The Republican Provenance of Obama's Rhetoric

by anderson

At his speech in St. Louis, Barack Obama asked what appears on its surface to be a rhetorical question, but which more largely presents the long running dialectic between labor and capital.

"It comes down to values in America. Do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it?"

After watching real median income decline over the last thirty years, while income inequality grew substantially -- especially true during Bush's terms in office -- it would seem the answer is pretty obvious. Capital assumed preeminence in American society, and not by accident. That it has done so at the expense of labor is perhaps the root cause of our current and worsening economic situation. Capital markets are in turmoil precisely because the middle and working class in American cannot afford to pay their bills, which have only experienced inflation, while wages have dropped. It was a recipe for disaster, one day or another.

But Obama's rhetorical question is really a statement that harks back to an earlier American epoch, also a time of duress when another Illinois senator broke onto the national stage.

Abraham Lincoln, newly elected as president in 1860, addressed the country in his first State of the Union speech and plainly stated the relationship between labor and capital.

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor.
...
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Such plain speaking about the value of labor and its obvious preeminence in the relationship to wealth, and society in general, seems scarcely imaginable in today's capital worship climate. But here is Obama, raising the spectre of Lincoln with his question to the American public.

Notable also in Lincoln's speech is his obvious disdain for another argument we hear much about from the now Republican party, which surely would blanche were they to be scolded by the man they often consider their own greatest president. Reaganomics gave us the "trickle down" scam, still trying to be pawned off today, which Lincoln saw as ridiculous on its face one hundred and forty years ago.

Of course, Lincoln would be skewered by his Republican party as it exists today. But it is refreshing to finally see someone evoke -- if only in the simplest of terms -- the dialectic of capital and labor, and, more importantly, rhetorically place importance, not only on the value of labor itself, but on its preeminent relationship to capital in society.

Comments

[Steve Hynd]

Great post.

[Russ Wellen]

"the work that creates it"

My God, he came perilously close to using the word "labor," not often heard in polite society these days.

I'd never heard those remarks of Lincoln before. Thanks.

[BJ Bjornson]

Figures that that Lincoln guy was a closet Commie. The type of guy who wouldn’t let the States decide moral issues like slavery, abortion, and gay marriage. Didn’t I read that he slept in beds with men? So he was a gay closet Commie! Clearly not as “Great” a President as the those liberal academic professors try and make him out to be. [/wingnut]

Thanks for the post.