My communist dad was a "Labour Aristocrat"

And I was once a “harmless” liberal

During the 1980s, when I was a teenager, political arguments between my dad and I would sometimes flare up because I was liberal and he was a communist. He defended the USSR, even Stalin, while I wrote both off as abominations. Similarly with Fidel Castro. My dad loved him but I, good liberal that I was, would accept no “excuses” for Cuba not having “free elections”. He hated Gorbachev. I thought he was a hero. I was so wrong about everything.

Today, I'd take my dad’s side in all those arguments.

My dad was born in 1930 in Bad Hall, Austria. He stepped off the boat in Halifax in the mid 1950s. Jobs were very easy to get back then. He had no problem exploring every province in Canada by living and working in each for a while. He also traveled through Mexico, Peru and Ecuador where he met my mom. Like many European immigrants at the time who had little formal education (my dad never attended a high school) he ended up deciding that Windsor, Ontario was the place to raise a family. Windsor is across the border from what was then the booming “Motor City '' of Detroit.      

My dad was an autoworker and fiercely pro-union as you might have guessed. Thanks to the ”Labour Aristocrat” wage he earned, his wife never got a paying job and he was able to buy a house and take his family on vacations (always to Ecuador). Paying for university educations for his children was not a concern at all. I easily paid for mine by working summers at the same factory where my dad worked.    

The Powell Memo and dangerous liberals (don’t laugh)

Could people who were like me decades ago, the well-heeled liberal sons and daughters of “Labour Aristocrats”, pose a threat to Capitalism? Lewis Powell certainly thought so. 

Powell was a US Supreme Court justice who in 1971 wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Powell wrote that 

“"extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed [my emphasis], and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern". 

I emphasized “better financed” above because in 1971 US capitalism was "delivering" to the working class to far greater extent than it has since 1980 when the counterattack Powell wanted began in earnest.

Anyway, “extremists of the left” aside, Powell then identified his primary concern 

"The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians" 

He was mainly worried about liberals, especially on campus. In 1971, decades of sustained productivity growth and rising wages meant that those liberals on campus that Powell feared would have increasingly been people from working class families who had more access to higher education than their parents ever did. 

Powell identified Ralph Nader as “the single most effective antagonist of American business”. Powell was also anguished by Yale Professor Charles Reich’s best-selling book  “The Greening of America”. Powell’s fear of Nader is easily understood since Nader always advocated practical ways to reign in corporate power. Reich’s book, on the other hand, was a joke. I have no idea if the CIA promoted Reich’s book like it did the work of  that the anti-communist “leftists” like Orwell, but it would have been smart to do so.[1]  

Nevertheless, Powell feared any kind of “assault on the enterprise system” (i.e corporate power) that had “evolved over the past two decades”. Again, I’ll stress that the decades Powell referred to (the 1950s and 60s) were two excellent decades for the US working class compared to the throttling they’ve taken since 1980.  Powell believed that “the campus is the single most dynamic source” of what he feared most - people getting independent of corporate power.  

We on the left can scoff at Powell’s conflation of liberals with leftists who actually do “assault” capitalism,  but Powell saw no reason to be complacent about either. He stressed that they ”need not be a majority” on campus and that only some “would enter the enterprise system” where they would finally learn to embrace capitalism. But the rest would occupy spaces that Powell saw as too independent of corporate power in 1971: media, universities, government bureaucracies and government in general - including elected positions.     

Worse ain’t better

Powell despaired at Corporate America's “appeasement” in the face of the assaults on it and urged a “more aggressive” attitude. Powell’s despair at hapless Corporate America was misguided in that concessions had to be made by capitalists after WWII. As of 1950, about a third of the world’s population lived under self-declared marxist governments. 

But by 1980, before the collapse of a major ideological competitor in the USSR, US elites had clearly decided that the concessions had gotten way out of hand. It is easy to see how the squeeze on the independence of intellectuals, journalists and politicians that Powell wanted would have to go hand in hand with a squeeze on living conditions in general. 

Leftists sometimes fear that reforms can only stabilize capitalism and eventually lead to backsliding. Powell’s memo is a useful read in that it shows that while that is one possible outcome, reforms that increase the self-esteem of the working class and their access to free time and higher education do open up desirable possibilities - the ones Powell feared. 

My dad, the communist labor aristocrat, was proud of what he achieved in Canada. He was a good worker who was especially dismayed when bad workers would trash the union that protected them. But he was also very grateful to the union that allowed him to live with dignity.  Capitalist concessions did not buy his loyalty because of the way he understood the world. Leftists must be part of the fight for working class dignity  - for the free time and security that allows them to contemplate the world closely - and allows their children the same. If you refuse to be part of that fight, or even hope for things to get worse, then you’re part of the problem.   

NOTE

[1] Reich wrote that The New Left failed to understand that “bureaucratic socialism or communism presents many of the same evils as America, and that American capitalism is now only a subordinate aspect of the larger evil of the uncontrolled technological state”. He added that looking for structural change and even fighting cops in the streets fails to “offer an affirmative vision”. So who did? Bob Dylan. That’s how Reich backed up his claim: “Bob Dylan did what he wanted to do, lived his own life, and incidentally changed the world; that is the point the radicals have missed.”