6-05-08, 9:08 am
Editor's Note: Norman Markowitz is an historian and contributing editor of Political Affairs. This interview was conducted last week. Check out PA's podcast for the audio version.
PA: We just posted your article, 'It's Time for a New Deal.' I’d like to ask you first, as a partisan of socialism, why you make such a vigorous plea for its return, given the fact that the New Deal was not a socialist project?
Norman Markowitz: If you look at American history, the New Deal government represented the most advanced, pro-labor government – a government that carried out, in limited but significant forms, public ownership and economic planning, both of which are essential features of socialism. The New Deal was not socialist, but it was supported, particularly by Communist Party activists after 1935 and for most of the last 10 years of the Roosevelt Administration, because it was advancing, in the name of saving capitalism, programs and policies that were strengthening and in limited ways empowering the working class.
Those programs and policies had only seriously begun when World War II interrupted them, and then the Cold War to a considerable extent derailed them. In 1932, there were less than 3 million workers in trade unions; in 1945, there were close to 15 million, an increase of 5 times. Social security, unemployment insurance, the National Labor Relations Activity, the 40-hour week, the minimum wage, the Tennessee Valley Authority, long-buried programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) with millions of public works jobs for the unemployed, the National Youth Administration, the beginning of federally-supported work-study projects for youth in school and out of school, the now repealed Aid to Families with Dependent Children – all of these programs are part of the historic legacy of the New Deal.
It was in this period that the Left reached the height of its real influence as part of a broader, New Deal, center-left coalition, which the Cold War basically fractured. Reviving this center-left coalition and regaining the lost ground of the last 30 years, in which rightist forces have been in the ascendance politically is really essential to developing a foundation from which one can advance socialist programs and build a mass party of labor.
The New Deal government represented new forces and politics. It operated through the Democratic Party. It made the Democrats as a party the majority party of the country, something they had not been since before the Civil War. But it wasn’t the Democratic Party per se. The people it brought into national politics were independent progressives, some progressive Republicans, some former socialists, along with independent centrist reformers, etc. And in that sense, if we look at mainstream American political history and the mainstream struggles for social and economic progress in America, the New Deal is really the best model we have.
PA: You have just mentioned what I think is the main argument of your article, and that is that the 20th century was the history of the clash between New Deal forces and anti-New Deal forces. Could you elaborate on that a bit?
Markowitz: Before the Depression, American politics was defined by both parties as a politics in which government intervention in the economy was portrayed as something negative – the people, the politics, the economics, and the culture were all defined from the top in conservative terms. Subsidies for business were good, subsidies for labor and the people was class legislation and bad. Both parties had the same investors, not only were they both for capitalism, they were pretty much for the same general policies.
The two parties were factionalized between progressive and conservative factions, and they represented really different religious and ethnic groupings. The Republicans were the party primarily of the Anglo-Protestant middle classes and upper middle classes, and in the North even sections of the Protestant working class. The Democrats were in the South the party of white supremacy and southern reaction, in the Northeast, the party of Catholic and to a lesser extent, in terms of numbers, Jewish immigrant populations; in the West more of lower income and small-town elements.
But there were no substantive differences in terms of economics, in terms of politics, and in general in terms of culture also between the two parties, except in terms of a kind of cultural conflict, in which the Democrats were much more tolerant of religious and cultural differences than the Republicans, who were much more uniformly Anglo-Protestant and were trying to make every American into an Anglo-Protestant.
The New Deal changed that. It changed the economics not in terms of moving in a socialist direction as such, as we would define socialism, that is, as Communists and Socialists would define socialism, but it brought into national politics the idea, and made it central, that government had a principal role, a primary role, for providing for the general welfare of the people, that labor unions and mass progressive organizations were not negative but positive, because they provided a kind of countervailing force to the power of big business, the power of the large corporations.
Many New Dealers also felt that laissez-faire capitalism was both hypocritical and irrelevant to modern industrial society. The prominent New Dealer, Thurman Arnold, who later became Solicitor General of the United States, published a well-known and well-respected book called The Folklore of Capitalism, which examined the mythologies on which capitalist ideology was based. Those are the same kinds of mythologies that the Bush administration, in an even cruder form, today represents.
The New Deal represented mass, pro-working-class politics. It brought labor for the first time into political action and political struggle – a new labor movement represented by Communist-Party-influenced and led industrial unions, more inclusive industrial unions. It made a new kind of unionism – social unionism – possible.
And the New Deal, broadly defined, represented what Roosevelt, at the end of the Second World War, called a New Bill of Rights, a Bill of Rights that included economic and social rights, a Bill of Rights in which the right to housing, education, health care, and employment would supplement the original Bill of Rights and update and modernize it.
In that sense, the struggle between the Old Deal, those who wished to make the trickle-down theory of government subsidies for big business the foundation of economic policy, those who wished to create – and did in the Cold War – a bipartisan policy of domestic subsidization of business, which meant gigantic government subsidies for the military-industrial complex, both in the context of fighting a permanent Cold War.
Also, in the New Deal period, people like Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson, along with many others, defined American Culture as egalitarian, inclusive, and rooted in the struggles of working people – to be a good American was to be an egalitarian, to support equal rights for everybody, to fight for the rights of labor against big business and the rich. It meant not striving to accumulate personal wealth for yourself, not trying to become as rich and powerful an individual as you could – that was all part of the older cultural view.
The struggle for the New Deal has been ongoing and has represented enormous substantive gains for labor, the working class, for the whole people, but those gains were severely compromised by the Cold War and those reactionary forces who looked to the pre-New Deal past, and who have again risen to ascendancy since the 1980s – those who trying are to privatize Social Security and weaken social guarantees and protections (with considerable success), those who are feeding gargantuan appetite of the military-industrial complex, intensifying income inequality, and undermining the infrastructure of the country. One of the most eye-opening statistics that one can look from the 1930s to the 1970s (from the New Deal period onward) is that during this period, even with the postwar stalemate and rolling back of New Deal policies, income inequality was significantly reduced in the United States. From the beginning of the 1980s to the present, however, it has risen sharply.
As part of the legacy of the New Deal era, millions of productive, skilled, valuable blue collar and white collar jobs were produced – thanks to a relatively strong labor movement and the huge technological advances that the US made as a country. Now, since the 1980s, we have seen the loss of millions of those jobs, both blue and white collar, and we have seen an economy that is geared almost entirely to investors, owners, and those who serve their interests by providing them with special services. This is an economy in which most people have increasingly seen their real standard of living stagnate and decline – in terms of affordable housing, health care, the ability to get and use education, economic and social security, and in what they get as compensation.
Now even their sources of compensation have been taken away, as consumer goods are now being produced by relatively cheaper labor abroad. Now, instead of a welfare state, what they live in is a kind of Wal-Mart state, in which they purchase goods sold to them by non-unionized American workers, produced by exploited workers in other parts of the world. But increasingly the relative cheapness of even those goods, thanks to what is happening to the US economy, is also being taken away from them.
PA: I want to also ask you about one figure you write about, Lyndon Johnson, who seemed to try to straddle the two conflicting forces in the country: He both advanced much of the New Deal but also, at the same time, fed the military-industrial complex. What are your thoughts on his role historically? His role in the civil rights movement was also an extremely important one, but at the same time he pushed the Vietnam War, and that seems to undermine his legacy.
Markowitz: Johnson is in some ways a very tragic figure. As a person, he came out of the rough-and-tumble politics Texas politics. He was a strong New Dealer in the 1930s – one of his first significant jobs was working in the Rural Electrification Administration in the mid-1930s, which provided electricity to poor, rural areas that private power was unwilling to because it was not profitable for them. He got himself elected in a special election to the House as a strong New Deal Democrat. He identified on a personal level with Roosevelt. But as he became a power in the Democratic Party in Texas, he also became a power-broker, a money man, a representative of the oil and natural gas interests, of the big corporations in Texas, a representative of the people who eventually gave us Halliburton out of Brown-Root. He also did not, as a congressman and then senator, seriously challenge segregation. When he was put on the ticket in 1960, most progressive and labor-liberal people deeply distrusted him.
When he became President after Kennedy's assassination, he seized what he saw as an historic opportunity to revive New Deal labor-liberal politics, and he did. He did it by linking up with the civil rights movement, the way Roosevelt did with the broader labor movement in 1935. He used all of his power to enact the most significant civil rights legislation in US history since the 1870s – the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Subsequently, he came forward with a New Deal revival program, which he called the Great Society. He used a version of World War II and Cold War rhetoric to advocate a War on Poverty (some of his supporters began to talk about a Marshall Plan – another Cold War policy, for the cities). He passed programs that were really a continuation of the New Deal, in terms of federal aid to education, the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Medicare – not a social-security based system of socialized medicine for everybody, but Medicare for senior citizens and Medicaid for those who can pass a means tests. His program also included important new environmental and consumer legislation.
He did all these things, but at the same time he carried the Cold War to new extremes by escalating the Vietnam War. This, in turn, lost him the support of the civil rights activists and youth, all the new forces in the politics of the 1960s, the new forces that had been most of galvanized by the civil rights movement. Those who supported what the Great Society program was all about – those who loved Roosevelt – had come to hate Lyndon Johnson, as an individual because of his escalation of the Vietnam War – and that escalation of the Vietnam War basically crippled the Great Society program.
Why does he do it? Well, he is part of a foreign policy consensus that he could not not break free from. I think this is a great historic irony. We now know, on the base of internal White House documents, that Johnson realized that what his government was saying about the war in Vietnam was to a considerable extent not true. He realized that it was a complex civil war and that the domino theory was nothing more than propaganda. He understood those things. But what he fears is if he does not “win” in Vietnam. He feared allowing Vietnam to be reunified.
He was given the opportunity to do that when he becomes President, just after John Kennedy was assassinated. In Vietnam, the CIA and the military had collaborated in bringing about a coup against the US-created dictator Diem, and a military government had been established. Then Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant, basically offered the Johnson administration, the Vietnamese – everybody – now that these political changes had taken place, an opportunity to go back to the Joint Commission and return to the Geneva settlement – and Johnson simply dismissed that out of hand. What he feared was that if Vietnam was reunified under the leadership of the Vietnamese people and the Vietnamese Communists, that this would destroy his administration in the United States. He feared the ghost of Joe McCarthy and being accused of having lost Vietnam. He feared the continuing power of the Cold War mindset. So to prevent that he destroyed his administration. To prevent the right, to prevent the Cold War establishment from burying him, he served their interests, and in effect lost the support of millions and millions people who he needed to make the Great Society possible.
PA: If I hear you correctly, you seem to be suggesting that more important than individual presidents, candidates or individual policies, are the grassroots and working class forces that make progressive change possible.
Markowitz: Right.
PA: Is the greatest lesson of Johnson’s Administration that you can’t fight a war someplace on the other side of the world and hope to rebuild society here? What are your thoughts on the parallels, or maybe lessons, we can draw?
Markowitz: Well, that is certainly one very vital lesson. You can’t rebuild society here, you cannot bring about social progress in the United States, while supporting military intervention and wasting the resources of society in foreign wars. You just can’t do that.
One New Dealer, Stuart Chase, who was eclipsed in the Cold War era, made this prophetic comment at the very beginning of the Cold War, when he said, “You can’t bomb democracy into your enemies.” War is a last resort. You fight wars when you have to, but you establish or try to establish economic and social institutions that will prevent war, not produce war.
The Bush administration has no interest, and the Republican Party has no interest, in any social reconstruction, social progress, or social advancement in the United States. They are against all of that. But any administration that is committed to advancing and winning back the ground that has been lost over the last three decades and bringing about social reconstruction in this country, must develop a progressive foreign policy that is like its domestic policy – internationalist, peace-oriented, and oriented toward economic and social reconstruction in the poorer countries of the world, which in principle is something the New Deal advocated.
Roosevelt talked about a Good Neighbor Policy. Roosevelt spent time planning for the creation of the United Nations, and toward developing a US policy that was multilateralist, good-neighbor oriented, UN oriented, and especially oriented toward the kind of social agencies now connected to the United Nations. That is the kind of foreign policy that would complement and strengthen progressive domestic policies. It is essentially an anti-imperialist/anti-continuing-Cold War policy.
We can learn much from the history of the Johnson Administration, which tried to be both Cold War and progressive, and it ended up bringing Richard Nixon into the White House, which brought all kinds of ugly backlashes, particularly a racist backlash in American politics, and political fragmentation – because you can’t do both.
If Senator Obama is elected to the Presidency, hopefully his administration will begin to move not only domestically but internationally in an anti-militarist and anti-imperialist direction. I think he has to move in this direction in order to be successful domestically. He will have to confront the power of the military-industrial complex, its power over the federal government, its power over the federal budget, and begin to seriously plan for a post-military-industrial complex America.
Today, according to the latest figures, the United States accounts for more than 50%, of the official military spending in the world. We have, and this is not counting all the overruns and all the allied spending, a de facto military budget that is in excess of $500 billion a year. Cutting that budget in half would still put the United States far ahead of any other single nation. So these are the kinds of questions that really have to be dealt with if the country is to overcome the political, economic and social crisis that it faces, and also that its policies have helped to bring about in the world.
