There was an interesting study made in the nineties and
reported in Joan Ciulla’s The Working Life. Executives were polled about what
motivated workers. Their answers ranged from ceremonies to non-cash awards.
They were then asked about what motivated executives, and as one, they
chorused: money.
This poll not only gives us a glimpse of how the
exploitation of workers generates complex denial rituals among capitalists, but
it also gives us a glimpse of how politicians in the neo-lib era think. Both
Republicans and Democrats have been agreed, in the last thirty or forty years,
that executives need lots and lots of money. Our recent cure for the
depression, which was handed out by Dr. Obama and his treasury secretary and
Fed Chief, was very, very heavy on the money for executives. But for workers –
well, the Republicans have come up with ardent defenses of the second
amendment, and the Dems have come up with retraining workers after we pass
marvelous “free trade” agreements to undermine their jobs and salaries.
Although to be fair, the Dems sometimes come up with things like Romneycare,
which makes sure to put in place a complex set of impediments and forms so that
the medical care for all thing doesn’t get out of hand. After all, the workers
love those ceremonies!
I was reminded of this by the recent launch of a think group
dedicated, on the one hand, to stopping the Dem bandwagon of Medicare for all,
which has become faddish among Dem pols, and making sure that some “bi-partisan”
health care approach, one that is acceptable to “stakeholders” (the investors
in insurance companies, drug companies, hospital corporations, and etc.) and
the ceremony-fetishizing worker. It is led by Andy Slavitt, who, to give him credit,
was great at opposing the drive to abolish ACA last year. He was less great in
opposing any universal expansion of health care. And he has saddled up with such
great minds as former Republican senator Bill Frist, who sponsored a bill for
privatizing medicare when he was in Congress.
Money for capital, non-cash awards for the rest of us: there’s
a bi-partisan platform we, or at least the we who writes and the editorials and
runs Congress, can get behind!
