> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Of course organized labor, at its greatest exten, was NEVER more than a
>> very small part of the total working class.
>
> You'd call 36% "very small" and "trivial"?
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Right - and it was as much a qualitative as a quantitative issue for the socialist movement. Marx and Engels and their revolutionary and reformist followers correctly adjudged the unionized workers, strategically concentrated in the key sectors of the economy, as the only social force capable of leading a struggle against capitalism and reorganizing production on the basis of need rather than profit. The centrality of the organized working class was integral to Marxism in both theory and practice.
When the anticipated proletarian revolution did not materialize in the most developed capitalist countries, Western new leftists like Carrol sought to substitute students, blacks, women, and other insurgent groups as agents of change. But none of these diffuse and transient constituencies, which were generally allied to labour, had anything remotely resembling the concentrated numbers, financial resources, economic power, political influence and more generalized social objectives of the trade union movement during the long period of it's rise. They still don't, even thought the unions are but a shadow of what they once were.