>Strangely enough, I said to ChuckO recently that I can't see very
>much trade union consciousness -- "big labor" was his preferred term
>-- in the US, with its national union membership level of about 15%.
>It seems one thing that unites US ultraleftists of both Marxist and
>anarchist varieties is their disdain for unions.
It is projection on your part that makes you see any "ultraleftism" in anything that I have said -- you should see "ultraleftism" in the yardstick that you are using to evaluate what others are doing on the queer front or any other front in the USA or anywhere else. It is you who have been complaining that GLBT activists' demand for the equal right to marriage is not revolutionary and that US leftists are spending too much time on what you contemptuously label marginal issues such as GLBT activism to help make the American working class revolutionary or some such nonsense. I'm simply pointing out that neither trade union activism nor GLBT activism nor the Nader/Camejo campaign nor anything else anyone is doing at this moment in the USA or Australia or any other parts of the world (with a few potential exceptions such as Venezuela) is particularly revolutionary or counter-revolutionary and that it doesn't make sense to apply such a yardstick since social revolution is not on the agenda in most parts of the world at this moment.
> > Even if all activists worldwide dropped all organizing that you
>> erroneously believe has little or nothing to do with purely
>> "economic" questions (such as matters of more or less wages, more or
>> less pensions, longer or shorter working hours, etc.) and
>> concentrated only on workplace organizing alone, they would not be
>> able to change the global trend of capitalist accumulation.
>
>In the first place, you don't seem to understand what I mean by
>"economic" and, in the second place, where is such a sustained
>concentration on "workplace organising" occurring? I don't know what
>"trend" you are referring to.
The trend that I am referring to is a little theorized trend of global capitalism, which changed around the late 1960s and early 1970s, though the timing was not exactly the same across national boundaries. Both in the capitalist and socialist blocs, accumulation began to enter into crises beginning then -- the beginning of the end of existing forms of socialism/social democracy/the shadow welfare states. The crises were partially resolved in favor of the ruling class -- hence the 1990s neoliberal recovery in the USA, for instance -- but they may begin to reassert themselves sometime in the near future.
It is absurd to blame GLBT activism or what you call "identity politics" for the decline of socialism/social democracy/the shadow welfare state as you do, for the decline has been a global one, rather than happening only in nations where GLBT activism has emerged and remained relatively active.
> > The
>> majority of the global working class live in former colonies of one
>> or more empires and therefore live with complex legacies of colonial
>> political economies.
>
>In many years of reading on colonialism, I've yet to hear a
>convincing description of the things that are shared by the wide
>variety of "colonial political economies" and how they differ from
>the wide variety of "non-colonial political economies".
Colonial capitalisms took diverse forms, for colonial empires as well as colonies didn't have the same political economy or social structure and colonial relations between colonizing and colonized nations differed greatly from one case to another. Some colonial empires lasted for very long periods, others, only for a little while; many colonies experienced more than one colonial master; a few colonies such as what became the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Israel etc. have been settler colonies that resulted in the permanent settlements; in other settler colonies such as Algeria, settlers got expelled by national liberation movements; some colonies were ruled by empires that preferred indirect rules; etc.
Legacies of colonial political economies have been on the whole negative, devastatingly so in some places like much of Africa and the Middle East, while a few places such as China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. have more or less recovered economically from the most negative impacts of colonialism, with herculean labor of local working-class populations. Latin America falls somewhere between the best and worst cases of post-colonial fates.
> > The majority of the global working class live
>> outside the rich nations, getting paid less even when they do exactly
>> the same work as workers who work for the same corporation in the
>> rich nations.
>
>There is, as you know, no consensus among left scholars that this
>idea is really the case, although the idea certainly has a populist
>life of its own.
Here I am speaking mainly of comparative living standards (wages, benefits, working hours, working conditions, education, infrastructure, etc.), not the rates of exploitation. The rates of exploitation are likely to be generally higher in richer nations than poorer nations, though it all depends on industries under examination. In some industries such as textile, though, workers of different nations often get paid radically different wages for the exactly same task -- see, for instance, French, Belgian, Indonesian, Turkish, and Filipina workers who get paid differently for making the same Levi's jeans in the documentary Working Women of the World (Dir. Marie France Collard, <http://www.frif.com/new2002/www.html>).
> > The majority of the global working class are subject
>> to racial, ethnic, religious, and/or other oppressions.
>
>To the extent that this is true, it is also subject to the question:
>"do they care and can we do anything about it?"
The answer is simple: when the oppressed care and begin to organize to address the oppression, help them do something about it. I discussed the question of the equal right to marriage here, to take just one example, because many GLBT activists have already put it on the national political agenda. The trick is to support it while pointing out the problem of tying benefits (such as health care, survivor benefits, etc.) to one's employment, citizenship, marriage, and other statuses.
> >The majority
>> of the global working class confront, at least for some period of
>> their lives, disability (if we live long enough, we will all get
>> disabled one way or another).
>
>My partner recieves a partial disability pension and works part
>time; I'm sure she'll be glad to hear that she has so many allies.
Some people live with congenital disablement; others live with progressive disablement; others live with temporary disablement; and most of us will live with disablement that comes with old age. Such disabilities are not identical to one another, nor will different categories of the disabled automatically develop the same level and quality of political consciousness about disablement, but leftists should try to point out disablement in the broadest sense as a universalist question, so more people will come to realize the importance of creating social conditions under which biological differences do not become grounds for socially constructed disablement.
> > class consciousness is *not* an automatic product of the development
>> of relations of production at all -- to the contrary, class
>> consciousness is a result of *resistance* to ruling-class power,
>> quite often a result of *resistance* to *further development of
>> relations of production* imposed by *the ruling class*.
>
>Perhaps you need to think some more about who _exactly_ Marx meant,
>when he used the word "proletariat". There is no _working_class_
>resistance before there is a numerically strong working class. It is
>hard to see how any working class other than the US could be facing
>more "further developed" capitalist relations of production at the
>moment.
Recognize resistance to the ruling class power where it exists, be it the resistance of wage workers, peasants, petty producers, colonized nations, students, or whatever, and see what you can do to help, especially if the resistance has a potential of becoming bigger and more militant. In most nations in the world, proletarians who have regular employment as wage laborers in the formal sector are a privileged minority of the working population (many are pushed into class limbos of the informal sector as petty traders, semi-peasant-semi-agricultural laborers, semi-factory-workers-semi-subsistence-farmers, etc.), and leftists can't postpone resistance to the ruling class until wage laborers become the majority of the population like in the USA.
> > It is often
> > noted that the only socialist revolutions that the world has seen so
>> far happened on the periphery of capitalism, in nations where
>> peasants far outnumbered wage workers, most often in the context of
>> struggles against colonial capitalism.
>
>These revolutions have all failed or are on the verge of failure.
A wrong yardstick. It's surprising that they lasted as long as they did, with little assistance to the working class of rich nations.
> > Even when we look only at the
>> richest nations -- the USA, Japan, and West European nations -- we
>> see that the nation that twice experienced the most revolutionary
>> form of working-class struggle is France, rather than England and the
>> USA whose ensembles of social relations are more thoroughly
>> capitalist than France, in that peasants are more thoroughly
>> expropriated in England and the USA than France.
>
>I don't see how France is necessarily more socialist/communist
>country than the UK or USA. Perhaps you're going down the same road
>as DRR, confusing dirigisme, land reform, etc., for socialism.
I didn't say that France is today more socialist than the USA or the UK. You missed the word "twice" in the quoted sentence above. I meant the Paris Commune and 1968. -- Yoshie
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