> I agree with a lot of what you say, until you get to Gompers. His attitude
> is the ancestor of modern American business unionism, which has given us a
> depoliticized and shrinking labor movement. "More" and no more got us where
> we are.
>
> Happy May Day, otherwise.
Also, Gompers wanted more for his skilled White craft workers and less for, or at least didn't give much of a shit about, those Jewish/Black/Italian/Polish/Irish/Mexican/Chinese/Japanese industrial and agricultural workers.
If I had to guess, I'd imagine most of us would just as soon have better rather than more... and if the the route to more goes through better then we're gonna be better off with less than the kind of more most folks mean by more. This is why I'm a red green with red black green sympathies.
In Gompers' terms, as today, more for us means a great deal more of that more goes to them. The more I want, the more, harder and longer I work, the more (stuff, unhappy, alienated and dissatisfied) I get and the more-squared they get... which sucks, of course.
The only reasonable route for us, collectively, to get better is to work less, make a world where they get less of the less our social labor produces, and we generate better ecological, technoscientific, personal, sociomedical, cultural and infraspatial relations and processes. Hell, if that kind of more-is-less-via-better is our goal we'd present many on the right with a better vision of community than the romantic and reactionary weak tea they presently have.
My Intro Soc students broadly embrace all of these kinds of ideas - pretty much each and every one of them is quite cognizant of how ambivalent they feel about nature, technology, identity, medicine, pop culture and globalization... and most all of them want deeper connections to and understanding of a place, themselves and their world... but these things are always presented in mystified, alienating, abstract and disempowering terms, so they revert to competitive individualistic more-ism 'cuz they've been made into more-ons.
The problem, in Aristotelian terms perhaps, is that folks really want - but don't know - the good, the better, and so they pursue more instead.
Incomplete and insuffient as always... Alan