>On 2013-05-25, at 1:48 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> > I'm confused though. Isn't the fact that the *actions* of these parties
> the practical, embodied reality that does, indeed, through legislation,
> cause the decline of the working class. Not only do they create
> legislation and institutions - such as employer provided health care or
> right to work laws or, recently, a push to make unemployment
> beneficiaries take drug tests -- they also drag people along into a
> system of party-based politics where people think political actions
> consists of voting?
>
>No doubt the open shop and other anti-union legislation has weakened the
>unions and working people are subjected to different forms of harassment,
>but these do not in themselves account for the precipitous decline in
>popular protest. The successive working class generations which produced
>the trade unions and socialist parties during the long period of labour's
>rise from the mid-19th to mid-20th century were subject to much fiercer
>repression than we face today, and fought back far more vigorously.
>
>What has changed is the condition of the working class then and now. The
>rise of the workers' movement occurred in the context of a strong demand
>for labour in an rapidly expanding industrial economy. The workers were
>highly concentrated in factories and mines where they could share their
>grievances and exercise their bargaining power. Their militancy was
>fuelled by a desperate need for shorter hours, better pay and working
>conditions, pensions, unemployment insurance, and other social programs,
>as well as the right to vote and to organize their own unions and
>political parties.
>
>The realization of these demands over time reconciled the working class to
>the system and led to a corresponding drop in political consciousness and
>political militancy, although the trade unions continued to expand and to
>secure concessions from employers who still needed to retain and attract
>workers.
>
>But now even industrial militancy has disappeared, and the unions have
>declined sharply as a percentage of the workforce. The American and West
>European working class has gone into reverse over the past three decades
>as global capitalism has opened up new zones of exploitation in China,
>Eastern Europe, and in what used to be known as the third world. Along
>with tech change and changes in the organization of work, this has
>produced much higher levels of unemployment and widespread job insecurity
>among the employed and ever-increasing numbers of the underemployed, the
>so-called new "precariat".
>
>These workers in the new service industries are more dispersed, atomized,
>and transient than the industrial workers who used to be concentrated in
>factories and neighbourhoods, and are consequently more difficult to
>organize in unions as well as politically. There was also once a powerful
>international socialist movement which could inspire young workers and
>intellectuals and provide them with the opportunity for sustained
>political action and political education. Since the collapse of the Soviet
>Union and the transformation of China and the corresponding withering away
>of the socialist ideal, that is another condition which is no longer
>present. Finally, as you note above, the winning of the right to vote has
>led the masses into an electoral system dominated by the rich and powerful
>where the act of voting is now the primary means of political expression,
>and is rarely replaced or supported by more effective forms of mass action
>in the streets and workplaces.
>
>Today's lower level of political consciousness of urban workers and their
>allies in the universities, professions, and elsewhere is a product of the
>changed economic and political environment described above. My argument
>has been that the liberal bourgeois politicians in the US and Europe are a
>reflection rather than the cause of the diminished consciousness and
>combativity of the working class. It is not as though left-wing activists
>in the unions and have not tried to raise the consciousness of the masses,
>but today's workers have been notably unresponsive to their appeals and,
>except for that part of the working class which supports the right, have
>remained stubbornly loyal to their liberal and social democratic trade
>union and political party leaders in any confrontation with the left. If
>it were simply a clash of conflicting ideas, we would have seen more
>left-wing insurgencies and campaigns succeed and effect lasting changes
>inside the unions and political parties and !
> in the community.
>
>That hasn't happened, which is not to say it never can. History is
>unpredictable, political consciousness ebbs and flows, and ideas and
>individuals matter at decisive turning points. But changes in
>consciousness are ultimately rooted in the material conditions of
>existence, in the circumstances we're forced to confront. I don't what
>other interpretation you can give to Marx's well-known statement that
>people "make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
>please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
>under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
>
> > At 05:50 PM 5/24/2013, Marv Gandall wrote:
> >> Below is a rather overwrought illustration in today's Counterpunch of
> the idealist pessimism of the US left which I alluded to in my previous
> post. The cry of despair by the magazine's editor, Jeffrey St. Clair
> attributes the "somnambulism" of the masses to their "betrayal" by
> cowardly and wrongheaded liberals and DP-oriented leftists - a favourite
> theme of Carrol's and others on this and related lists. Liberal
> ideological hegemony is treated as the cause rather than the consequence
> of the decline of the organized industrial working class and of the mass
> international socialist movement which developed within it. There is no
> reference to the underlying material conditions which have ultimately
> been responsible for the decline, in particular the technological
> advances and global spread of capitalism which gave the system a new
> lease on life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Capitalism's
> unexpected resilience is in conflict with Marxist orthodoxy, which had been !
> forecasting the system's imminent demise for more than 150 years. But
> since it is perceptibly easier to change ideas than material conditions,
> and ideas are the stock in trade of today's campus-based left, the
> development of a strong idealist streak in contemporary Marxism is not
> surprising.
>
>
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