CAPITALISM IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT

By Dave Jamieson
HUFFINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — In a move that will surely provoke Republicans and business interests, the National Labor Relations Board announced Tuesday morning that it will propose significant new rules for the union election process, streamlining procedures and possibly making it easier for American workers to unionize.

The rules proposed by the NLRB will undergo a public-comment period, but if adopted, the amendments will define the amount of time parties can litigate before and after an election, allow for the electronic filing of election documents, defer litigation on voter eligibility until after an election and consolidate all post-election appeals into a single appeal.

Overall, the new rules could make it harder for employers to stall elections and easier for unions to organize new members. Right now, elections typically take place within two months of organizers having gathered a sufficient number of signatures from workers — a generous amount of time, organizers argue, that employers can use to pressure workers not to unionize. The NLRB’s new rules would certainly shorten that period, though it’s hard to say by how much.

“One of the most important duties of the NLRB is conducting secret-ballot elections to determine whether employees want to be represented by a labor union,” said NLRB Chairman Wilma B. Liebman in a statement. “Resolving representation questions quickly, fairly, and accurately has been an overriding goal of American labor law for more than 75 years.”

Union officials were quick to praise the NLRB and its proposed rules. Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the country, said in a statement that the changes would help fix a “broken, bureaucratic maze” that allows employers to stall the election process.

“Although we are still reviewing the proposed new changes,” Trumka said, “they appear to represent a common sense approach to clean up an outdated system and help ensure that working women and men can make their own choice about whether to form a union.”

The rule changes will likely infuriate business groups and Republicans who view the labor board under Obama as being overly friendly to unions and workers. The labor board currently has a Democratic majority, and its general counsel, Lafe Solomon, has been far more aggressive in enforcing labor law than Republicans were accustomed to in the Bush years.

Republicans and business interests have reacted strongly to a complaint Solomon brought against the Boeing Company, which alleged that it broke labor law by establishing a production line for its 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina. The complaint said Boeing’s move amounted to retaliation against its workers in Washington state for having gone on strike in the past. Just last week House oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Cal.) called a special field hearing in South Carolina and asked Solomon to appear and justify his complaint.

Republican lawmakers can be expected to heighten their attacks on the NLRB in the wake of the proposed rule changes. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has already claimed that the board has “an agenda that is not healthy for this country.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce could not immediately provide comment on the NLRB’s proposed rule changes.

By Eugene McCarraher
The Nation

Why should we want to reinvent capitalism? Rather than reinvent it, we should remind ourselves why capitalism is so pernicious. We could start by stating the obvious (which, apparently, needs restating): the nature and logic of capitalism are incorrigibly avaricious. As a property system driven by the need to maximize profit and production, capitalism is a giant, ever-whirling vortex of accumulation. Anything but conservative, it’s the most dynamic and protean economy in history. As Marx observed in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto, capitalism thrives on constant reinvention: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” Always seeking new ways to make money, capitalists have reinvented the system several times already. Enclosures, factories, Fordism, automation and “flexible production”—metamorphosis for the sake of profit is the only constant in capitalism. Each incarnation has featured new brands of exploitation and corruption, designed and packaged by masters of economic and managerial sophistry.

To be sure, reformers have been partially successful at shaping these reinventions: collective bargaining, regulations of business, the welfare state. Whatever victories for justice working people have won have been hard-fought and tenuous, the fruit of protracted struggle. But however ingenious or effective the reforms, they’ve been limited, if not eventually subverted, by the intractably mercenary nature of capitalism. As we can see from the history of the past forty years—an era that has been marked by a transatlantic assault on social democracy and New Deal/Great Society liberalism—the rage to accumulate remains the predatory heart and soul of capitalism. We have good reason to assume that capitalists will always seek and find fresh ways to cast off the fetters and vanquish their opponents.

But the iniquity of capitalism goes deeper than its injustice as a political economy, its amoral ingenuity in technical prowess or its rapacious relationship to the natural world. However lissome its face or benign its manner, capitalism compels us to be greedy, callous and petty. It takes what the Greeks called pleonexia—an endless hunger for more and more—and transforms it from a tawdry and dangerous vice into the central virtue of the system. The sanctity of “growth” in capitalist culture stems from this moral alchemy, as does the elevation of market competition into a model of human affairs.

Conscripting us into an economic war, capitalism turns us into soldiers of fortune, steeled against casualties and collateral damage, ransacking the earth to fill the shelves and banks with plunder. Capitalism stands condemned most profoundly not by its maldistribution of wealth or its ecological despoliation but by its systematic cultivation of people inclined toward injustice and predation. And I think we on the left need to start dismissing as utterly irrelevant the standard apologetic riposte: the material prosperity and technological achievement generated by capitalist enterprise. No amount of goods can compensate for the damage wrought on human nature by the deliberate nurturance of our vilest qualities. The desecration of the values we claim to hold most dear is the primary reason we should want to abolish, not reinvent, capitalism.

This suggests that what needs reinvention is not capitalism—leave that to the well-mannered barbarians in the business schools—but our moral and spiritual imagination. I don’t mean only the wisdom that lies in the venerable traditions of the left. Even those who have opposed capitalism have often fallen for its illusions: the ideal of “growth,” the mythology of “progress,” the cipher of “innovation.”

Any effort to end the tyranny of Mammon must be leavened by other concerns. What does it mean to be human? What do we really want? These are moral, even religious questions—the kind of questions we often dismiss as politically unserious, or relegate to the hallowed oblivion of “private life.” But they’re also political questions, for the answers determine the ends as well as the means of production. The ancient moral and metaphysical concerns may turn out to be not redoubts for reaction but wellsprings of radical hope.

Read the first proposal in the “Reimagining Capitalism” series, “The Rise of Benefit Corporations,” by Jamie Raskin.