At 6:42 AM -0700 12/8/09, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>[WS:] It is just an opinion, one that I happen to disagree with.
>The empire survived a much better armed and organized insurrection
>attempts than a riot mob here and there. Not only that - it crushed
>those attempts without giving much in. Just think of the
>Confederacy, Indian wars, or coal wars.
It isn't armed insurrection by the poor that the ruling class fears, you're quite right. Nevertheless, the poor are still at the front line of the class war. They don't have to take up arms, that isn't how this class war is fought. The class war is an economic war, not a military one. For some reason some people are quite unable to grasp that.
What the ruling class really fear is that the poor will refuse to work, for low wages, will refuse to consume, will refuse to obey orders. What terrifies the ruling class is that this disobedience spreads to the entire working class, as it has threatened to a few times. That the working class will then go from refusing to work to orders from their employers, to thinking that perhaps they might run the workplace themselves. Will set a very bad example by simply taking what they want.
It has got nearly to that point a few times, unions telling employers how many workers they must employ, for what wage rates, who they can and can't employ and even imposing rules strictly limiting the amount of work any employee can do.
This situation naturally comes about when the employing class lacks the means to effectively discipline their workers. There must be a pool of cheap labour available or there can be no effective discipline and that pool of unemployed must be willing to, desperate to, work. Yet it is difficult to maintain the needed work motivation among those who are marginal to the actual workforce. It is a delicate complex balancing act that involves the micro as well as macro policy settings.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
Will steal and squat
>If the US ruling class was ever scared shitless after the Civil War
>- it was the rise of the USSR and the challenge it posed not only
>to the US imperialism abroad, but the example it set for the masses
>at home. This was the only time, in my view, when the ruling class
>took the threat from below seriously and embarked on appeasement
>polices to defuse that threat. In other words, the after the
>Sputnik went up, so did the US government funding for education and
>social programs as well as the salience of the civil rights agenda.
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>Otherwise, paraphrasing one wealthy US industrialist (his name
>escapes me at the moment) the US ruling class has always been in the
>position to hire a half of the working (and middle) class to subdue
>the other half. In other words, no serious threat from below.
>
>Of course, you and others can believe in the revolutionary potential
>of the poor and the threat their pose to the US institutional order
>- just as I disbelieve it. It is a matter of personal opinion and I
>am afraid that neither of us can convince the other side to the
>contrary.
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