I doubt. There is a certain tendency among the members of this list, and certain segments of the left in general, that class politics is determined by the economic class interests. Hence the dictum that if workers only focused on their own economic interests, etc. etc.
I do not think, however, that there is much truth in the above proposition. To make a long story short - the category "my interests" is a cognitive construct affected by innumerable social influences, and its boundaries may vary quite significantly. For some, this category may include only a pay that allows purchasing a fixed set of goods (e.g. a house, a truck, a gun, and beer), for other it may include a much broader category of essentially private goods, such as health care, child care, education, for still other -it may also include a host of collective goods, such as clean and healthy environment, justice, peace etc. A similar cognitive process is at work in delineating the boundaries of the commonality of interest - for some "our common interests" is limited to blood relatives or neighbors, other may expand it to members of the same town or county, still other - to members of a particular occupation or nationality, and all that can be combined with distinctions by gender, ethnicity, income level etc. etc.
The bottom line is that "objective material interests" - while indeed being "objective" (i.e. not illusory or ex post facto rationalization) - do not exist in isolation (one "interest" independent of another "interests) but rather form a cluster that is constructed by cognitive processes of lumping together certain interests and splitting apart and filtering out other interests. Those cognitive processes, in turn, are affected by the forms of various social institutions with which people interact in the pursuit of their interest. For example, the institutional form "private corporation" pre-defines, so to speak, what constitutes legitimate interests of different kinds of people engaged in its activities and what does not. Thus, the profits of the stockholders and directors are such an interest, while the "externalities" or "public goods" affecting living standard and the quality of life in the communities surrounding those institutions are not. By contrast, the institutional form "nonprofit or public benefit organization" may include the latter as a legitimate interest. [Shameless self-promotion: One can find more on that in my obscure book _Civil Society and the Professions in Eastern Europe_ published by Kluwer/Plenum, especially chapter 8].
>From that standpoint, immiseration or catastrophic events do not
increase the chance that people will focus on their true economic
interests. Such events may or may not shatter the existing cognitive
schemata that form the basis of "false consciousness" so to speak - and
there is evidence showing that people often dig-in their heels and
stubbornly stick to their old beliefs in face of adversities instead of
adopting a new perspective on things. But even if the existing
interpretative schemata are shattered - there is no assurance that the
new ones that replace them will be any less "false" from the left's
point of view. The rise of Nazism in Germany is a very instructive case
in point - it was a replacement of the liberal bourgeois decadence that
developed in Weimer times that was thoroughly shattered by the economic
misery brought by the depression - but if I ever were to choose between
liberal bourgeois decadence of the US-style "new economy" and the brave
new world of some of its detractors, I'd keep the decadence.
In my view, the times of prosperity and liberalization offer a better chance for shattering the yoke of "false consciousness" of the masses and organizing a movement to bring social change than the times of misery and decline. Eastern Europe is a good case in point - the most sweeping social protest developed in the times of greatest economic prosperity and liberalization, not during the hardest times. There are three main reasons for that:
1. A social movement for a change needs a window of opportunity to operate and develop - and such a window is usually closed during the more oppressive and hard times
2. Such movement also needs material resources to operate, and such resources are easier to mobilize in the time of prosperity and liberalization
3. Any social movement must overcome the personal sacrifice that potential participants incur as a result of their participation - in hard or oppressive times, that sacrifice is usually exacerbated by high opportunity cost (e.g. struggle to overcome everyday hardship, support family etc. may take precedence over pursuit of broader interests) or sanctions for participation (c.f. McCarthyism).
Wojtek