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by taming the short-sighted greed of the owner class and providing the commoners with enough to live on, thus averting desperate acts by desperate people. One consequence of this was that American labor got "domesticated" in a way that never happened in other parts of the world. The old labor-socialist connection was broken, and organizations like the once-powerful IWW were marginalized. One mark of American labor's separation from international labor is our September Labor Day instead of the international May 1 Labor Day, which was just too "socialist" for the corporations to handle.
The difference between then and now is that there is nobody stopping the greedheads from pursuing their chosen course to its logical end of grinding the commoners into the dirt. This means that things are going to get very tough in the coming years. And don't take any momentary fluctuations in Christmas sales as indicants of a coming recovery. It's like mistaking weather for climate. The structural problems, such as our dependence on oil, our refusal to build an adequate 21st century infrastructure, the busting of the unions, the imminent destruction of SS, the gutting of our educational system, the out-migration of jobs, etc. are continuing apace and it is these processes that will ultimately seal our fate.
The question is whether, out of the ashes of this ruined society, there might arise a long-deferred collectivist transformation of American culture--or whether it might go the other way, into a Lord of the Flies world in which life is, as Hobbes said, "nasty, brutish and short."
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