It’s also unclear whether computerization has actually reduced manufacturing workers to “gauge readers.” Even if these claims were true, computerization puts enormous power in the hands of the workers who set up and maintain these new machines. Deskilled workers could halt production by staying at their machines, a twenty-first-century version of the 1930s sit-down strikes.

Writing in the Washington Post last September, the unimpeachably mainstream economist Larry Summers proclaimed, “We ... know that stronger unions are not just good for their members, they are good for our country and our descendants. Strengthening collective worker voice has to be an important component of any realistic American inclusive growth agenda.”

Well, Marx certainly didn’t view them as separate phenomena. In the first volume of Capital, he argued that the accumulation of capital went hand in hand with the accumulation of a surplus population — that wealth was being created through exploitation, but at the same time big chunks of the working class were excluded or made superfluous to the needs of capital.

Contingent workers, temporary workers, part-time workers, and the long-term unemployed — this whole group is expanding, leading us down the road to pauperism. Notwithstanding the deep crisis of legitimacy this is creating for capitalism, there’s nothing, no tendency within capitalism itself, to go in a different direction. If we are going to change directions, it’s going to have to come from a mass political movement, rather than something coming out of capital itself.

The brilliant organizers of the cio understood that within the industrial economy of the mid-twentieth century, steel, coal, and other key industries mattered more than other industries. Within the service economy today, education and health care are the strategic sectors. For at least the next couple of decades, there can be no exit threat: Schools and colleges, nursing homes and hospitals, clinics, and many other components of the always-changing education and health care delivery system can’t be moved offshore, automated, or relocated from a city to its suburbs or from the North or Midwest to the Sunbelt.