defending and promoting Labor

The Four Pillars of the Green politics movement are: Ecology, Democracy, Justice, and Peace. There is an initiative to add a fifth Pillar: Labor.

In the contestation between labor and capital, labor has been losing for fifty years:

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.38.2.107

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Mass society has no operational “we the people” conscience. When things are so large, so opaque, so remote, the wealth/power elites can fund what it takes to get their way.

There was an interesting exception to the dynamic of capital usually gaining More. When the system was in crisis, being questioned, and being challenged by an alternative (socialism) during the 1930s and 1940s the enlightened wing of the bourgeoisie recognized the impetus to allow improvement of conditions for labor. The share of GDP going to labor temporarily increased for a few decades. By the 1970s the system had restabilized and the socialist challenge had been reduced. So after that the dynamic of capital gaining More revived. Ever since, the share of GDP going to labor has generally declined. It’s unjust and bad for social cohesion. It leads to malaise among the masses. But labor is atomized, demoralized, and discombobulated.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/why-america-is-failing

A systemic reform to fight for is the reversal of this pernicious trend. That does argue for adding “Labor” as a fifth Pillar of our movement.

[Personally, I think another additional Pillar should be: “Community” . . . in order to indicate the communitarian orientation of our ideology.]