From the Editorial Team

Economic recovery remains as elusive as ever. The prospect of a protracted period of stagnation, even a debilitating retrogression in the standard of living—once dismissed as so Japanese, so un-American—now looms as a dread possibility. The reasons for this run deep into the past and did not originate in the recent global financial meltdown. Beneath a veneer of prosperity, America has been an under-developing country for a long generation. By far, the most dramatic manifestation of that under-development has been the hollowing out of the economy's industrial heartland, beginning in the late 1970s. If prosperity has rested largely on the growth of the financial sector, that wealth was accumulated at the expense of the nation's industrial core, built up over the course of a century, in a process that might be described as auto-cannibalism—an economy eating itself alive. The ugly economic and social realities that trailed in the wake of deindustrialization were prettified by delusional pontifications about how we had entered a post-industrial nirvana. Although that nirvana has soured of late, we hear precious little from our policymaking elites, as they ponder the Great Recession, about how to reindustrialize the economy. After all, so the conventional wisdom goes, industry is so passé, a relic of another age. True recovery, or so it would seem, means shoring up those "too big to fail" banks and getting those shopping malls humming again. Or does it?

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, we present here a bold proposal to remake the economy by replenishing and transforming its industrial foundations. Robert Pollin and Dean Baker mount a meticulously reasoned plan for a government-private sector partnership to restart the engines of high-tech industrial redevelopment. They systematically dismantle the arguments against such an undertaking, namely that government planning is inherently inefficient; that it is antithetical to American political practice; and that it will inevitably drain capital away from the private sector and so end up inhibiting economic growth. Pollin and Baker then present a nuts-and-bolts, dollars-and-sense projection of how reindustrialization would work in key sectors, including transportation, infrastructure, and renewable energy. And they emphasize the plan's impact on the creation of millions of new, well-paying, high-skilled jobs.

Reindustrializing America under public auspices could become the centerpiece of an audacious labor movement program to rescue the country from what is shaping up to be the Long Decline. But it would require a degree of independence from business as usual, both in the political arena and on the economic front. Just when the CIO was getting born, back in the mid-1930s, the labor movement had run into a dead end in Washington when the Roosevelt administration's key piece of recovery legislation, the National Industrial Recovery Act, was declared unconstitutional. Not dismayed, one of the CIO's founders, Sidney Hillman, declared: "We are going ahead on our own." They did, and because they did so soon enough the administration regained its political momentum and the labor movement became a critical player in the triumph of New Deal liberalism.

Is "going ahead on our own" possible or essential today? Three articles in this issue of New Labor Forum argue in the affirmative, each in a different way. Stephen Lerner makes a bold proposal that the labor movement should seize the moment by forging campaigns that promote economic reform, consumer advocacy, environmental sustainability, and sector-specific organizing. Lerner focuses on what might have been done in the auto/transportation sector and what might ignite a strategic breakthrough in the finance "industry." Richard Sullivan addresses the fundamental misconceptions about what it means to be a social movement that cripple the way labor leaders and their allies go about assessing what's possible and what's not. Joe Burns calls for a resurrection of the strike as the vital but neglected weapon in labor's arsenal, and shows why those who dismiss this as infeasible and reckless are wrong.

If there's one place where the labor movement must, at least for the time being, "go ahead on its own" it is the logistical...