UAW convention

Enrique Diaz-Alvarez enrique at anise.ee.cornell.edu
Fri Jul 10 06:10:36 PDT 1998


Dennis R Redmond wrote:
>
>
> That is, we need to think not just in terms of new movements (and the
> obvious examples of the TDU, IG Metall, and genuine Left parties like the
> Greens or the Labor Party) but in terms of a newly global proletariat,
> which has barely begun to organize itself and mostly lacks class
> consciousness, but which is employed in high-tech cleanrooms, works with
> state-of-the-art computers, and is probably one of the most skilled and
> educated workforces, in its own way (I include media awareness and
> cultural cosmopolitanism here), in world history. So what would an
> information socialism look like? I have no idea, but my guess is it'll
> have something to do with activist-minded unions and Left parties in
> Europe and the US sparking/solidarizing with multinational organizing
> drives in Eastern Europe and East Asia, just as much as the US South or
> American service-sector industries. The spread of community-based labor
> coalitions and cross-border initiatives, like the one currently
> being waged with the Han Young workers in Tijuana, or the ones starting to
> appear in the European Union itself, are powerful evidence that such
> things are at least possible, even in an era of the most ferocious
> political and social regression.
>

This is very nice, but exactly how do you lump together $30,000/year clean-room technicians and $60,000/year engineers in the US, on the one hand, with $2/day workers in Mexico or even $3/hour US McDonalds employees, on the other? Can you convince them that they have common class interests? Do they really have common class interests?


> -- Dennis

-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 758 8962 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique



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