> If the working class was fully class conscious, given what we know about
> the failures of socialism as we knew it, what would the working class know?
Ideally, it would "know" itself as a collective subject, i.e. figure out that capitalism is ripping it off and appropriating its labor for nefarious purposes. The weird thing about late capitalism, and this is something most radicals tend to forget, is that the proletariat is *not* a subject the way the bourgeoisie is, but rather an object of domination. Class struggle is not a boxing match between two subjects, but more like a process of natural history, where one species of insect cannibalizes another (I know the entymologists would have fits with this metaphor, but you get the idea). The Wall Street rentiers, the corporate CEOs and their paid flacks have the time, leisure and strategic flexibility to think their class project through quite thoroughly. The proletariat -- well, we workers have to work, right? Our class consciousness consists of being unconscious, in other words -- we spend our time running around getting stuff done, and then consuming ecocidal cars and patronizing malls with what little money we've earned. We're overindebted, overworked, overconsumed, etc. and generally have no time for politics. We're the objects of other people's marketing and finance schemes, for the most part (though we resist when we can).
> What questions would the ruling class be unable to answer--or feel
> desperate to mask? What central issues should egalitarian democratic
> educators see as centripetal?
I'd see this as the question of economic justice, though others would have other agendas, and rightly so (all the Left struggles are, in reality, closely linked: multiculturalism is the flip side of unionization which is the flip side of democracy which is the flip side of feminism etc.) There's no reason that poor people should exist in the USA, that 40% of workers have no pension funds, that 25% of our kids grow up in hideous poverty, that the rich get disgustingly richer and that 1.4 million mostly poor Americans are in jail, and that what wealth which does get created is horridly toxic, brutal on the environment and mostly low-class junk, in the end. "Soak the rich and spend on the rest of us" is a rallying cry which sparks terror in the most self-confident Wall Street spinmaster. That's why they talk so feverishly about our stock market bubble: they'd like to convince everyone that anyone can get rich nowadays. Just buy the S & P 500, and all will be well! (Till the Crash, due sometime later this year. Then things get interesting.)
-- Dennis