I don't think you give enough credit to the working class - including the most conscious part of it which is involved in its unions, social movements and political parties - as the architect of its own misfortune or fortune, as the case may be. This seems to me a common enough error on the left, where the working class is mainly seen as a passive agent easily fooled by the bourgeoisie, either directly or through the current leaders of its organizations. I think this subtly dismissive view of the masses mainly reflects the isolation of the left from working class organizations and broader milieus, coupled with disappointment that the masses have historically not followed its self-evident advice to expropriate the capitalists and build socialism. Your post is in this vein. You write that the "non-capitalist majority" is being sold a bill of "neoliberal" goods by their "usually craven and corrupt" leaders who act as "brokers" for the capitalist class.
... We don't have enough respect for the pragmatic wariness and choices of people in a risky environment, and mistake it for ignorance. Their main interests are private - their families, personal status, leisure activities - until circumstances force them to pay attention to social issues and the organizations which purport to represent their interests in the public arena. If they buy into what the Blairs and Bushes and Kerrys and Sweeneys are saying, it is not because they are being conned, but because they have confidence their current leaders and the existing system will continue to provide them a standard of living to which they have become accustomed and which, despite their various discontents, they on the whole endorse. Why should we expect them to tumultously break with their leaders and existing organizations on the basis of what, after all, are only abstract promises and policy prescriptions from the left that things can be better? My dad, employing the popular vernacular, used to say he "never bought a pig in a poke" and would mockingly ask "was you dere, cholly?" when I'd challenge him about his political choices. In retrospect, I can better understand his instinctive skepticism.
MG ------------------------------
My argument with the Trotsyist group I belonged to most recently involved the Transitional Program. In my final faction fight, I argued that the problem with the working class in the prosperous post-war decades was not confined to misleadership, as Trotsky thought, with greater justification, in the 1930s. I asserted that, as a result of continually improving living standards, the majority of Western workers rejected revolution and embraced reformism. So I agree with much of what you say.
Unlike you, however, I don't think the conservatism of the union bureaucracy and mass reformist party leaders merely reflects the attitudes of the base. The leaders, IMO, have positions of their own to defend. This assumption is confirmed by my own very limited trade-union experience, but can be tested more logically, I think, by examining the few post-war occasions on which the majority of workers actually did break with reformism. For brevity's sake, let's confine ourselves e to the most famous episode--France in 1968.
In these events, a role analagous to that of the social democrats was played by the PCF (French Communist Party). When 10 million workers went on strike in May, the PCF shunned any notion of a revolutionary student-worker alliance, even as the Gaullist regime tottered. They worked overtime to confine the struggle of the workers to bread-and-butter demands. The PCF, the Socialists, and their respective union federations laboriously negotiated the Grenelle Agreements, a package of economic concessions more generous than anything the workers had known since the general strike of 1936. But when the PCF and union leaders took the Grenelle Agreements to the factories, they were overwhelmingly rebuffed by the rank and file, who instead demanded a "people's government." Only after DeGaulle surrounded Paris with troops and the PCF and CGT (Communist union federation) called for a secret ballot of strikers did they finally accept the Grenelle Accords two to three weeks later.
So here the case is pretty clear cut. The workers abandoned their "pragmatic wariness" in favor of revolution, and their reormist leaders did not follow them, but subverted them. When it came to the crunch, DeGaulle secretly left the country to bargain for the support of French troops stationed in Germany, and his prime minister, Geogres Pompidou, called PCF headquarters. Only the PCF had the ability to get the strikers back to work because they were the very organization that revolutionary-minded workers looked to for leadership. But the leaders were not revolutionary for definite reasons of their own. This drama has had many different enactments in the 20th century, and you can't understand it without appreciating the reformists' role as capitalism's defenders of last resort.
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