Affirmative Action's Doom of Communism and Unionism

American labor unions at their height in 1971 began their long downward fall after the 1964 civil rights act and latter equivalent work value legislation and affirmative action for women. The tight labor-management/ownership dialectic of wage negotiations was broken as labor supply was flanked by millions of new workers entering the workforce and seeking after management jobs and owning positions instead of just higher wages.

While the liberation of oppressed Americans to a more fair labor competition was good, it was bad for U.S. labor unions that had emerged to benefit white men preponderantly since their formation in the early 20^th century. It is not a coincidence that labor union organization developed concurrent to the rise of communism in the former Soviet Union and later in China and elsewhere. The style and form of western capitalism of the era and more limited public participation in stock shareholding were conducive to and us vs. them worker-management-ownership negotiating posture.

In the era of decline of labor Unions and the fall of the former Soviet Union there have been vast regions of new labor brought into the free world market including from former communist block countries such as Russian and Eastern Germany. Even Maoist China has grafted its labor and production for sales to the free world through synthetic modification of the management style of the Chinese Communist Party. Affirmative action and the 1964 Civil Rights Act were key developments in increasing the labor pool in the United States. The conditions that comprised the logic for existence of the Soviet Communist Party and for American labor unions then began to fade away.

If the eventual end of the former Soviet Union that began in December 1989 with the withdrawal of Russian military forces from East Germany was the culmination of implicitly inefficient political-economic structure it also coincided with the withering away of the need for communism and labor unionism to exist as a defense against predatory capitalism and economic aristocracy. That process for labor began with the rise of minorities and women with affirmative action. Skipping ahead through history here in order to move to a better point for analysis in the U.S.A. one can say that women and minorities failed to develop or increase the union structures they displaced and argue about why that occurred or if it was good or bad.

Wages for white males in the U.S.A. stagnated after 1971 and haven’t significantly changed adjusted for inflation. Wages rose markedly and steadily for the affirmative action set as there were more people to share the national wealth with. Without the tight economic conditions that existed before affirmative action, the cold war ended and corporate globalization and communications networking unions had no solid economic opponent to negotiate with-it was dispersed globally and a cornucopia of other laborers in the field and factories would do the work cheaper.

Because affirmative action personnel were interested in becoming part of management and being over white males there wasn’t sufficient interest in forming labor unions to create and sustain unions even if empirical economic circumstances would have supported unionization. Unionization however was just a response to the existential economic problems encountered by ordinary people, as was communism. The basic problem for workers and citizens today seem to be the erosion of political sovereignty through globalization and their implicit inability to politically control their national destiny. Concentration of wealth is a paradoxical result of the vastly increased access to stock market investing opportunity through electronic commerce. Pure technical power has provided means for concentrating wealth from existing wealth in ways inaccessible to ordinary investors. Dreams of management lifestyles occur within an existentially challenged society with immigration, environment and security problem. Mass marketing and consumerism and mass entertainment programming have made an “I like to watch T.V.” out of Inspector Cleuseau. Concentrated global wealth and power making way to vast organizations have usurped individualism and citizenship in America. The concept of unions has drowned in a wave of mass population and organizational increase.

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In the post-union social environment perhaps the largest unions are of an ad hoc racial or gender constituency seeking class power. Wages are held to be negotiated from an oppressive management other. A larger slice of the pie that the organizational-other has as owners and employers, is sought for an employee class through lawsuits of reapportionment. The machine has itself become the de facto union and individual free enterprise was drowned along with unions. Each were absorbed by the global financial network that owns shares in everything, dominates the political environment and that has at its heart a pure pursuit of abstract profits. That applied axiology means a social-political inability to respond to ecospheric and social challenges in a timely way. It is easier to brainwash or finesse away awareness of the problem than to correct it.