> I believe that every social movement has a window of
> opportunity available to it for a limited time, sometimes longer,
> sometimes shorter.
[snip]
> In the United States, by contrast, that window of opportunity was
> largely wasted. True, labor movements emerged, but they did not create
> a permanent institutional structure that would allow it to last. Main
> reasons were social fragmentation (by race, ethnicity and gender),
> false
> perception of upward mobility, and the size and amount of crumbs that
> were falling from the bosses' tables. As a result, the labor movement
> in the US was like a shooting star that lights up and vanishes.
One other reason that is often emphasized is the deliberate campaign by big business and the nascent PR industry to convert workers' self-image from "workers" to "consumers," which, coupled with the Fordist policy of raising wages somewhat and the success of the movement for lowering work hours, encouraged workers to put the emphasis in their life on what they could consume in their leisure hours. In other words, the U.S. owning class very cleverly discovered how to convert the mechanism of increasing relative surplus value into a hegemonic means of control of the working class. I don't think Marx anticipated this, but I may be wrong -- somewhere in those voluminous pages of the MEGA there may be something about this.
> Quite frankly, I do not see ANY political or
> economic force capable of sustaining whatever is left of the New Deal -
> let alone move the country toward socialism. The privatization of
> anything from Amtrak to social security is a matter of time - I think
> by
> 2010 it will be for the most part completed.
To go back to my image of the concrete and the blades of grass poking through the cracks in it, you tend to focus on the concrete and I on the grass blades. Or to put it another way, we are both looking at a glass that is only 2% full; I'm looking at the 2% part and you are looking at the empty part.
Yes, there was a window or two for traditional-style union organizing which have basically disappeared now, but that doesn't mean that windows for non-traditional organizing aren't still possible. I'm not a great expert at all on the union movement, but it seems to me that those organizers who are trying to come up with completely unorthodox organizing methods are on the right track. Organizing around work is still very important for any left movement, because work still takes up a large part of most people's waking life, and there are certainly plenty of discontents with it that could be turned into a movement if someone figures out how.
I do see the 98% empty part of the glass, as well. But to me, it's almost like an interesting intellectual puzzle. We (the working class and its sympathizers) are trapped in a room which is locked from the outside. Maybe there is no way out at all, but maybe there is, and unless we make the latter assumption, we will never find out whether there is one.
All we can do is study what we can see of the lock mechanism very carefully, and try to figure out a way of picking it. Or more to the point, study the entire room and its construction in great detail, looking for the smallest clues to solve the problem, the one thing that the builder of the room overlooked. The ruling class has been very clever, as I said, but there might be a fatal flaw in their system.
> Or get your EU passport if you can. I have mine by virtue by my Polish
> citizenship, which technically has not expired.
If I emigrated anywhere, it would probably be Japan (which after all does have working national health system). But it's certainly not a paradise compared to the U.S. In fact, I don't think there is really any geographical escape. The capitalist system is a single system and at this point it is world-wide. If conditions in Poland are not exactly like the U.S. now, they will be before long. Even China is fully integrated into the system. If we can't solve the problem in the U.S., it can't be solved anywhere.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile