AMERICAN DISPOSABLE

BOOK REVIEW

THE DISPOSABLE AMERICAN:LAYOFFS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES,LOUIS UCHITELLE, VINTAGE, NEW YORK, 2006

I have just finished re-reading David Halberstam’s The Fifties as part of an attempt to better understand that period as the foundation of many social, political and economic and cultural post-war trends that continue, or have been expanded on, today. The book under review, to its credit, puts forth an analysis that undermines one critical part of the ‘myth’ of the Fifties that can be put in shorthand as the proposition that ‘a rising tide lifts all ships’. That is, given the tremendous advantage the American capitalist economy had after its World War II victory combined with a certain ameliorative changes in corporate and labor culture would insure that things would keep getting better and better. As long as one did not challenge the capitalist basis on which this system was built. Today, after the victory of that unchallenged assumption, the chickens have come home to roost. The classic case for what amounted to class collaboration was the ‘partnership between the Walter Reuther-led United Auto Workers and Detroit’s Big Three automakers in the immediate post-World War II period. The recent purchase of one of the Big Three, Chrysler, by a private equity company that will inevitably entail another massive round of layoffs was greeted without a peep by the Auto Workers Union

Thus, clearly those days of so-called ‘social contract’ derived capitalism, whether illusionary at the time or not, are over and have been for a while. The most compelling data centers on the seemingly never-ending fact that while those who manage the capitalist empire has vastly increased their wealth and position the mass of Americans has either been spinning their wheels or going under. This book is an ‘up close and personal’ look at those who did not make it for one reason or another but mainly because they were caught up in the vise of a dramatic changeover in corporate culture which can be paraphrased bluntly as the ‘survival of the fittest’.

One thing that is clear from all the interviews, unfortunately, is that few working people, and this book is really about working people, have a political clue about what has happened to them and why. Or, moreover, what to do about it. The amount of self-doubt, personal guilt and bafflement expressed in the book shows more clearly than any current theoretical Marxist treatise that I have read why this runaway capitalist system is still in place. Still, if these interviews emphasize that the task to change things may be daunting it nevertheless needs to be done. While the author offers no particular remedy for this growing economic inequality he does perform a service by laying out the problem. It is our task to break the logjam. And given the dominant corporate culture and its ruthless workings the fight will not be pretty.