I didn't study the 70s in school, because it was happening as I was growing up. So, though I remembered the outlines, I needed someone to fill them in. Cowie's palette is a somber one, though. At stake was, he writes: [the] dream... that collective working-class agency could guarantee basic economic security for all as the foundation of a greater freedom.
Cowie begins in 1972 in Lordstown, Ohio, where young auto workers, fearing that they will be "hacking on the line for 30 years" with no say in how their work is managed, go on strike. Pitted against them are the old, entrenched capitalists (of General Motors) and status-quo loving union bosses. These guys fear the young strikers - men with long hair and afros, love beads and mod clothing; Vietnam vets who know dysfunction when they see it. This bunch had seen liberation (at least on television) and wanted some for themselves.
Stayin' Alive looks at the 70s as two distinct periods (1968-1974 and 1974-1982). Cowie discusses the political and economic happenings within each, followed by an analysis of that period's popular culture - music, movies, and television. At the beginning of the 70s, there is a glimmer of hope: maybe the young, integrated, liberation-demanding kids can win. But alas, Nixon's paranoid scheming, an energy crisis or two, stagflation, an ineffectual Carter administration, a union-busting Ronnie Reagan, and the sickening, no-holds-barred, runaway greed of the wealthy classes, all combine to drastically shrink the pie for which American workers must compete. By the end of the decade, being chained to an assembly line job in a factory with no say in your present, let alone your future, is actually looking pretty good - and damn near unattainable - to most working class Americans.
Cowie explains how the rise of identity politics, sadly, played directly into the cynical divide-and-conquer strategies of the union bosses and politicians. He shows how Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan deliberately inflamed racist white nationalist and misogynist sentiments in order to consolidate their own power. Sound familiar? Even the part where (Republican) politicians turn their backs on the material concerns of poor white people and replace those concerns with cultural ones - things like abortion and school prayer that would have no effect on their standard of living no matter how they were decided: that strategy began all the way back then, in the 70s, too.
Cowie clearly knows his stuff - the detail about labor legislation and all the various political maneuverings are fascinating. That the momentous decisions made by the president and congress come down in the end to trivial matters of timing, or even just naked human frailties, incompetencies, and vanity is not well understood by most of us and is difficult to fully comprehend. I suppose that's why we accept simplified and simple-minded explanations for so many things? At any rate, Cowie's conclusion is that, by the end of the 70s, no economically-based "working class" identity remained in the United States - that workers had been successfully divided and, thus, had no real voice.
He ends the book with something of a challenge:
Whatever working-class identity might emerge from the postmodern, global age will have to be less rigid and less limiting than that of the [post-World War II] order, and far less wedded to the bargaining table as the sole expression of workplace power. It will have to be less about consumption and more about democracy, and as much about being blue collar as being green collar. It will have to be more inclusive in conception, more experimental in form, more nimble in organization, and more kaleidoscopic in nature than previous incarnations. The chapter of the modern working class has closed; the page of imagination is open; and the future is unwritten.
