Charles Brown
Marv Gandall
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."