The generations born after 1973, those who grew up in the era of perpetual ‘crisis’, successively internalized the idea that each generation would generally be worse off than the previous one. They learned, again, to be afraid. This was a historic reversal that could also be read as a kind of group psychotherapy, a mass re-education in ‘frustration tolerance’.
Notes
1 1. Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-Wisher to Mankind (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971; first published in 1786).
2 2. Judson Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, Fortune Magazine, July 1970, reprinted in Lloyd Zimpel, Man Against Work (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 61–75 (p. 66).
3 3. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 274. He also writes: ‘The “sacrifice consensus” is breaking down’. These days, nobody is going to think: ‘I am doing this for my family, I am working so that my son has a better life than I do’ (p. 280).
4 4. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney, p. 275.
5 5. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 66.
6 6. Malcolm Denise, quoted in Weller, The Lordstown Struggle and the Real Crisis in Production, p. 4 (my emphasis). He wrote: ‘Employees in the 1970’s are (1) even less concerned about losing a job or staying with an employer; (2) even less willing to put up with dirty and uncomfortable working conditions; (3) even less likely to accept the unvarying pace and functions on moving lines; and (4) even less willing to conform to rules or be amenable to higher authority’ (Malcolm L. Denise, ‘Remarks by Malcolm L. Denise, Vice President, Labor Relations, Ford Motor Company at Ford Management Conference, The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, November 10, 1969’, pp. 5–6, quoted in B.J. Widick, ‘Work in Auto Plants: Then and Now’, in B.J. Widick (ed.), Auto Work and its Discontents (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 1–17 [p. 10]).
7 7. Saul Rosenzweig, ‘A General Outline of Frustration’, Character & Personality, vol. 7, no. 2, December 1938, pp. 151–60 (p. 154).
8 8. Ibid., p. 154.
9 9. Earl Bramblett, quoted in Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 65.
10 10. See Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Crise et sortie de crise, Ordre et désordres néolibéraux (Paris: PUF, 2000), pp. 32ff.
11 11. The formation of this line of argument has been studied in detail by John David Truty, ‘Ideas in Disguise: Fortune’s Articulation of Productivity 1969–1972’, PhD dissertation, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, 2010.
12 12. Truty, ‘Ideas in Disguise’, p. 141.
13 13. See Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, p. 32.
14 14. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney, p. 276. Note, however, that neoliberals were divided over the decisive factor in inflation. While the Friedmanians concentrated ‘on the immediate causes of inflation – the injection of newly printed money into the economy’, the Hayekians insisted on ‘the capacity of trade unions to exert a causal influence on the process of monetary creation’ (Gilles Christoph, ‘Du nouveau libéralisme à l’anarcho-capitalisme: la trajectoire intellectuelle du néolibéralisme britannique’, PhD dissertation, Université Lyon 2, 2012, p. 368).
15 15. In 1975, Raford Boddy and James Crotty, echoing the arguments in the Wall Street Journal, wrote: ‘We view the erosion of profits as the result of successful class struggle waged by labor against capital’ (Raford Boddy and James Crotty, ‘Class Conflict and Macro-Policy: The Political Business Cycle’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 7, no. 1, 1975, pp. 1–19 [p. 1]). Their thesis was immediately criticized for its monocausal character by other authors of the same general tendency. See Howard Sherman, ‘Class Conflict and Macro-Policy: A Comment’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 8, no. 2, summer 1976, pp. 55–60.
16 16. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999), p. 37. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006); Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (London: Monthly Review Press, 1981); and, in particular, John Bellamy Foster, ‘Marx, Kalecki and Socialist Strategy’, Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 11, April 2013, pp. 1–14.
17 17. Quoted in Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, p. 65. As Life Magazine reported in 1972, ‘much of the fear of being unemployed has disappeared, along with the notion that hard work is a virtue in itself’ (‘The Will to Work and Some Ways to Increase It’, Life Magazine, 1 September 1972, p. 38).
18 18. ‘The U.S. Can’t Afford What Labor Wants’, Business Week, 11 April 1970, p. 106. Quoted in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 156.
19 19. ‘Adam Smith’, Supermoney, p. 275.
20 20. Michael Perelman, The Pathology of the U.S. Economy Revisited: The Intractable Contradictions of Economic Policy (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 40. See also Alan S. Blinder, Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 107ff.
21 21. Arnold Weber, head of the ‘Cost of Living Council’ under Nixon, in Business Week, 27 April 1974, quoted in Perelman, The Pathology of the U.S. Economy Revisited, p. 41.
22 22. Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive’, p. 40.
23 23. Horst Brand, of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted in Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970’, p. 40.
24 24. In the early 1980s, the trio of Marxist economists Weisskopf, Bowles and Gordon proposed the notion of the exit cost, defined as the proportion of the standard of living that an employee can expect to lose in the event of dismissal or resignation: ‘the higher is the cost to workers of losing their jobs, the more cooperative they are likely to be at the workplace. The lower is the cost of losing their jobs, in contrast, the less responsive they will be to employer efforts to boost productivity’ (Thomas E. Weisskopf, Samuel Bowles and David M. Gordon, ‘Hearts and Minds: A Social Model of U.S. Productivity Growth’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 2, 1983, pp. 381–441 [p. 387]). Their calculations show that the cost of losing a job, after increasing in the 1960s, fell in the early 1970s. The low unemployment rate, the rise in real wages, and benefits, among other factors, lowered the cost of exit, mitigated the risks associated with dismissal, and made the balance of power more favourable for workers: ‘conservatives’, they noted, ‘propose to restore work intensity through intensified labor market discipline (and, we might add, assaults on unions) and to revive business innovation by unleashing private enterprise from the collar of government regulation’ (Weisskopf et al., ‘Hearts and Minds’, p. 438). Some mainstream economists have adopted this idea, but from the opposite angle, explicitly crediting the neo-Marxists: ‘In a provocative recent Brookings paper, Weisskopf, Bowles, and Gordon (1983) have used the presence of the unemployment benefit […] to explain the […] decline in productivity in the United States’ (George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, ‘Introduction’, in George Akerlof and Janet Yellen (eds.), Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 5). At that time, Carl Shapiro and Joseph Stiglitz discussed ‘equilibrium unemployment as a worker discipline device’. Their argument was based on treating ‘the threat of firing a worker’ as a ‘method of discipline’ and concluding that much of the slowdown in productivity stemmed from a lowering of the costs of losing work (Carl Shapiro and Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device’, The American Economic Review, vol. 74, no. 3, June 1984, pp. 433–44 (p. 434).
25 25. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 69, and Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, p. 178.
26 26. Townsend, A Dissertation