UNLOCKED: History is a Weapon 15: On the Labor Question w/ Matt Christman

The Antifada

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2024

⏱️ 129 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Enjoy this blast from the distant pass: January 2023!

Check out all the other Histories is a Weapon on our patreon

In light of the depressing denouement of 2022's railroad conflict, Sean and Matt sit down, in person at last, to discuss the deep history behind how American organized labor got so disorganized and why the labor movement hasn't moved in decades.

Why was it that, in the United States, workers institutions had trouble evolving past the infancy of narrow, sectoral, decentralized craft unionism towards broad-based, nationally-coordinated industrial unionism? How did capital, in the face of militant organizing, help choose the weaker of the two as their partner to bargain with? In what ways is worker self-organization in this country truly, as our enemies always say, anti-American? And importantly what is to be done now that private sector union density is so low, workers institutions so captured and the national labor relations regime has fallen apart?

STAY TUNED AFTER THE OUTRO MUSIC FOR A SPECIAL LAST MINUTE ADDENDUM

Transcript

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0:00.0	We'll be singing.
0:02.0	I'll be singing.
0:04.0	Well, we'll we need.
0:08.0	We'll be singing.
0:10.0	I'm getting no down.
0:15.0	Folks,
0:17.0	Fenty fathers, history is a weapon,
0:21.0	number 15. This is me and Sean Gee B. I'm here
0:25.0	Chrisman. Hey hey and Andy on the ones and twos here. They're gonna chime in a little bit.
0:31.0	DJ Andy on the ones and twos. We're here. This is our 15th
0:36.4	fucking episode of this little anti-fata miniseries. We are here today to see if you find folks out there in podcast land are woke to the
0:47.1	LQ. If you understand, if you wrap your heads around, a question that be deviled the peoples of the 19th century,
0:56.8	a question that seemed to be solved by the mid 20th century, but a question that has returned
1:02.0	with a vengeance. That question of course is the labor question.
1:06.0	The United States has a very particular history.
1:10.0	What Matt and I are going to talk about today is something that we touched on on what was it
1:15.8	we did the one on why there's no labor party yeah I think that was
1:19.9	episode those very early three yeah maybe So we're talking three, four years ago.
1:25.3	And then also in the our episode on Pivotal Decade, the 1970s, we talked about the kind of decomposition of the
1:35.7	Fordist labor regime in the entire political economy that created it in the 1970s
1:41.8	and here I think we want to ask some more cutting and
1:46.7	essential questions about labor unions in the working class in the United States
	...

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