Yoshie,
I forgot to mention in reply to an earlier comment of yours regarding the lagtime of autoworkers actively and strategically responding to the new configuration of plants: it certainly feels like the U.S. working class is generally sleepwaking on dangerous ground. Take that California Initiative to disallow union $$ in elections. That scares the hell out of me. Maybe it will lose. But I think "What are these people doing? The bourgeoise is steadily chipping away at reforms that seem a basis for leaping to something more, and most people seem out of touch, naive.
This coming to feel it as normal that one is powerless in ones own life is how a Tom Meisenhelder defines
"reification" in an article "Toward a Marxist Analysis of Subjectivity "
Charles
>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 05/09 5:33 PM >>>
Gar wrote:
>People really do believe that there are no alternatives, that the market
>rules all, that if you win something else it will probably be worse, and
>that anyway you can't win.
I think that you capture popular feelings very well here, including the contradictions within them (for instance, if any alternative is worse than capitalism, why do people often add that "anyway you can't win"?). I believe that the feeling that "anyway you can't win" is the most debilitating one in the long term.
Feelings of this sort are of course in part caused by objective difficulties of winning anything under capitalism, but people resist getting involved in 'activism' not simply because of the above feelings you describe so well. I think that many people don't get involved in 'activism' because in a whole lot of cases 'activism' is done for the sake of keeping 'activists' active, not really to _win_ anything worth winning. There are many reforms that are winnable, but oftentimes so many compromises are made _ahead of time_ to avoid looking 'unrealistic' that the resulting 'goals' of reforms don't capture popular imagination at all. Why should anyone waste time running around collecting signatures, handing out leaflets, organizing, holding rallies, marching, sitting-in, etc., if the objects of reforms are petty, compromised, full of loopholes, hard to understand due to vague language or complex schemes, and so on?
Yoshie