[lbo-talk] Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune

[Mike Ballard]

Yoshie wrote;
Even those who organized the Paris Commune, what
Marx thought of as the first dictatorship of the proletariat at work,
thought of themselves quite differently than many Marxists imagined
them to be.  Contradiction between objective and subjective -- who we
are and what we think of ourselves -- is a permanent feature of lives
under capitalism, though contradiction is more visible than ever
today.  
*************************

Agreed.  Most workers today in the industrially developed States don't think of
themselves as being part of a class, unless they're self-defining as "middle
class".  They are mired in all kinds of individualistic identities and
social-ideologically defined groupings e.g. race, religious faiths,
nationalsims, region (I'm a Southerner) and so on.  To the degree that they
start acting as a class for themselves, they begin to achieve the power that
they lack as narrow individualists within their segregated, ideological ghettos
and to that degree, they become class conscious and a threat to the rule of
Capital.

Best,
Mike B)

Wage-slave's Escape
http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/

 
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