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| David O’Connell |
A bit of background
‘We must give them reforms,’ said Quintin Hogg, a Conservative MP, in 1943, ‘or they will give us revolution’ (Sagall, 2005). The Labour government which won the first election after the Second World War is credited with creating the NHS (National Health Service), nationalising core industry, and pushing the most left wing programme in British political history. This is what Labour supporters today point to when you ask them what a Corbyn revolution might look like, and it has certainly begun to gain traction among the British population.
What they forget is that the 1945 Conservative manifesto also included most of these benchmark Labour policies, which were not unique to Labour. Hogg reminds us that this social compromise was born out of the bosses’ general need to compete with the then-powerful socialist movement for the loyalty of the working class.
The resulting pact froze class conflict in most core industries and confined it to the fringes of the working population. The unions became professional mediators rather than instigators of class conflict or social transformation, and were relegated to propping up progressive politics in parliament, a fundamentally disorienting change which dramatically deskilled the labour movement (Berlin, 2006).
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| Jan Theron |
When considering President Donald Trump’s attempts to keep foreign migrants out of the US, remember who put him in power. It was by all accounts working class people in areas decimated by neo-liberal policies. Remember also that Trump is trying to secure the support of US trade unions for his reconfiguration of these policies. One commentator has described this as ‘eat[ing] the American left’s lunch’ (Harris, 2017).
It should come as no surprise to South Africans that trade unions can support a racist, right wing government. That was how it was in 1976. The South African government of the time was also trying to keep out migrants who were not white, and the established union movement was more or less complicit. Those unions that did not actively support the bars to non-racial organisation imposed by apartheid did nothing to undermine them. In practice, their commitment to solidarity extended only to organised workers.
That year, I became general-secretary of a trade union (‘the union’). The union came from a tradition in which solidarity meant making common cause with unorganised workers everywhere. However, little evidence of this tradition remained by 1976. It had been corrupted organisationally, and there were leaders ‘eating the money’.
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| Peter Evans |
Trump’s minions have already made it clear that organised labour will be among their immediate targets. Public sector workers, who are the main pillar of organised labour’s strength, will be attacked early. Turning the National Labor Relations Board into a thoroughly anti-labour organisation will make union certification, via officially sanctioned elections, close to impossible. Another obvious agenda item is a national ‘right to work’ law which will remove the requirement that workers represented by a union pay membership dues. I will not try to exhaust the list of likely attacks here, although projecting the disastrous details of Trump’s regime will be a crucial part of figuring out how to mount some kind of defense.
Trying to think about how it might be possible to change the political landscape is a different sort of task. It requires a careful debate on the structural circumstances that produced so many Trump voters. Theories of ‘The Trump Voter’ abound, and sorting them out will require a careful analysis of exit polls that has yet to be done. But two preliminary themes have already emerged.
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| Thomas Greven |
Donald Trump clearly lost the popular vote and will only inhabit the White House because of the anachronistic and undemocratic institution of the Electoral College, once specifically designed to foil populists like him. Contrary to claims that he somehow ‘hijacked’ the Republican Party, I argue that he simply used the traditional Republican playbook to the extreme - dividing the population along racial, ethnic, and religious lines as well as exploiting anti-elite sentiment – to sell economic and social policies that will hurt the majority of Americans. This got him support from right-wing extremists in the Alt-Right movement as well as the white working class – Americans without a college education – and surprisingly also from white working class women, given that he tried very hard to offend all women. This latter group of voters, previously either non-voting or marginally part of the Democratic coalition, was the key group for Trump’s success in the old industrial heartlands now called the rust-belt states. It is necessary to ask why this group supported him.
