Another Analysis of Industry

Like many of the thinkers that we have read during the course, Piven and Cloward attempt to make an analysis on our society through a close look at labor, through the Industrial Workers Movement. Throughout the piece, they address the movement of the industrial workers with emphasis on the role of the unions throughout the country following the Great Depression. What i couldn't but think throughout the reading (just as i had thought while reading Marx's analysis of industry in the 19th century) was the fact that to me, it seems to be quite outdated. Obviously, this country is still extremely reliant on industry, and there are factories across the nation that employ much of our country, but with the introduction of workers comp, welfare, and branches within companies like Human Resources, many of the issues that were a huge problem for the pre World War II America, are not issues of huge concern today. Now what is to be said is that this is likely to do with the movements addressed in this article from the early protests all the way up to the civil rights movements.

That being said, the piece seemed to me to be an almost perfect response to the cycle that Marx describes with The Invisible Hand. It only seems natural that when humans are put as cogs in a giant machine, it will only a certain amount of time before they band together to attempt to solve the problems generated by this self-fulfilling cycle. Certainly with reference to the individual, however, it goes against what many of the thinkers might have deduced about human nature and people looking out solely for themselves. It takes an environment that in conducive to group thinking for a solution to a nation wide problem to be reached. And to me, this is what happened with the events leading up and and eventually including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of America.