The Weavers

 There has apparently been a back-and-forth playing out on social media in recent days over the fate of the American textile industry. A once-thriving sector of American manufacturing, the unions representing U.S. garment workers were still running ads as recently as the 1970s trying to convince people to buy American-made clothes. But over the years, the business dried up and the jobs largely moved overseas. Today, most of the clothes we wear are made in the Global South. 

Since Trump's idiotic trade war went into effect, some liberals have made the defunct garment industry the butt of their attacks on Trump's woefully shortsighted policy. They have apparently been mocking the tariffs online, for instance, with "cartoon memes of Americans sowing cloth"—the point being that U.S. workers probably would not want these kinds of manufacturing jobs if they actually came back. 

Along similar lines, the New York Times ran an article a couple weeks ago about one southern town that used to be dominated by textile factories. The point of the article was that most people who lived there didn't actually remember the "mill jobs" fondly, and didn't want them to return. 

Life in a "dark, Satanic mill"—as Blake called them—was perhaps actually not so hot. And the people on social media are probably right that we tend to over-romanticize the departed manufacturing jobs of yesterday. 

It seems to me, however, that people are also right to view the middle-class blue collar jobs of former times as something that ought to be recreated if we can. My problem with Trump's tariffs is not that they hearken back to the ideal of high-wage manufacturing jobs. My problem is that his tariffs will almost certainly not create any of these jobs and actually will make it harder to manufacture things in America. 

Plus, meanwhile, they will punish innocent people around the world and may well spark a global recession. Oh, right—that.

The textile workers, then, seem to have no one actually defending them. Neither Trump nor his critics have their back. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent drew some pushback from the textile manufacturers' trade association last week, because he essentially said outright that the Trump administration had no intention of recreating garment industry jobs. We're looking for the "the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past," Bessent said. 

Yet, at the same time that they do not appear to be particularly solicitous of the interests of the handful of America's remaining textile workers, the Trump administration also seems dead set on destroying the textile industries of other countries. The small African country of Lesotho—for instance—was singled out for the most punishing tariffs of all in Trump's original so-called "Liberation Day" plans (despite Trump having earlier mocked the country as a place "no one ever heard of"). 

Why was Lesotho subjected to these trade attacks? Because their foreign trade centers on a small and struggling textile industry that sells clothing to the United States. The same goes for Bangladesh and several of the other places that Trump singled out. 

I'm not contemptuous, then, of the American garment industry, or of the idea of American workers "sowing cloth"—as if that were somehow a disgrace. That's not my objection to Trump's tariffs. I think that the loss of these jobs and the death of the American garment industry was a tragedy. It deprived many good, hard-working people of their livelihoods. That's never anything to sneer at with internet memes. 

But, now that these jobs have moved overseas, it seems equally cruel to deprive the impoverished people of Lesotho or Bangladesh of their livelihoods in the industry in turn—especially when they have far fewer alternative ways to make a living than American workers now enjoy. 

The problem, in both cases, then, is not "free trade" or "fair trade" or what-have-you. The problem is the displacement of jobs—regardless of how it's done—without having any realistic plan for how people are supposed to support themselves after it happens. The loss of livelihood is the injustice—and the injustice is the same regardless of the direction in which it flows. It was wrong when it happened to American workers—and it is wrong now that it is happening to workers in Lesotho as well. 

The ugliest aspect of Trump's "America First" approach is that it deliberately tries to prevent workers in both countries from seeing the commonality in their fate. It pits them against each other; when in reality, they could see that they each are facing the same evil—the loss of employment due to the quest for exploitatively low wages—and they both have the same interests—namely, in ensuring higher wages and better labor standards around the world. 

The problem, whether it happens to American workers or Lesotho workers or Bangladeshi workers, is that the people with power in society keep seeing fit to deprive people of their livelihoods—without even explaining how they are supposed to survive after the fact. As Thomas Carlyle puts it—speaking in the voice of the displaced worker—in Past and Present (his great work of social criticism about the Victorian-era Industrial Revolution): 

"Behold us here, so many thousands, millions […] We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many. We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us[…]? Or if you declare that you cannot lead us? And expect that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of starvation? What is it you expect of us? What is it you mean to do with us?"

That is what the Lesotho workers and the Bangladeshi workers must be asking today: you propose to drive us out of our jobs in the textile mills—the jobs that, just a decade ago, U.S. policymakers urged us to take, as recompense for losing our subsistence agriculture jobs to cheap heavily-subsidized U.S. crops. So, having destroyed our agriculture by encouraging "free trade," and now clawing back our textile jobs in the name of destroying "free trade"—what exactly do you expect us to do? 

Do you expect us to just stand here "and in a composed manner perish of starvation"?

U.S. workers could well say the same thing. After all—as mentioned above—Trump's tariffs are far more likely to actually decrease U.S. manufacturing employment, rather than increase it. And if Trump's tariffs drive the global economy into a recession—as they seem poised to do—then Americans will be out of work regardless of their industry. So much for recreating those "middle class blue collar jobs of yesteryear." So—what does the government propose to do with all these unemployed? 

(It's worth bearing in mind, by the way, that Carlyle in his book was partially criticizing the British protectionist "Corn Laws" of his era—hardly a model of free trade! So just because Carlyle was a prescient critic of the cruelties of free market capitalism—that does not mean he would have endorsed Trump's grossly reckless, hard-hearted, and irresponsible tariffs, which will only raise costs and make life harder for everyday Americans.)

Carlyle writes in his book that the demand for a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work" is the most reasonable that could ever be uttered. People who are willing to work, and just ask to be pointed the way to a job, should not be disappointed in this most just demand. But the U.S. government has no plan or guidance to offer them. We moved jobs overseas decades ago. Now, we want to take away those jobs from unoffending foreigners who did nothing wrong. But no one seems likely to regain them here as a result. 

For all the talk on both the Right and the Left these days of turning the page on "neoliberalism"—then—we seem poised to witness just another example in the long and ugly history of capitalism displacing workers from their livelihoods. That's all Trump's tariffs actually amount to—just another gratuitous blow to the global working class. 

And it is fitting, in some ways, that the textile industry should be the face of this new crisis of displacement—because the weavers of the early 19th century were themselves the first victims of economic displacement during the Industrial Revolution. Of today's garment workers in Lesotho, in Bangladesh, and here in the United States, then, we can say the same as what Heine wrote about the Silesian weavers of his time. 

The unemployed, desperate, impoverished weavers were still weaving—he wrote—except now they were weaving the grave clothes of the German political order. And so it is with our political order today. People will only stand for so much. People who are being gratuitously put out of work to serve the forces of capitalist greed will not just go quietly into that good night. They will—as Carlyle put it—not meekly accept starvation as their fate "in a composed manner." 

As Heine put it (Bowring trans.): 

“The shuttle is flying, the loom creaks away,

“We're weaving busily night and day;

“Thy shroud, Old Germany, now weave we,

“A threefold curse we're weaving for thee,—

               “We're weaving, we're weaving!”