On 2013-08-14, at 1:40 PM, michael yates wrote:
> Perhaps something missing from this discussion is the power of bourgeois ideology. We are inundated with this from earliest age, from parents, churches, media, and schools. No one escapes it or is uninfluenced by it. Unions come into being within it, and they are influenced by it. In good times and bad times. Money, success, status, these have a powerful pull on us. It is a wonder anyone sees through it and embraces a radical life. Because you can be sure that if you do, many negative things will happen to you.
This is quite true, but when didn't the power of ruling class ideology have this effect on the masses?
> With respect to union leaders and rank and file, one thing that the workers always have is the alienation they feel as they work. Most leaders no long feel this. So efforts to push for rank and file democracy and control over the union, led by workers themselves, can have a powerful impact on consciousness that no amount of radical rhetoric by leaders far removed from workplaces can have. Sustaining this is hard, however. Institutions have to exist to support it and make it self perpetuating.
When I was a steward in a Steelworkers local in Toronto for a time in my younger days, I would have casual discussions with my workmates about exploitation, the nature of capitalism, union democracy, and the need for solidarity between men and women and the whites and non-whites in the plant, and these would elicit enthusiastic nods and comments, which I would convey with some excitement to my wife that evening, only to return the next day to hear the same group grousing about the "girls" and the "Pakis" as if our conversation had never happened. So it's correct to emphasize that the only way to sustain commitment among both workers and students is if there are "institutions to support it" - more specifically, IMO, a credible political organization which can inspire, recruit, politically educate, and provide members with sustained organized activity inside and outside the workplace. In the 30's, this function was mainly performed by the Communist Party. Even though it was only a small mass party in the US, it was still a fighting organization which was identified with the Bolshevik Revolution and the young Soviet Union, whose economic and cultural progress then contrasted favourably with conditions in the depressed capitalist economies.
Today, the Soviet Union is gone along with the parties which drew inspiration from it. The working class in predominantly service economies is dispersed and transient rather than concentrated in large industrial enterprises and communities. The protest movements which are an inherent feature of capitalism regularly rise and fall, exciting and then dashing the hopes of leftist activists and sympathizers. I haven't the slightest idea whether, how, when, and where we might see a rebirth of that once-powerful workers and socialist movement.