1979-81 was that the union leadership had expended much of its energies combatting the rank and file insurgencies of the Sixties and Seventies that had challenged the norms of business unionism, thus evaporating activists energies on internal struggles. The dependence on the Democratic Party machinery was also fatal. The AFL-CIO helped Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, with the promise of a labour-friendly bill, but it was filibustered and contained. And when Chrysler was going under, labour depended on Carter to organise a bail-out and thus engaged in its first, fatal, pre-Reaganite round of concessionary bargaining. Job losses were conceded and the union movement subsequently lost members and leverage. It was already ripe for plucking apart by the time Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union.

This nosedive in unionism reached a plateau by 1982 and it facilitated a wave of restructuring and spatial re-organisation in American industry, including auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, mining, telecommunications and building. The US steel industry alone lost a quarter of a million jobs by the end of the 1980s, as larger firms downsized and smaller groups such as Birmingham Steel and Oregon Steel pioneered new successful models of accumulation. As in Europe, the manufacturing sector shed jobs in bulk and waged a bitter but often successful war against shop floor organisation. Through intensified labour regimes and technical innovation, capital was able to raise productivity while wages remained static rather than rising with productivity gains as had been the case in previous decades. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity in US industry rose by 46.5%, but the median wage fell by 8%. (Figures from Harman's Zombie Economics). Notwithstanding a brief period of growth at the end of the 1990s, real wages continued to fall in the Bush years, and are still falling while productivity has soared during this crisis. (Though, typically, a number of US economists writing in the New York Times have taken the opportunity to argue that US wages are actually far too high and should be reduced to the global "market-clearing rate"). The intensification of work included a crude increase in the rate of exploitation by way of increased working hours, so that the average labourer in the US worked almost as many hours in 2004 as a Mexican worker (1,824 and 1,848, respectively). This process, technically known as 'class struggle from above', did facilitate a substantial recovery in aggregate profit rates until about 1997 - not to the levels of the post-war boom, but certainly above the troughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For figures, see David McNally, 'From Finance Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation and the Global Slow Down', Historical Materialism, 17.2).

The model of business unionism that persisted and still persists involves the acceptance of capitalism not just de facto but in explicit ideological terms - the language of class politics is specifically eschewed. It involves reliance on the Democratic Party which is, both in terms of its outlook and leading personnel, a capitalist party, not even a reformist party akin to European social democracy. It involves bureaucratic top-down methods of organising and growth in which the latter is the preserve of 'professionals', long-term sweetheart deals, no-strike agreements, and the exclusion of would-be members if they do not belong to existing bargaining units.

The effect of this depoliticised, professionalised model of unionism is not only to forestall struggles but to substantially weaken them where they arise. Moody gave the example of auto-workers striking at a BMW plant who met with European trade union delegates. They explained that they were not against the company - they liked the company - but they just wanted a voice, a seat at the table. The delegates said 'they're going to get beaten', and of course they were beaten, because they didn't understand that it was a class conflict not a family quarrel. Another problem facing US workers is the one I mentioned in a previous post - older forms of community-based workers' organisation have suffered because labour is much more mobile than before. American workers can travel a hundred miles to get a job now, whereas once it was common to live within walking distance of work. Moreover, they are unlikely to work at the same plant, where common union representation would signify a common struggle. They are atomised, fragmented, and dispersed. The only workers' constituency that resembles those old communities is among immigrants.

The formation of 'Change to Win', which was supposed to break with the more bureaucratic methods of the AFL-CIO, did not augur a new period of growth. This was in part because the split didn't involve any substantial political or tactical disagreement. It was entirely driven by the unions' respective leaderships. The Change to Win federation essentially accepted the same model of recruitment as the AFL-CIO, based on professionalised campaigns and economies of scale. The SEIU, one major constituent of the Change to Win coalition, was supposed to have recruited tens of thousands of new members, but its net growth after factoring in losses amounted to approx. 10,000 - not really that large given that the SEIU represents 1.8m workers. Its leadership has publicly eschewed any idea of class politics, instead vaunting that old shibboleth, 'partnership'. And it has increasingly resorted to carrying out raids on other, smaller unions - a nasty and rightly scorned tactic in the labour movement. The UAW and USWA unions experienced losses. Only the smaller unions have made gains. There are positive developments, however. Unions are changing their attitude to immigration and increasingly looking to organise the 12 million Mexican workers in the US. The SEIU, despite its commitment to business unionism, did take some pioneering steps in this direction with its famous janitors campaigns in the 1990s. (The campaigns featured in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses). But it has not organised a great deal in the South, which is ripe for a recruitment drive, and where tentative efforts in, eg, the meatpacking industry have met with success.

Moody has long advocated a version of 'social movement unionism' to combat the conservatism and limitations of the 'business unionism' model. Rather than reserved for members of bargaining units, unions should be thrown open to all - not least those many workers who regularly volunteer their time and efforts to help union recruitment drives, but are not union members themselves. The unions should campaign on broader issues and be integrated into larger campaigns rather than restrict themselves to narrowly 'economic' issues. We had a glimpse of this with Seattle and after, and with the massive organisation of immigrant workers in 2006, subsequently crushed under a wave of ICE raids and horrendous repression. But as yet the model of business unionism has not been broken with on a large scale and, as a result, recruitment still doesn't make up for lost members, and union density continues to decline. It will require a painstaking accumulation of forces before the necessary shift can take place, but it would also require an ideological break with the Democratic Party to be sustainable - now a much more delicate and difficult matter with the Obama executive. To the extent that white workers break with Obama, it may just as well be to the right as to the left.

(Yet another whinging, pessimistic post. Where is the Hope? Where is the change-you-can-believe-in? Tsk.)