> I'm not sure about this, but I'll put it up anyway: Maybe we're all
> hoping/expecting that old modes of organization will revive themselves,
> like some re-run of the Flint sitdown strike 70 years later. But maybe
> that won't happen. Maybe the social base and organizational form of
> progressive politics has changed, or has to change further. We all,
> consciously or not, seem to treat "working class" movements as the gold
> standard, but maybe that's not quite true anymore.
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My own view, which I've made known on the list before, is that it's
reasonable to expect that at some point - I don't say in our lifetime, but
wouldn't dismiss it either - the system will again go into crisis, and will
no longer be able to deliver the single-digit unemployment, single-digit
inflation, and easy credit that keeps many of your friends and mine - people
who work for a living - relatively satisfied and focused on their personal
and family lives and careers rather than politics. What would they do in the
event of a crisis? Whenever this has happened before, people have combined
and turned to political action. It's not at all a stretch for me to imagine
my presently apolitical friends calling on the small-l liberal parties they
normally vote for to restore their lost jobs and income and homes. They
won't even have to be directly affected. The crisis will be all around them
and touching someone they know. I think there would also be a spillover
effect in the workplace because of the changed political climate and adverse
changes in working conditions, which will make trade union issues more
relevant.
The social base has changed in that workplaces and neighbourhoods are now populated by service, administrative, technical and professional workers rather than industrial and craft workers, but the reasons which would drive these more recent layers of the working class to combine would largely be the same as before. What tactics they would use is something that can't be predicted, but people are creative and will do what seems appropriate in the circumstances, including sit-down strikes and other forms of action which are still very much part of living memory. Similarly, whether and to what extent they revive the old socialist ideologies and forms of organization is also difficult to predict, but again the historical memory of this movement is still fresh, and, for a few years yet, there will be people like ourselves around who will be drawn back in to help influence the direction of a new mass movement. More fundamentally, I think it it will be in the nature of things, as in the Great Depression, for people to be spontaneously anticapitalist to some degree or another in reaction to the failure of the private sector to sustain their living standards, and they will necessarily look to government by default to restore them. Whether this anticapitalist impulse would move beyond reform to a revolutionary assault on the system of private ownership itself will depend mostly on whether reformist governments are able to contain the crisis and resolve it, as the New Deal did in the 30s.
So I guess my answer to your question would be two-fold: a) I don't think you will get a mass movement of the kind we call socialist outside of a systemic breakdown, and b) I think it would act more rather than less like the old movement, except it would reflect its new occupational, gender, and ethnic/racial makeup.
Until then, of course, you'll still get the regular appearance of large single-issue movements of antiwar activists, women, gays, immigrants, environmentalists, etc. fighting for reforms to the system - but outside the framework of a generalized crisis which would bring all of these different constitutuencies and others beyond them together - probably, given the circumstances, self-consciously as "workers".
That's my guess, at any rate.