“It might be well at this point to dispose of an almost universally held fiction. That relationship exists between #wages and #productivity, that wages can increase only to the degree that productivity increases. This view is put forward by economists, by #management, by #government, and by #labor leaders …. The theory has one justification – pegging wage increases to increased productivity (speed up) justifies the contract deals by which labor leaders barter increased discipline over the workers for financial benefits. The alleged relationship between wages and productivity is false in theory and false in fact. Without massive struggles, workers wage increases, tend to fall behind gains in productivity. With massive struggles, wages rise far beyond what productivity gains would indicate.”
— George #Rawick The American Working Class (1973)
#history #union #unions #MayDay #economics

“Where, then, is the affluent worker? Isn’t the average worker ready to accept this exploitation in exchange for a house, a car, and a color television set? Or is this a modern myth?

To begin with, affluence is not payment for suffering. It is payment for struggle. To the extent that American workers share in the goods produced by the society, it is a result of massive battles and continuous wars, going back over a hundred years, marked by violence, looting, destruction, strikes large and small, on level that puts the record of any other major industrial country to shame.”
— George #Rawick, The American Working Class (1973)
#books #labor #history #union

George #Rawick’s warning in 1964 about the threat of rising #authoritarianism seems prescient in that it presaged our current fascist era that began with #Reagan and continues through #Trump.

“But one thing remains certain — that if the Negro struggle is defeated — it will be defeated in the midst of a general reactionary development in the #UnitedStates. To stop this the Negro struggle must become even more radical in its demands, its form of organization, and its actions. For unless the Negro working class, the one active progressive force at present in American society, goes forward, all of American Society will continue to slide towards barbarism, towards an increasingly authoritarian solution to the crisis of #capitalism. Those purported left-liberal friends of the Negro … who counsel the Negro movement to develop ‘a careful strategy’ … offer advice which if adopted will prove disastrous to both black and white working class people.”

“When [George #Rawick] protested against the tenancy of historians of #slavery to name the archetypal rebel as Nat and not Harriet, when he saw the force as few academics did of Angela Davis’ early writings on #women and slavery, and when he explicitly argued that point-of-production analysis needed to be paired with an emphasis on the #labor of social reproduction. He was very much responding to Selma James’s ideas.”
— David Roediger, Listening to Revolt: The Selected Writings of George Rawick (2010)
#books #history #union #feminism

95yo feminist Selma James is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

“Those involved in the modern, capitalist world, even those critical of it at times, often find it difficult to understand that social classes often do not, cannot, act out of rational, economic self-interest. Both Karl Marx and Max Weber understood this, but many liberal economic determinists do not …. Social classes entrenched as the rulers of reactionary social systems, ones that by their very nature do not utilize all the natural and technological resources available at a given time, do not act out of narrow economic self-interest, but, rather, out of fantasies that no longer have even the vaguest coincidence with reality.”
— George #Rawick (1972)