I recently saw the film Blinded by the Light. There’s a lot here: a young man’s love for The Boss, the struggles of South Asian immigrants to the UK, and a musical with a ton of Bruce Springsteen songs. Stayin’ alive, right? It’s a genuine story of stayin’ alive. But more than anything, it reminded me of a book called Stayin’ Alive. Jefferson Cowie wrote the book, and he also wrote a history of RCA called Capital Moves.
Working Class Americans and the 1970s
Something happened in the US in the 1970s, and I think most Americans over the age of 50 get it. At least, they get it in some sense. We can tell the story of the 1970s in many ways, and a narrative of industrial decline dominates one of them. But it’s rather nebulous, and I think Cowie puts his finger on it.
You see it in the heated labor battles at the beginning of the decade versus a relative lack thereof at the end. And you see it in union failures to handle interlocking issues of race and class. Unions moved from using the strike tool to not using it, and, after implementation of historic civil rights legislation from the late 1960s, they moved from racial exclusion to balkanization.
Race and Gender
Let’s start with race and gender. Cowie sets out some of the organizations designed to counter racism and sexism in unions. He pays a lot of attention to the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and Coalition of Labor Union Women. Why did we need these groups? Aside from perhaps the CIO, labor simply didn’t support racial justice. And between labor misogyny and anti-labor sentiment from feminist groups, twin forces squeezed women labor activists. And so, the CBTU and CLUW stepped in.
Marxist groups like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement stepped in to mend these divides and create multi-racial, multi-gender labor coalitions. But they faced issues of size and effectiveness. They also faced opposition, both from worker cultural attitudes and pro-traditional labor elements of the civil rights movement, particularly Bayard Rustin. Rustin’s book From Protest to Politics stands out.
The End of the Working Class?
Let’s think about the path of least resistance. Your union struggles to handle these issues, and it still doesn’t get it on issues of race and gender. What does it do? It restricts itself to bread-and-butter issues. Worker autonomy and ownership? Racial and gender justice? Nope. It can’t unite the workers around common interests, so it abandons the strike tool. As a result, it hires professional staff to sit at the bargaining table in place of a united body of workers.
And so, we get Cowie’s thesis. A perfect storm of forces crushed the labor movement in the mid 1970s. It couldn’t adapt to the inflationary pressures of the 1970s, the shift to service work and its accompanying multi-race/gender labor force, and the looseness of the New Deal political coalition. Not to mention automation. Perhaps just barely stayin’ alive.
Politically, the latter half of the decade and the 1980s were total disasters. Culturally, capital defeated much of the industrial working class. And, politically and strategically, visions of worker ownership and socialism crawled in a hole and died.
Bruce, Stayin’ Alive, and the Long 1970s
And then there’s Bruce Springsteen. What does The Boss have to do with all this? Cowie points to a split in Bruce’s music between the ennui of the early-to-mid 1970s and the anger and frustration of the late 1970s and 1980s. Listening to some of this stuff again, I see it.
Springsteen roared out the gate in the early 1970s on the twin forces of ennui and desire for something better. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and Born to Run stand out. Lots of people had good union jobs, and civil rights legislation opened some of these opportunities to black Americans. But worker control wasn’t really on the agenda, often for the reasons above. Unions hit the bread-and-butter issues, but not the deeper ones. Yielding control of the factory floor to the boss and taking home a larger share of the profits.
Want to do something interesting or just something in your control? You do it on your own time. Here’s Bruce in Born to Run:
In the day we sweat it out on the streets
Of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory
In suicide machines
Sprung from cages on Highway 9
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin’ out over the line
Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run
Leave Town?
Or your can hop in your car and leave town. Bruce talks about that over and over and over. Let’s stick with Born to Run:
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide
Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Oh, someday, girl, I don’t know when
We’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go
And then there’s Thunder Road:
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey, what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, heaven’s waiting on down the tracks
And the ending of the song, pretty much the anthem of anyone ready to get the fuck out of some place they don’t like:
So Mary, climb in
It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win
Maybe Bruce took it too far, but that’s the mood. We’re talking a combination of dissatisfaction and security. Bruce sings to people afraid of boredom, not starvation or homelessness.
Bruce and the Later Working Class
Things changed in the late 1970s, and so did Bruce’s music. The dissatisfaction remained, but the hopefulness faded. Bruce channeled some of the resulting anger and bitterness. I’m talking here about his work from the early 1980s to mid 1990s, stuff from Born in the USA through The Ghost of Tom Joad.
I mean, did you really listen to the lyrics from Born in the USA? Here’s how it starts:
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that’s been beat too much
‘Til you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
The song’s about a Vietnam vet. And many of the components of the earlier music remain, but Springsteen turns them to different ends. You still get a car metaphor in Born in the USA, but it goes like this:
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go
Maybe we hauled ass out of town earlier, but we can’t do that anymore. And even if we do, it ain’t getting us anywhere. Bummer.
The End
I find the logical conclusion of this line of development in some of Springsteen’s mid-1990s work. Especially Youngstown. The song’s an industrial history of Youngstown, Ohio. And, of course, we eventually make it to the 1970s and later. There’s a video montage that’s particularly informative.
He gives the expected history of industrial demise, but he also identifies the enemy:
Well my daddy come on the Ohio works
When he come home from World War Two
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble
He said, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”
Hitler couldn’t destroy the US industrial worker base, but corporations sure could. And we get more discussion of the capitalist as enemy:
From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name
Where does all this lead? What’s the logical conclusion? It’s this:
When I die I don’t want no part of heaven
I would not do heaven’s work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell
What could there be after that? And Bruce’s career again tells the tale. He moved on to new styles of music after 1995.
Blinded by the Light or Stayin’ Alive?
I’m not sure where Blinded by the Light fits in the leftist film canon. But I suspect it’s in there somewhere. It’s much more early Bruce than later Bruce, though the film hits the theme of corporate layoffs. Despite layoffs hitting the main character’s father hardest, we get the expected broad impact. And, of course, the expected solace in all those Springsteen songs.
