Working Class Heroes

Montana's unemployment rate hovers around 3% and yet actual wages and buying power are falling as the cost of living rises. Add to this a rise in worker productivity and we have a real contradiction in classic economic terms. We would expect low unemployment to create wage pressure but what is different now is both the types of jobs being created and the mentality of the new workforce, both products of what is generally called "globalization" but what I think can more accurately be called the colonization of everyday life.

We used to extract resources here (still do but scaled way back, most is outsourced to countries with lax environmental laws) and it was hard ,physical work that required concentrated labor. Logging , mining, dam building, road construction all needed industrial forces that were mobile and not particularly educated(in the formal sense). These workers were easily organized because they had a native grasp of class relations, exploitation and power relations. They fought for their share of the profit, they understood that without their productive capacity those natural resources could not be extracted.

Now days, a whole new division of labor has been constructed,workers are fragmented, atomized into small concerns and less rigidly defined categories. Service workers, small business employees, co-ordinators and contractors have taken the place of industry per se and this new labor force has been indocctrinated in the public school system to believe notions of "class" have been replaced by much more opaque categories of exclusion and division. The notion of solidarity, common cause or union has been systematically displaced and demonized through culturalization with active participation of media, entertainment and organized religion. National and racial exceptionalism lend meaning to lives of working, consuming, and paying for wars or yachts for the wealthy.

So people work harder for a smaller and smaller share and blame their predicament on straw men, vaguely concieved enemies and cultural outsiders. They are cynical of a hollowed out politics but frozen by apathy ,denial and powerlessness to effect any change. Montanans continue to buy the newest, biggest pickup which they cannot afford to fill with gas, complain about taxes while making minimum wage and sport flag decals and Support the Troops stickers.
The Montana IWW hopes to restore some pride and move people to regain some control over their own lives. If not now, when?