The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers Movement by Stanley Aronowitz, and: Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement by Thomas Geoghegan (review)

In their most recent books, Thomas Geoghegan and Stanley Aronowitz write about labor’s deepening crisis with an approach that Antonio Gramsci might have called pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. Geoghegan, the labor attorney and wry observer of the union scene, and Aronowitz, the social critic and activist academic, come at their subjects from different analytic directions and recommend different courses of action (which not surprisingly reflect the influence of their lifelong commitments to the law and Marxian thought, respectively). But on one thing they are in firm agreement: the US labor movement that once represented a third of the nation’s wage earners is dying, and it cannot be resurrected in its old form. Rather, a new kind of labor movement is needed for the twenty-first century. “Labor is the one thing that can save us,” says Geoghegan. “But the thing that can save us is not the labor that we have now” (187). That phrase could have just as easily come from Aronowitz’s book.

Indeed, despite their divergent orientations, Geoghegan and Aronowitz agree in their grim diagnosis. Organized labor is on the ropes, and long-term survival in its present form is impossible. Collective bargaining is “effectively dead,” concludes Aronowitz (103). The union contract has become a kind of “legal vise” (32), he says, now “more a blunt instrument of management than a workers’ sword” (78). “Twenty years ago the old Big Labor was just wasting away slowly,” adds Geoghegan. “Now the patient has stopped eating altogether” (39).

Both authors place a good deal of the blame for labor’s problems on two factors—politics and the behavior of the unions themselves—although each offers a different reading of how these factors play out. Aronowitz argues that “overt state terrorism practiced by Democratic and Republican administrations alike” (62) during the Cold War marginalized labor radicals and accomplished labor’s integration “into the prevailing political and economic system” to an extent that “it not only complies with the law but also lacks an ideology opposed to the prevailing capitalist system” (19–20). Lacking such an ideology, the AFLCIO became a mere “appendage of the Democratic Party” over time (120). Aronowitz faults union leaders for their “deep reverence” for authority, “especially the authority of the law,” and suggests that their very psyches are now captive to the oppressive system. “This awe for the ‘rule of law’ has displaced the primitive awe of the father,” he claims (82). Thus debilitated, union leaders remained hostage to the “limits of contract unionism” (21) and acquiesced to a situation in which “public relations gradually replaced the strike weapon and shop-floor militancy” (97). It need not be so, Aronowitz tells us. The “failure to organize and to fight does not reflect a lack of resources,” he insists, “but instead a lack of faith” (25).

Geoghegan also roots his diagnosis in politics, although his reading of the political narrative diverges from Aronowitz’s. It was not “overt state terrorism” that bludgeoned labor into submission to an oppressive order, in his telling, but rather the Democrats’ embrace of such issues as free trade, free capital markets, and “school reform” that helped marginalize labor over time. While Aronowitz argues that “liberal reform is dead” (65), Geoghegan aims to revive a form of labor-liberalism within the Democratic Party, which he hopes will in turn be capable of jumpstarting a new labor movement in the nation. He maintains that whether it realizes it or not, the Democratic Party “needs a labor movement not just to win elections but to govern the country, or at least keep it from cracking up” (38). Testifying from...