When social mobility is blocked and the prospect of individual ownership recedes from view, the conditions appear for a change in consciousness. There arises a perceived need to change the existing economic and political arrangements, which necessarily requires collective action and the corresponding development of a collective consciousness.
Such transformations in mass consciousness don't happen overnight, but the preconditions seem to be appearing. There is less social mobility today for younger workers in the US and other advanced capitalist countries, accompanied by growing dissatisfaction with the traditional governing parties and the conspicuous inability of the system to generate the kind of secure full-time jobs in unionized workplaces, then there was in the postwar "golden age" of capitalism. Nothing is static.
On Dec 15, 2014, at 2:17 PM, Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Charles Brown:
>>
>>> Americans have had an unusually large mass of people with petit
>>> bourgeois personality or embued with the "entrepreneurial spirit"
>>> since the start. See the last chapter of _Capital_. Many many farmers
>>> who have small plots of land, own their means of production, and are
>>> petty producers, potential capitalists.
>>
>> Yes. But as Bourdieu said, the two errors of social analysis are, on the
>> one hand, saying "Everything's changed!," and on the other, "Nothing's
>> changed!" Most ordinary workers in the Golden Age, from the 1950s through
>> the 1970s, didn't think of themselves as little entrepreneurs of the self.
>> Now they do.
>>
>> Doug
>
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> CB: I don't think Bourdieu is correct that those are the two errors of
> social analysis. But in any case I make neither error in my statement
> above. Small farmers are practically wiped out. That has changed.
> They passed on to present generations the ideology of aspiring with
> the entrepreneurial spirit to be "independent".
>
>
> I'm not sure where you are getting evidence of what most workers
> thought in the 50's through the 70's ., but I bet a huge percentage of
> the working class was hustling , and trying to figure out how to
> strike it rich. All of them in the so-called Black Market were
> hustling. The working class fetish for gambling casinos is related to
> this. Individualist ideology was definitely rife, and that's
> basically petit bourgeois ideology.
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