Liebe, Wissen, Arbeit

The “hard hats”, as they were called - mostly white union construction workers in New York - rallied in defense of Nixon, the war in Vietnam, and the perpetrators of the Kent State massacre. They carried American flags and chanted the familiar Birchite mantra, “love it or leave it”. The police allowed the hard hats to assault the protesters, effectively dispersing them. The hard hats made their way from there to City Hall, where they would demand that the mayor raise the flag from half staff, where it was in honor of the dead at Kent State, to whole staff. After some back and forth, New York’s deputy mayor Richard Aurelio ordered the flag to be raised. Over 100 were injured in total, mainly student protesters. American unions at the time were broadly in favor of the war in Vietnam. Union workers were alienated from the student- and youth-led New Left, and many union jobs were located at “defense plants” that built weapons for the war effort. High off the hog of the GI bill, which transformed many proletarian ex-soldiers, veterans of the second world war and the war in Korea, into members of the home-owning gentry, these workers experienced the height of the American empire, at least the height for the “middle class”. Having bought in to the petit-bourgeoisie (via state-subsidized mortgages), and being led politically by class collaborationist business unions, they did not expect the capitalist class to turn on them - they were, after all, not just fellow Americans, but white Americans, many the descendants of settlers, and many also descendants of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants who had only relatively recently been brought in to the fold of whiteness. To them, this was their society that the left-wing students wanted to dismantle. But less than two years after the hard hat riot, Nixon made his trip to China, the first step of what would coalesce in the opening up of China’s labor market to American capital. Offshoring began not much longer after that: American capitalists could move their factories from places like Ohio and New York to Shanghai, where workers could be paid a fraction of the wage that was demanded by the American labor aristocrats, and made to work in far less safe - but far cheaper - working conditions. American workers lost their jobs en masse, as well as their bargaining position. Technological changes, especially the advent of the humble shipping container, meant that production could be more easily centralized in Eastern Asia, where labor costs were pennies on the dollar. The opening up of China’s labor force would be followed, in the 1990s, by the resumption of diplomacy and trade with the same government in Vietnam which 60,000+ US soldiers died fighting against. “To die for the reactionaries is lighter than a feather.” American capital would become free to move anywhere across the globe, and it moved in search of the lowest cost of labor.

The “hard hats”, as they were called - mostly white union construction workers in New York - rallied in defense of Nixon, the war in Vietnam, and the perpetrators of the Kent State massacre. They carried American flags and chanted the familiar Birchite mantra, “love it or leave it”. The police allowed the hard hats to assault the protesters, effectively dispersing them. The hard hats made their way from there to City Hall, where they would demand that the mayor raise the flag from half staff, where it was in honor of the dead at Kent State, to whole staff. After some back and forth, New York’s deputy mayor Richard Aurelio ordered the flag to be raised. Over 100 were injured in total, mainly student protesters. American unions at the time were broadly in favor of the war in Vietnam. Union workers were alienated from the student- and youth-led New Left, and many union jobs were located at “defense plants” that built weapons for the war effort. High off the hog of the GI bill, which transformed many proletarian ex-soldiers, veterans of the second world war and the war in Korea, into members of the home-owning gentry, these workers experienced the height of the American empire, at least the height for the “middle class”. Having bought in to the petit-bourgeoisie (via state-subsidized mortgages), and being led politically by class collaborationist business unions, they did not expect the capitalist class to turn on them - they were, after all, not just fellow Americans, but white Americans, many the descendants of settlers, and many also descendants of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants who had only relatively recently been brought in to the fold of whiteness. To them, this was their society that the left-wing students wanted to dismantle. But less than two years after the hard hat riot, Nixon made his trip to China, the first step of what would coalesce in the opening up of China’s labor market to American capital. Offshoring began not much longer after that: American capitalists could move their factories from places like Ohio and New York to Shanghai, where workers could be paid a fraction of the wage that was demanded by the American labor aristocrats, and made to work in far less safe - but far cheaper - working conditions. American workers lost their jobs en masse, as well as their bargaining position. Technological changes, especially the advent of the humble shipping container, meant that production could be more easily centralized in Eastern Asia, where labor costs were pennies on the dollar. The opening up of China’s labor force would be followed, in the 1990s, by the resumption of diplomacy and trade with the same government in Vietnam which 60,000+ US soldiers died fighting against. “To die for the reactionaries is lighter than a feather.” American capital would become free to move anywhere across the globe, and it moved in search of the lowest cost of labor.