Us Labor and the Gaza War (3): What Is To Be Done?
We should approach the military-industrial complex as a target of specific investigations and as a window into the broader structure of American capitalism.
This is the third and final part of an essay that I tried and failed to publish in the first half of 2024. For the first part of the essay, and the backstory, see here. For the second part, see here.
What Can We Do?
If it would be silly to pretend like labor has more power than it does. Even assuming an impossible harmony of intention and will, workers do not currently have the power to determine the foreign policy of any political party, and certainly not to shut down the military supply chain at the point of production. But to do nothing would be a moral abdication as well as a waste of a strategic opportunity. In that spirit, a few tentative ideas.
Stand firmly against repression
A hands-on learning experience for student protestors at UC Irvine, May 2024 (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Organized labor has a direct interest in fighting against repression of all kinds. The nationwide movement of antiwar students was accused, as far as I can tell, of breaking a single window. Yet they were subject to outrageous repression, including deployment of “counter-terrorism” units. If snipers can be deployed against students in tents, what would happen if the same standard of repression were applied to the banner events of labor history?
Consider the Flint sitdown: a small minority of workers, led by political radicals tied to international communism, took physical control of private property worth millions of dollars. To hold their ground, they threw glass and metal, capable of causing serious injury, at the cops. Obviously, Roosevelt could not endorse the tactic. But he could, and did, say to the Secretary of Labor: “Well, it is illegal, but what law are they breaking? The law of trespass. … Shooting it out and killing a lot of people because they have violated the law of trespass somehow offends me.” When GM demanded armed intervention, the president said: “Why can't these fellows…meet with the committee of workers? Talk it out. It wouldn't be so terrible.”
This was not Biden’s approach to the burgeoning antiwar movement, whose campus strongholds were also in many cases union workplaces. Even if one discounts the relevance of campus workers to the broader labor movement, it would be foolish to assume that this repression cannot be turned against labor. Recall Obama’s infamous remarks:
If you are working here and in the middle of the day you just stopped and said, ‘You know what?...I’m going to shut down the whole plant until I get something,’ You’d get fired, right? Because the deal is, you’ve already gotten hired. You’ve got a job. You are getting a paycheck [and] the pride of doing a good job and contributing to a business…
Biden may be “pro-union.” But politicians are fickle. Just a few months after Flint, FDR refused to condemn the Republic Steel bosses when they gunned down unarmed workers. Compared to a switch like that, it would be easy for Biden to turn against labor’s troublemakers. In late April 2024, Semafor reported on a “donor-led” effort “to bring the legendary Democratic politico Rahm Emanuel back...to run the re-election campaign.” Emanuel famously exclaimed, during the auto bailout: "Fuck the UAW!" As mayor of Chicago, he was a major antagonist of CTU. The Rahm push reportedly comes from “New York’s big-money power base,” which surely describes Democratic super-fundraiser Steven Rattner, who had recently been in the news with warnings that Shawn Fain would literally destroy the American auto industry.
One should not put too much stock in a single piece of elite gossip. But the broader point is essential: if broad swathes of manufacturing, including the entire EV ecosystem, are redefined as national security industries, it is only a matter of time before strikes get broken using the emergency powers embodied in Taft-Hartley. And a prudent person might expect that legal injunctions will not be the only, or the most severe, form of state power brought to bear in such a “national emergency.”
2. Unions should capitalize on their advantage as one of the few remaining zones of nongovernmental political participation.
One defining feature of the current moment is an unusually wide division between elite and mass opinion on foreign policy. People will debate which polls are the most revealing. But it is hard to see how anyone could deny the gap between widespread public support for a ceasefire, evident since shortly after the war began, and the near-total elite consensus that the US must continue to support Israel’s assault. The divide is even wider if you look just at the Democratic Party and its long-suffering adherents. Less than a month after October 7th, 58% of Democrats already thought Israel had “gone too far.” Among the political class at that point, not even Bernie Sanders was willing to say as much. By May, one poll found that more than half of Democrats believed that Israel was committing genocide. Beyond the Squad, no one with any power in the Democratic Party has shown the slightest interest in addressing, much less representing, this majority of their own voters.
A defining feature of the current moment is an unusually wide division between elite and mass opinion on foreign policy.
This is not the first time that the pursuit of “national security” interests has led Democratic presidents to completely disregard the small matter of public opinion. The Korean War was so unpopular that it brought Harry Truman the lowest ever presidential approval rating, a scandalous 22%. The fact that the Korean War brought an economic boom not only didn’t help, it may have been a liability. The enormously popular Dwight Eisenhower made this pitch explicitly, saying that “Americans don't want to pay for any pseudo or false prosperity in the blood of their sons.” Similarly, Democrats were unable to respond to the increasing unpopularity of the Vietnam War because of the recalcitrance of the small group of men who made every key decision.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War stranglehold over union leadership meant they were unable to give voice to these unrepresented currents of public opinion. But today, in a country with very few civil society organizations of any kind standing between the lonely individual and the unresponsive government, unions have an opportunity to provide space for people to debate foreign policy alternatives. Passing a resolution in a union local does not, by itself, make anything happen. But it provides an opportunity for people to practice persuading others, for building networks with likeminded people in other workplaces and other cities, and it sends more of a message than tweeting or voting in a presidential election. Perhaps it will also illuminate, by bringing conflict to the surface, which domestic forces stand in the way of a different foreign policy.
Providing this kind of space is especially important given the composition of the contemporary American working class. The share of immigrants in the total population is now around 15%, as high as it was at the height of the “new immigration” of the late 19th century. Since immigrants are more likely to be workers, they represent one in five workers. Immigrants have direct personal connections to other countries, and therefore may have a different perspective on issues which are generally presented as “distant.” The support of the US government for the war in Gaza is exceptional in world perspective; around the world, huge numbers of people and many of their governments have watched the genocide and understood its significance as a precedent for the coming age of resource wars and violent, high-tech management of surplus populations. The general drift towards militarism is directly connected with immigration policy: anyone paying attention to the Republican response to October 7th would have noticed how quickly they connected Gaza with Sinaloa, and started fantasizing about missile strikes across our own border wall.
To be clear, every union that is doing its job will have members of every imaginable ideological complexion.
To be clear, every union that is doing its job will have members of every imaginable ideological complexion. Immigrants can arrive in the US for any number of reasons, with any number of political implications. It’s worth remembering the experience of LA leftists working with Salvadoran workers in the early 1990s, who discovered that the recent immigrants had a range of opinions on the Salvadoran civil war. But, once again the contrast with the early Cold War is instructive. The industrial workers who built the CIO were perhaps 30% Slavic, and even more heavily Catholic, facts which turned out to matter hugely given the behavior of the Red Army and Stalinist governments in Eastern Europe. If the situation today is simply heterogeneity of opinion, that is more propitious than the situation facing the CIO left in the late 1940s, who confronted not a kaleidoscope of opinions but a unified anti-communist counter-organization rooted in kinship, neighborhoods, and churches.
3. Aggressively enter the debate about domestic priorities
In the leadup to the election in 2020, Jake Sullivan helped prepare a series of reports laying out “A Foreign Policy for the Middle Class.” In addition to discussing trade politics, the report recognized
strong support for sustaining or increasing defense spending that provides an economic lifeline for working families and communities” [and declared it] understandable why politicians on both sides of the aisle fight to preserve what amounts to the United States’ only national industrial base…because of the economic benefits their constituents derive from it.
This much is basic military Keynesianism. But the report also made a more notable, and commendable recommendation:
Use of the defense budget for domestic economic benefits deserves to be the subject of a genuine national conversation, rather than treating it as an open secret and conflating it with debates on the substantive defense requirements.
The administration and its propagandists have apparently forgotten this advice. “Genuine national conversation” (better: debate) is precisely what is being avoided when Biden defends his military policies by pointing to their supposed economic benefits, or when he justifies their tariff policy by claiming that Chinese overproduction poses “risks to our national security,” or still more ludicrously that the tariffs are some kind of an infosec measure made necessary by the threat of computerized Chinese smart cars. “Conflation” is exactly what goes on when liberals accuse a Republican congressman who voted against military appropriations of “thumbing his nose at a good chunk of new manufacturing jobs that [local] leaders fought hard for.” We should take the old Jake Sullivan at his word: we should have explicit debates about economic planning and about American power, and reject any convenient sleight-of-hand in which a consensus on one issue is used to sneak through controversial action on another.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan once asked: “How can the debates on the defense budget more clearly acknowledge the livelihoods it sustains, the health of the global economy it promotes, and the resources for pressing domestic investment it depletes and diverts?”
Sullivan’s 2018 report made another important point: military-industrial policy “needs to be weighed against the alternatives.” They offered a distinctive summation of the tradeoffs: “How can the debates on the defense budget more clearly acknowledge the livelihoods of working families and entire communities it sustains, the health of the global economy it promotes, and the resources for pressing domestic investment it depletes and diverts?” On the labor left, we should not accept all of these premises. We should especially question the idea that militarism is healthy for the global economy, and we should always seek to avoid exaggerating the number of working families and communities which literally depend on the defense budget. But we can agree with Sullivan et. al. when they “that increasing funds for some public works projects to build infrastructure might create more jobs and deliver a greater economic yield in the long term.”
We can also go beyond this comparative multiplier analysis by insisting that the most important question isn’t jobs, or even long-term economic yield, but social needs. Most people in the United States have important needs which go unmet whether they happen to be employed or not. By the same token, there are many socially necessary projects which would not be especially attractive if judged only by the criterion of job creation. The revival of proposals for the 30 hour workweek as a labor demand are the natural place to connect this move away from the jobs obsession with the experience of workers whose actual lives currently depend on having a job.
4. Enlist the expertise of workers and unions to connect broad domestic goals with specific questions of production
It is also important to be precise about what we mean when we say that military spending “depletes and diverts the resources for pressing domestic investment.” Historically, anti-militarists have often had an affinity with advocates of sound money and balanced budgets. This is most obvious on the right, but during the Iraq War even the left-liberal Joseph Stiglitz found himself attacking deficit spending per se in order to attack the Bush administration. But sound money is not just bad economics, it will inevitably backfire by giving support to attacks on public sector workers, many of whom are union members, and public services on which working class people in general depend.
Historically, anti-militarists have often had an affinity with advocates of balanced budgets. Sound money is bad economics, and it will inevitably backfire. But there are real tradeoffs.
But there are real tradeoffs. Any kind of investment will require capital goods. Unlike money, which can be created at a keystroke, producing capital goods takes time. At the moment, the arms industry currently consumes about 20% of all US capital goods production. It is almost certain that there are opportunity costs here. Even military producers complain about delays due to shortages of machine tools, so it doesn’t appear that there is much excess capacity here. But we need to know more about exactly what these material tradeoffs are: what are the civilian investment projects that would not be feasible without a major shift away from defense production?
These are questions which are difficult to know from the outside or from reading the business press, but they are the kinds of things that skilled workers could illuminate from firsthand experience. The experiences of workers could also provide pointers in the other direction: what are the specific, skilled capabilities that we would need to reemploy (or, more positively, that we would be able to reallocate) in the event of a real peacetime reconversion? On this last point, we will not need to start from scratch: an important task for younger activists and researchers today will be to connect with and learn from the people—including labor unionists—who studied these questions during the debate about a post-Cold War “peace dividend.”
Another place where we can talk about real tradeoffs is the question of which investment projects are able to obtain financing, especially given the end of the long period of very low interest rates. Just as machine tools can be scarce, so can access to credit. There are two important dynamics here. First, as interest rates rise, private capitalists will demand a higher return on any investment projects. Second, as interest rates rise, the costs of keeping an existing enterprise going will rise and weaker firms will fail. Civilian-oriented investment to meet social needs will be disadvantaged by both of these dynamics, as we can already see in the case of renewable energy. Historically, when credit is tight, the government has taken steps to ensure that financing is available to military-industrial producers. For example, the Defense Production Act of 1950 directs the Federal Reserve to help oversee special “V Loans” to military producers. The same Fed currently dismisses out of hand the idea that they should do anything at all to tilt the field in favor financing the green transition. This sort of double standard should be politicized, as part of a broader attack on the political economy of financial constraints on industrial production.
Opponents of the war and the labor movement have a common interest in exposing the shadowy world of private finance. Our goal here should be to “make public a continuous bookkeeping of the US political economy.”
Speaking of finance, there is an obvious connection between the recent antiwar campus protests and the traditional practices of the labor movement. The demand that university endowments divest from companies profiting from the Gaza war is a demand for financial disclosure, something that union researchers have spent plenty of time on. Indeed, the divestment movement has already formed an effective link with academic unionists who have already been looking into just these questions. Opponents of the war and the labor movement have a common interest in shining the brightest possible light into the shadowy world of private finance. This problem links the arcana of Ivy League endowments to the physical provision of aerospace parts and surveillance services to the opaque entities which now control huge swathes of our housing stock and healthcare system.
If we try to think along these lines, the “political economy of the war” may have as much to do with the 12 million people whose workplaces are run by private equity as with the million people who work in the defense industry itself. At the very least, a simple demand like “Open the books on Pine Island Capital Partners” would generate attention and draw opposition from all of the right enemies. A plank in any intermediate program should be a full scale Congressional investigation, with subpoena power, into the structure of ownership and control in the American economy, along the lines of the New Deal’s Temporary National Committee on Economic Concentration (TNEC). As we approach these difficult tasks, it’s important to remember that crazy things have happened: in the the 1930s the federal government hired the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy to study the eight capitalist cliques which controlled much of the American economy, then paid to print and distribute the conclusions as official publications.
Workers know more than anyone else about certain things which have become extremely important. Union researchers are veterans at untangling the submerged structures of economic and political power. The question is how to collect this information, and to refine our practical research questions, until we are able to “make public a continuous ‘bookkeeping’ of the US political economy” (C. Wright Mills again). This would be a vital task for labor even if we lived in a world of capitalist peace. But, in the violent world we actually live in, we should approach the military-industrial complex as a target of specific investigations and as a window into the broader, nearly unrepresentable, structure of American capitalism.
“which now control huge swathes of our housing stock”
Institutional investors own 0.56% of the single family housing stock — if you’re going to be sloppy about stuff like this, why should I trust that the logic of your broader argument is sound?
"We should approach the military-industrial complex as a target of specific investigations and as a window into the broader structure of American capitalism." ... glad to see somebody talking about the military-industrial complex ... on Substack serious criticism of the military-industrial complex has been widely replaced by waffling about the deep state, a term never defined