There were lots of commentary today in the left wing blogosphere regarding Neo-Liberalism, and its role in the American left. I'm not going to address the disputes over economic policy because there are plenty of people that will do a better job than I would. Instead, I want to address this complaint that always seem to come up in criticizing bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. Why is it that young left-wing bloggers are not pro-labor? As a 20-something blogger that considers himself progressive, I can only offer my speculative theory on this so take it or leave it, but here goes.

One of the problems for young left wingers like myself is that we have no sense of labor history. I was born in 1987; during the height of the Reagan Era. I have no idea what life was like when the labor movement was at its peak. I have lived in a capitalistic system all my life, and even though I'm aware of alternative economic systems like social democracy, I have never experience it. Finally, like many college graduates, if I wanted to participate in discussions about class, socialism, and labor, I had to seek out my college socialist club because I wasn't getting it from my political science major.

For my generation, its very easy to go through life without ever questioning our capitalistic system. Given the limited power that workers have today, it's very easy for my generation to assume that this is how the world always worked. As in, its easy for us to assume that employers always had an advantage over the employees, and the lack of workers rights is simply the natural result of our changing economy and society. It's easy to believe that so long as you are not aware that since the 1970's there has been a very deliberate effort on the part of businesses to weaken the power of workers by destroying their unions.

But again, if you're not aware of the historical effort on the part of businesses to weaken labor rights, why would you support labor? I ask the same question to myself. The only reasons I can give for supporting unions is that I read books about labor history, or books that make the case for increased unionization.

Again, this might not be an adequate answer to this question, but at least I tried. In this country, we do a good job educating our kids about the civil rights movement especially when we focus on the historical confrontations between blacks and whites. But we don't do a good job explaining to our kids about the historical battles between workers and capitalists, and how our ancestors had to fight to secure basic privileges such as the eight hour work day. Now, that mistake looks like its starting to haunt the American left.

Note: this item is from my personal blog: http://2moneythoughts.wordpress.com/