From: Turbulo at aol.com Message-ID: <20d.1030e4b.2fb8c8dc at aol.com> Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 11:46:36 EDT Subject: Re: Appeal to the US Anti-War Movement To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
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>The question, of course, is why don't "US workers assert their own economic
>interests more militantly"? I don't think we'd have any disagreement that
>this would be a constraint on the war machine, not least because a stronger
>and more confident US working class would be much less willing to pay for
>imperialist wars at the expense of existing social programs (and the
>continued forfeiture of long overdue ones like universal health care).
I agree with your explanation for the decline of unions and union militancy, a little less with your expectations about how the working class would respond to a deep crisis. Remember, even in the thirties, the initial political response wasn't mainly one of greater class consciousness. There were a number of populist demagogues who achieved a wide following. Huey Long and Francis Townsend are hard to characterize in left-right terms. But perhaps the most popular of all, Father Coughlin, was unmistakably fascistic. Industrial unionism, which burst forth in 1934, supplied a strong antidote. But in the absence of big industrial concentrations, the working class is much more fragmented and prone to manipulation. If an economic meltdown happened tomorrow, the force best positioned exploit people's anger is the Republican-fundamentalist alliance. They are already quite successful at this.