On 2012-01-27, at 12:51 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Marv: "Second, it is also true that what you call "consumerism and
> suburbanization" has played a role in fostering atomization and
> breaking down social solidarity. These are actually by-products of the
> unanticipated rise in mass living standards throughout most of the
> 20th century. Marxists had instead expected there to be increasing
> immiseration leading to revolt as a result of capitalism's "inherent
> contradictions" playing themselves out."
>
> [WS:] And this was a MAJOR blunder, a demonstrably false prediction
> that normally would falsify a scientific theory. But then, as JK
> Galbraith aptly observed, Marx could not have foreseen the development
> of the corporation and Keynesianism, which were a real game changers
> that undermined the entire classical economic theory (not just
> Marxism).
I agree, as noted above, that the early Marxists could not have foreseen the resilience and adaptability of capitalism in finding new markets and developing the technology to exploit them. Keynes and the corporate form of business organization wouldn't have amounted to much, though, without this material underpinning.
> MG:> In any case, the attachment to religion is not a new phenomenon,
> and does little to explain the relative passivity of the mainly
> secular modern working class.
>
> [WS:] You got to be kidding. Organized religion was one of the MAJOR
> factors that affected labor organizing in the 20th century in Europe.
> Or to be more precise, one of the major factor that either spit the
> working class into factions (e.g. the Netherlands) or to undermine
> socialist effort to organize labor (following the encyclical Rerum
> Novarum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_Novarum which was
> explicitly designed for this purpose). The role of the Roman Catholic
> Church in undermining labor militancy and labor organizing is second
> only to that of fascists, with whom btw the Catholic Church often
> collaborated.
Neither the Catholic nor Protestant churches have had any success in sponsoring union federations to rival the vastly larger ones initiated and controlled by social democrats and Communists in Western Europe and North America. Full stop.
Here in Canada, for example, the Christian Labour Association only represents a puny 50,000 workers compared to more than three million who belong to unions affiliated to the Canadian Labour Congress. Quebec's independent Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) has a further 300,000 members and the mainly teacher-based Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ) another 160,000. Tellingly, the CSN started as a Catholic union back in the 1920's but soon fell under the control of anti-clerical socialists who dropped all reference to its Church origins.
The same fate befell the CFDT in France which started as the Christian Labour Federation but was forced to open its ranks and change its name in an unsuccessful bid to compete with the much larger labour centrals controlled by the Communists (CGT) and, to a lesser extent, by the Socialists (FO). You've pointed to the Netherlands to illustrate your thesis. In Holland, the social democratic FNV has 1.3 million members to the Christian Federation's 350,000 and the 160,000-strong management and professional employees' federation. Holland is the dubious high point of of Western European Christian trade unionism, whose general level is so low that it barely attracts any public attention.
Of course, there are God-fearing and Church-going trade unionists who have belonged to the mainstream of the labour movement for generations, but their faith has bolstered their trade union convictions rather than "undermining labor militancy and labor organizing". Paradoxically, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum had this effect rather than the opposite one you attribute to it.
> Even after it was
> seriously crippled, e.g. in Soviet bloc countries, organized religion,
> especially the Catholic Church, was still a nontrivial factor in
> fomenting anti-communist sentiments.
Of course. That was an extraordinary situation. The Communists were in power, and working class dissatisfaction with the status quo was aimed at them rather than a non-existent capitalism. The oppositionist Catholic Church in Poland was the only institution capable of advancing trade union demands in the absence of independent trade unions and socialist parties and the discredit attached to official socialism. But to read this late 20th century experience in a single country into the entire history of the trade union movement under capitalism is absurd.