This is the second part of an essay that I tried and failed to publish in the first half of 2024. For the first part of the essay, and the backstory, see here.
The Current Moment in Historical Perspective
Joe Biden, “the most pro-labor president in history,” pursued a broad program of national security industrial policy as well as an aggressively militarized foreign policy. This is not the first time that US labor has confronted such a situation. Both world wars were important moments in the forging of a relationship between labor leaders, the Democratic executive branch, and corporatist business executives. But while the post-WWI period saw the rollback of both the military-industrial complex and the tentative experiment with labor-capital-government cooperation, something different happened after 1945. For one thing, there was no post-war depression. There was, once more, a post-war strike explosion followed by backlash (Taft-Hartley). But there was no destruction of existing industrial unions as had occurred in the early 1920s.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, 1947: “It may be necessary to bribe the labor movement to take part in the struggle against Communism. Whatever else may be said about a ‘permanent war economy’ at least wages are high [and] employment is full.”
Perhaps most importantly, there was no actual return to peace. Instead, a new condition emerged, which militarists and their critics alike called “semiwar.” To the men (and it was mostly men) who dreamt up the permanent private military-industrial complex, labor had a crucial role to play. Domestically, the economic effects of military spending would help build consent for the Cold War among labor, at that time a crucial electoral constituency for the Democratic Party. As the exemplary Cold War liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, wrote in 1947, “it may be necessary to bribe the labor movement to take part in the struggle against Communism. Whatever else may be said about a ‘permanent war economy’ at least wages are high, employment is full, and the economy is relatively stable and productive.” By the beginning of 1950—before the outbreak of the Korean War—Schlesinger was fighting within his organization, Americans for Democratic Action, for a de-emphasis of domestic issues in favor of a focus on supporting a colossal program of rearmament. Not until the fall of LBJ in 1968 would any important AFL-CIO union say a word against US militarism.