During the four years it took to write Capitalism Killed the Middle Class: 25 Ways the System is Rigged Against You, I conferred with the director of the International Labor Organization in Geneva. He insisted that I make it clear to my readers that my analysis of the middle class was confined to the US because he said Europe was dealing with these issues in a very different manner.
Book Two in the trilogy is called, therefore, Capitalism: the Global Edition because, though they may be dealing with inequality differently, the issues remain pretty much the same. I know because I’ve taken my book with me to Thailand, Italy, and Morocco and people have asked when I will publish the book in their language because, they say, the situation is much the same.
So I looked for a way to gauge the differences, wondering if there was a fundamental difference in the way a society treats its middle/working class. I chose Morocco and Thailand because I have firsthand knowledge of the way these countries treat their middle classes, France because it seems to be in a period of transition under Macron, and Norway because a UN report has repeatedly pointed to that country as the happiest and coincidentally the most equitable nation on earth.
I used the same criteria I used in the first book as a gauge for analyzing the power of the middle class - everything from the criminal justice system to labor representation. I also asked when is it obvious the middle class isn’t happy. I suggested that strikes and other forms of revolt are a clear indication and brought up Tiananmen Square in China, the Yellow Vests in France, and the Arab Spring throughout the Middle East as protests from the middle class pushing for change.
The third book, (Re)building Union, brings the issue back home and asks three fundamental questions: what does the labor movement do right, what do they do wrong, and how can it change to better serve the middle class and, in the process, become more effective and thus more powerful? This summer I conducted a webinar and asked those questions of various labor leaders and activists throughout the country. There was no consensus, but I came away convinced that the labor movement is not the solution in its present form. I think the answer lies in returning to our Socialist roots, now possible because Millennials don’t have that knee-jerk reaction to the term that affects the rest of us; they can finally renege on the promises we made to Joe McCarthy. In that way the labor movement becomes a counterbalance to laissez-faire capitalism and we’re free to experiment with systems that take the middle class into account rather than creating a pool of casualties, collateral damage, as in the Maquiladora experiment that became NAFTA.
My premise in the first book was that the answers are out there but that we need to have
something to build on. If you have no sense of history, no idea of how we got to here, and don’t know why a solution is needed NOW, you can’t offer a solution. My book was meant to lead the recently “woke” down that path. The rest of us will follow.