These questions of labor and democracy are pertinent in 2024. They are questions about which there has been too-little serious investigation in over a generation, over which interval the stories of labor in the New Deal have tended to congeal into celebratory hagiographies. But in light of the challenges we confront in the present, we think it an appropriate opportunity to invite public participation in the ongoing process of rethinking and rediscovery that gives permanent life to the study of the past. “The depository of historical knowledge,” as the philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed, is “the struggling, oppressed class itself.”
Punctuated by Watergate, the Nixon Administration has been evacuated of its historical import
The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II. Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment.
The number of students in public school classrooms is irrefutably political.
The problem the union faces is that, on its own, it cannot create the type of system it wants. To ensure that a service like education be available at high quality to every family in the population, general standards must be established and monitored across the community. The district and its schools are the only tool suited to this task. Choice is invidious when the underlying options are so poorly distributed. Smaller classes, with student access to serviceable institutions such as libraries, nursing, and counseling, will require action from municipal and state authorities, from the Board of Education, through the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Office of Education, to the Governors office and the State Assembly. Fighting the effects of the trends the district has set in motion won’t suffice; the teachers must reverse those trends. Can they do it alone?
For forty-years American management has leveraged capital mobility to demand concessions from organized labor. Holders of sovereign debt do the same to demand reductions in public spending and shrinking the public sector. This has severely strained liberals’ willingness to stimulate private investment through taxes and transfers. Meanwhile, corporate boards of directors continue to refuse to invest on any but their own terms. Loosening their grip on investment decisions is the only way through this impasse.
