> No. No. No. The issues of struggle are always given to us by contingent
> developments. Our _perspective_ on those issues, whatever they may be,
> is that of educating the workers to fight _all_ injustices, even
> injustices to minor Czarist officials or students from the bourgeosie.
> Workers will not be fit to rule, nor will they be able to struggle
> decently around even major class issues, unless they learn to recognize
> that an injury to one (even a petty producer) is an injury to all.
> Workers who won't struggle for gay rights won't struggle for socialism
> either.
The rank-and-file Bolsheviks in 1917 were products of a society still in the throes of modernisation. They were not paragons of political correctness, except by the standards of the time, but they clearly had a solid (economic) class consciousness. IMO the situation in the developed world is now completely different, perhaps even reversed, i.e. the class of wage earners is far more "fit to rule" than those rank and file Bolsheviks, but it lacks a coherent sense of who it is and what it is capable of, i.e. it is not yet a class-for-itself. That, IMO, is what we should be concentrating on.
Grant.