On this day in 1873, the labor leader William Green was born. At the age of 16, he went to work in a coal mine. By 18, he had become a union representative. And he went on to head the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for almost three decades — including the whole of the Great Depression. He is known for pursuing a “cooperative” strategy where labor tries to work with management. I think that’s really interesting, because he took the reins of AFL in 1924. Listening to people talk about labor now, you would think that the idea of labor working with management was only something they did recently and very reluctantly.

I’m not sure that it was the correct way to go. As far as I can tell, businesses are run by people who are not really able to cooperate. They are kind of like the Republican Party during the early years of Obama’s presidency: when offered cooperation, all they see is weakness. It doesn’t seem to matter how reasonable and helpful labor is, the capital class always wants to take power away from labor. And this is why we need a major rethink of our economic system.

Still, Green managed the AFL through an incredibly difficult economic period. He was probably the best man for the job at that time.

Happy birthday William Green!

Today, one of the greatest political leaders of twentieth century, Mikhail Gorbachev is 84 years old. I have great admiration for him. But he is also kind of a tragic figure. He was a reformer, but I fear his timing was wrong. He wanted to turn the Soviet Union into a social democracy. But the west was intent to do to this project what it helped Pinochet do to Chile. Russia because a kind of anarchy where the state control of the economy was replaced by an oligarchic control of the economy.

In particular, I think we ought to all agree that Boris Yeltsin is one of the great villains of the second half of the twentieth century — worse even than Thatcher and Reagan. But they are all of a kind. I remember back many years when Putin first showed up on the political scene. He was immediately vilified in the west for fighting the oligarchs. The implication is that the oligarchs were some kind of oppressed minorities. What they were rather were corrupt power brokers who — with Yeltsin’s help — stole huge amounts of wealth from the Russian people. So standing up to them rightly endeared Putin to the Russian people.

Of course, Putin has shown himself to be similarly corrupt and incompetent. But there hasn’t been nearly as much at stake as there was under Yeltsin. And Putin has at least done good things in terms of stabilizing the country. His handling of Ukraine has been stupid, however; he used it to get domestic support at the cost of international enemies. And I’m sure that domestic support will be temporary. In partial defense, the west was only too happy to jump all over him; but he should have realized that.

Gorbachev is a true Russian patriot. He is not a Yeltsin or a Putin, who I think represent the worst instincts regarding political power. This isn’t to turn Gorbachev into some kind of teddy bear. He did, after all, reach the very top of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But some people are better able to maintain their ideals. And he is not just critical of modern Russian. According to Wikipedia, “Gorbachev calls for a kind of perestroika or restructuring of societies around the world, starting in particular with that of the United States, because he is of the view that the late-2000s financial crisis shows that the Washington Consensus economic model is a failure that will sooner or later have to be replaced.” I find it interesting because there is still so much self-praise in the west about the fall of the Soviet Union. But the truth is that feudalism was a terrible system that still “worked.” The cracks in capitalism are obvious to anyone who is willing to look.

Happy birthday Mikhail Gorbachev!

On this day in 1868, the great William Edward Burghardt “WEB” Du Bois was born. He lived most of the way into 1963. I find that remarkable. Can you image living through that period? He grew up without electricity — with horses and mostly exterior plumbing. And he died after two world wars, electricity and cars everywhere, and phones in every house. Of course, none of that is what is special about Du Bois.

He was a sociologist by profession — the first African American to earn a PhD at Harvard. And he saw the world the way a sociologist does. I tend to think of sociology as about the most accurate vision of the world — along with anthropology. And although economics is called the dismal science, I think it might better be applied to sociology. I tend to see the world that way and it doesn’t make me happy.

One of the great disputes of the early part of the 20th century was between DuBois and Booker T Washington. I don’t doubt Washington’s greatness and good intentions, but he was wrong. The truth is that in similar situations, I can go in either direction, but time has shown that it was a mistake for blacks to try to make nice with whites and hope that they would eventually be accepted as full human beings. It goes along with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ discussion of the idea of “twice as good.” This is the idea that African Americans had to be “twice as good” as whites to get approval.

The problem with it is that for the racist, “twice as good” is not nearly enough. Infinitely good would probably not be enough. To the racist mind, any misbehavior on the part of a black person is proof of their inferiority; and any good behavior is waved off as the exception to the rule. Du Bois understood that equality must be demanded. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

As many great African American observers, Du Bois saw more clearly the white “race” than it did itself. And I do not really think of him as a thinker in terms of racial matters. He was a radical thinker. And by that, I mean that he followed where the evidence took him. This is the problem with the vast majority of scientists — both social and “hard” — they are too inclined to just go along with what others already believe. There’s a good reason for this. In most cases, not worrying about what society thinks of what you think is really dangerous. And there were many hard times for Du Bois. But in retrospect, I don’t think there is any doubt that he was far more correct than not in his appraisal of the United States. He suffered for the sins of evil men who were never forced to suffer. That is, of course, the American way.

Happy birthday WEB Du Bois!