> Actually, polls consistently show a majority of Americans - a bare
> majority, admittedly - have a favourable view of unions.
[WS:] Not the polls that I've seen. Take for example the 2013 Gallup poll ranking confidence in various institutions. The military tops the list, while organized labor is in the bottom, above the Congress and HMOs, but way below religion, police, media, banks and big business http://www.gallup.com/poll/163055/confidence-institutions-2013-pdf.aspx
I also see that you have a great deal confidence in the political system, since you believe that the solution lies in a political party that represents labor interest. This surprises me, because how do you reconcile it with the fact that none of the existing parties represent labor, even labor and socialist parties? You can take a voluntarist approach and claim that party politicians "chose" to betray their constituents, as many lefties do - or you can take a materialist approach and say that power structure has changed. If you take a voluntarist approach then yes, you can be optimistic about the political process. You can believe that if a different set of political actors get to the stage, it will be an altogether different show. But if you take a materialist explanation, as I do, changing political parties is like rearranging seats on the deck of the Titanic.
I have little use for Marx's economic theories, but what he get right on is the connection between economic institutions and political roles people involved in those institutions play. Capitalists exploit workers not because they are greedy bastards, but because capitalist institutions make them play that role, whether they like it or not. Likewise, workers are a progressive force in society by the virtue of their industrial employment, not because of their poverty, anti-bourgeois sentiment or other social-cultural traits like many lefties tend to assume. Industrial employment makes workers progressive for two reasons. First, it makes the them the sole creator of value. Second, organization of industry also provides the material basis for the political organization of the working class. Without industrial employment, the working class becomes the lumpenproletariat.
Marx's prediction how the organization of industry would develop did not materialize - which is hardly surprising because nobody can predict the future - but he was right on the money about the connection between organization of the economy and organization of the polity. The fact that old working class parties no longer reflect broadly defined interests of the working class has everything to do with changes in economic institutions and little if anything to do with the supposed "treachery" of politicians and party bosses. It follows that the change of the political status quo will come from a change in the organization of economic institutions rather than from electing a new set of politicians and political parties.
I see the growing 'social economy' and its multiple organizational forms (coops, mutuals, esops, social enterprises and so on) as a nucleus of that change. It is a growing institutional force because "naked capitalism" is unsustainable. Even open-minded capitalists see this, and a growing number of them support various social impact/social venture institutions. The growth of "social economy" in the US may be slow comparing to say, Europe or Latin America or even Canada, but then the US society is thoroughly fucked up by the poisonous influence of business, religion, militarism, and individualism. So the change I am talking about may not happen here, at least in a foreseeable future, but it will happen elsewhere.
In this light, the "Marxist" thing to do is not reiterate the mantras of the past, but to find a way of organizing that growing "social economy" into a coherent political "left" force.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."