When one mask comes off, others start to follow, and in quick order. America’s rightward turn, its fascist lean, is finding allies everywhere; if they are not necessarily ideological allies, they are at least opportunistic ones. So it is that many of the country’s biggest and most rapacious corporations have begun to place their bets that the possible re-election of Donald Trump will offset the risk of widespread social collapse with a business environment friendly enough for them to begin reducing labor to the status it enjoyed in the late 19th century — that is to say, a status elevated above that of the recently liberated slave class only in degree and not in kind.
Trader Joe’s, a sort of lifestyle-branded grocery store for comfortable urbanites that has built its reputation on a friendly, laid-back corporate persona and the delivery of exotic and ever-changing treats, has joined with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, best described as an attempt to make sure that the only thing we spread throughout the galaxy is predatory capitalism, and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, an online retailer more successful and more predatory than any monopoly since the East India Company, in attempting to have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional — and, thus, illegal and, imminently, nonexistent.
It is joined in this effort by Starbuck’s, the hippie-dippie tea and spice shoppe turned international caffeine cartel, whose former chief executive officer, Howard Schultz, once presented himself as so acceptable to the current state of the Democrats — who present themselves, in the deliberate absence of any alternative, as the party of the working class — that he recently attempted to become its presidential candidate. (That the likes of Schultz and business data propagandist Michael Bloomberg pose as the natural heirs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt tells you all you need to know about the state of electoral politics in the United States.) The only things these companies all have in common, from the hula-shirted flirts of Trader Joe’s to the would-be galactic imperialists of SpaceX, is their abysmal record of low wages, dangerous working conditions, and the guiding principle that labor is disposable and should be paid as little as legally allowed.
I won’t waste your time rehashing the same old Marxist arguments you have seen and heard from me ad nauseam since you first made the bizarre choice to start reading my writing, nor will I reiterate that the endgame of practically every company in this country is to reduce its workers to the level of chattel slavery in all but name, making sure to carve out exceptions that unlike with a slave, they should not be responsible for feeding, clothing, housing, or transporting their laborers. I will simply note that this degree of escalation represents a wager — a wager that would be risky had these entities not managed to reach a degree of wealth, power, and immunity from consequence beyond the wildest fantasies of the robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries — that the most capitalist nation in world history has finally had enough of listening to workers complain.
There are those who will tell you that this gambit is spurred on by the boldness of Democratic president Joe Biden in defending the rights of labor through his NLRB, or to the recent upsurge, post-Bernie Sanders, of union organizing in spaces and occupations previously difficult to unionize. More cynical people might tell you that it is spurred by the fact that a Trump re-election will mean the end of any resistance to the smooth operations of business, and possibly the end of democracy altogether, and are simply striking while the iron is hot. Whatever the case, let us be clear about what is actually happening: four of the biggest, most powerful, and most influential companies in America (a country that has always allowed concentrated wealth to have its way with the law) are trying to permanently entrench the notion that the single, solitary government entity that makes its business the fair treatment of employees is inherently illegitimate.
Let us be even more clear about this: the NLRB is not just all that workers have in terms of protection; it is wildly insufficient for all that. The National Labor Relations Board, in the most hyper-capitalist country ever to stain the planet, is what we have instead of a socialist state, a government that cares about labor, or a genuine worker’s party. The NLRB, as the saying goes, is the compromise; it is part of the package of progressive legislation pushed through as part of FDR’s New Deal that was meant to prevent what was both badly needed and an actual threat in the U.S. of the 1930s: a communist revolution. In the best of times — which we may define here as the brief window of post-war consensus that existed from just after the Second World War and the election of Ronald Reagan — the NLRB is a mild centrist body that puts in the minimum effort to pretend there is some kind of balance of power in America between labor and capital. At the worst of times — which we may define more narrowly as the years during that window when Republicans controlled the government, or, after the ascent of neoliberal New Democrats beginning in the 1990s, when Democrats did — it is a toothless nonentity with neither the desire nor the ability to do anything for the people on whose backs and with whose sweat the billions of the ruling class rest.
The fact that these titans of finance and industry, whose wealth far surpasses that of every empire that has ever existed, have chosen this moment to argue that not only do workers have no rights that they are bound to respect, but also that any attempt to make them do so is inherently illegitimate, should tell you everything you need to know about the attitude of the bosses towards those on whom that wealth depends. I do not know if they will succeed; the rich tend to get what they want in America, and the legitimacy, and thus the potency, of our government’s institutions has never been lower. The fact that this sort of argument — previously limited to cartoonish libertarian ideologues — is now being advanced by our most powerful corporate masters is not a good sign. A court system packed for two generations with right-wing judges is not likely to make a sensible ruling in this regard. If Trump does win the election, the status of the NLRB would be bleak. But a Biden win would merely maintain a deeply compromised status quo, as (we must again repeat) America has two political parties, but both are parties of capital. State legislatures are already overturning labor laws, gutting health and safety precautions, and re-introducing child labor, a demonic state of affairs that has only been banished in this country for the blink of a historical eye, so Democratic control of the White House is unlikely to make much of a difference.
Let’s leave this splash of bad news, barely felt in the firehose of constant catastrophe that forms our current political moment, with a warning: Perhaps you think this will make no difference to you. Perhaps you think your profession, your wealth, your class status, or your particular circumstance of education and cultural sophistication will protect you from the brutality the elimination of even the barest of worker protections will inflict on the people you perceive as your servants or lessers. But remember who gets the sugar and who gets the shit; in a slave economy, there are only two kinds of people, and you either own or you’re owned. Better start thinking about that. Bad times are coming.