Summary:
Our world depends on labor. Labor, not capital, actually gets work done. Whether it’s cleaning up a thoroughfare after a flood, building a lighthouse, defending our country, or teaching our kids, labor is central. Yet those who seek to wage war on workers imperil our country in doing so. When the 1% tries to pull up the ladder of success and close the door to advancement against the 99%, liberty is lost. Our very future depends upon reaffirming the primacy of labor, and on having a preferential option for labor.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Our world depends upon labor; it begins and ends with labor.
In labor do our mothers bring us into this world; the labor of the mortician and the gravedigger escorts us out.
From beginning to end
on labor do all our works depend.
America’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, had no doubt of labor’s importance. “Labor,” Lincoln declared in his first State of the Union message, “is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
It takes labor to get things done. Last Thursday, for the second time in just four years, a flood swept down across Cathedral City’s East Canyon Drive into the Tramview mobile home park. Within a matter of hours, Cathedral City’s public works department had deployed its resources and cleared tons of mud and debris from the roadway.
Mere capital, itself alone, wouldn’t have cleared East Palm Canyon Drive. It took labor --- specifically, the labor of public-sector workers --- to do so.
Incumbent politicos seeking reelection didn’t clear East Palm Canyon Drive; city workers did that.
Moreover, the city workers who clear our streets after floods, or who provide the myriad of other public services we take for granted until they’re gone, don’t do so in order to generate capital; they do so because it’s a public good. Other public goods include building lighthouses, defending the nation, or educating the next generation. Cleaning up after disasters is also a public good, part of the commonweal, something we do because in helping our neighbors we also help ourselves.
Sadly, the idea that work and workers possess a dignity that ought to be celebrated and respected seems to be vanishing from our public discourse. For too many our society, workers are fungible, disposable resource, a convenient target to be railed against to satisfy a political base, or a convenient prop for election-season photo opportunities.
Yet, if America is to survive and prosper in the generations to come, we must insist upon recognizing not just the importance, but the centrality, of labor within both our economy and our morality. Politicians love to talk about morality if it means imposing their particular views of reproduction or sexuality; they shrink from acknowledging the moral dimension of labor, and the immorality of seeking to immiserate and impoverish the middle and working classes upon whose labor all our prosperity depends.
In the same State of the Union message in which he declared labor’s priority over capital, Lincoln warned against the consequences to laboring people should they surrender their own political power: “if surrendered [, such power] will surely be used [by the foes of working women and men] to close the door of advancement against [working people] and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.” The first Republican President’s words are as prophetic in 2012 as they were in 1861.
For liberty is invariably lost when any sector of the population that has prospered mightily, rising high on the ladder of success, seeks to pull that ladder up behind it, closing the door of advancement, and essentially declaring “we’ve got ours, and yours, too.” When liberty is lost, the nation is lost; when social mobility is lost, liberty is lost.
Warren Buffett has postulated that his class, i.e., the superrich, are waging a winning class war against America’s middle and working classes. If so, we know where to find Karl Marx’s truest disciples of class war theory, and we need not look to any so-called proletariat to find them.
If we are to restore the potential and prosperity of the United States, we must divorce ourselves immediately from the notion that capital is superior to labor, and cleave strongly to Abraham Lincoln’s ringing affirmation to the contrary. Our future depends strongly upon affirming and reaffirming at every turn the priority of labor, and upon having a preferential option for labor.
For in the end, whether we are billionaire or beggar, everything we have is the product of labor, from the moment we enter the world until the moment we leave it. Labor defines us; labor measures us; labor is the measure of our dignity.
And as the famous English hedge priest and labor martyr John Ball asked more than six centuries ago “when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. He has never knowingly or intentionally crossed a picket line since he was old enough to understand what a picket line means. The views expressed herein are his own. They do not constitute legal advice, and should not be so construed.
