I don't have a social-scientifically valid basis for this. I draw my views, which are weakly held, from years of experience in talking to people, among them lots of lower-middle class students at a big Midwestern university--Ohio State, actually, where I used to teach. My students there didn't care for Marx, but not because they disagreed with his analysis of capitalism. Rather, they thought either (a) that there is nothing that could be done, usually because socialism would be worse, or (b) that there are ethical reasons that the rich deserve their property even if it has the bad effects that Marx describes.
I also used to around Ohio and Michigan talking socialism to workers and farmers, and generally getting very positive responses to my "populist" propaganda, presenting socialism as democracy. A lot of these people were folks who were trying the petit bourgeois option, running small farms or business or both part time, and were impressed by the problems of going it alone. A particularly successful line was pointing out, when I spoke to church groups, that the parishoners ran the churches just fine. I don't say I got lots of militant activists out of this, but the responses tended to be favorable.
Marx did reflect on the resistance of workers to socialist organization. He developed a theory, the theory of fetishism of commodities, to help explain it. He didn't suggest a productive way of dealing with it. But we can hardly blame it: no one has come up with one since.
--jks
>
>If the Marxist critique of capitalism is common sense to most
>people, then it already has wide currency. My impression is
>that in fact it is not. While people in general have many
>insights into their oppression, their take on the system as
>a whole does not have the coherence and logic of a worked-out
>ideological system, Marxist or otherwise. Otherwise we
>could hardly expect to observe 97% of the electorate voting
>for the candidates of the plutocracy.
>
>I don't think this has to do with just the language; I
>think the notion of a comprehensive ideology is foreign to
>most people, except for some fundamentalist types. After
>all, such ideas are pretty rigorously excluded from the
>media and the schools.
>
> > >
>I haven't found this to be the case in advancing such ideas
>to my co-workers. Apparently the sort of people who think
>they can run things themselves, in the sense of doing jobs
>and getting money without the governance of bosses and their
>capital, often do so, leaving the others (whom they might
>otherwise influence and inspire) drudging mindlessly in the
>office and the factory. The petit-bourgeois option, still
>available for many, serves very well as a safety-valve for
>working-class dissidence. Instead of forming unions and coops,
>the sharpies turn into libertarians and fill Usenet with
>wailing about taxes and regulation.
>
>I consider this widespread lack of will toward autonomy,
>individual _or_ communal, to be a fairly serious problem for
>both socialism and anarchism -- the moreso for anarchists,
>since I suppose non-anarchist socialists believe they can
>order people to be free. Speaking of Marxism, I wonder if
>Mr. I-am-not-a-'Marxist' ever contemplated the possibility of
>such a development. Eventually it might lead to serious
>problems for the bourgeoisie, but not of the sort depicted
>in the _Manifesto_.
>
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