On 2013-07-22, at 9:01 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 8:36 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
The Gallup poll you cite underscores rather than undermines my view that most Americans are well disposed towards unions than are hostile to them. It indicates 62% of those surveyed have "some, quite a lot, or a great deal of confidence" in unions while 35% have "very little" none at all". Remember your claim was that unions were only supported by die hard leftist s and opposed by "everyone else". The poll also notably doesn't break down the result by social class, locale, or age. If it did, it would show significantly higher levels of support for unions where it counts most - among public and private sector workers in the big cities, particularly younger ones - than where it counts least, among farmers and small business owners in rural and suburban areas who pull down the average. That trade unions are less popular than the military, religion, police, is beside the point; I never suggested otherwise.
> 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.
I'm confident the only way there can be fundamental change in power and property relations is if a working class party committed to that objective were to take state power and replace private with public ownership, and the current capitalist-controlled political system with a genuinely democratic one. It should be obvious to you that I have no confidence that the current state apparatus, whose purpose is to advance and defend capitalism, would ever permit such a monumental change. History suggests that if there were ever a social crisis of this magnitude, the political system would become increasingly repressive, lose all popular legitimacy, and give rise to parallel efforts from below to organize new forms of democracy expressing the interests of wage and salary earners.
> 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?
What surprises you? Like all of us, I distinguish between what I think ought to exist in respect of a political party and a political system, with what presently exists.
> 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.
I take neither position. I don't believe the power structure has changed, nor do I believe all previous generations of trade union leaders and all varieties of socialists have continuously "betrayed" their working class constituents, as the Trotskyists and other leftists propose. The union leadership and the parties they support reflect the consciousness of their base more than they shape it, though there is a dialectical interplay between the two.
The liberal parties and politicians who currently enjoy the support of working people would only be betraying their followers if the political consciousness and demands of the latter were opposed to the ideology and program of these parties. But there is no longer a constituency within the working class which wants to abolish capitalism by "legal" or insurrectionary means. Within this larger context, however, there have been ever-increasing small betrayals of the base by the Democrats in the US and their kindred social democratic parties abroad. The Obama administration has notoriously reneged on the most important promises from the 2008 campaign with respect to the jobs and housing crises, healthcare, curbing the financial industry, labour law reform, civil liberties, the environment, etc. This is a view which is not only held by the usual suspects outside the party, but by many unhappy liberal intellectuals and activists within it.
> 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'm neither optimistic or pessimistic about what the future holds. I'm no more able to predict political developments than weather patterns. A materialist holds that you can't just rearrange political systems and political parties, as you do deck chairs, without there being an underlying social crisis which results in deep changes in political consciousness. We haven't reached that point.
>
> 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.
Ah, Wojtek. If only you integrated what you understand about Marxist theory in your analysis of contemporary events.
And I refuse to keep revisiting your utopian socialist nostrums below. :)
> 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.