[lbo-talk] Republicans want recessions

[Marv Gandall]

This is a long historic trend corresponding to the shift from an industrial to a service economy in the advanced capitalist countries. It's reflected in the composition of the labour force, including within the organized trade union sector. Industrial workers and their unions have increasingly lost ground to organizations repressing government workers, teachers, nurses, and other administrative, technical, and professional employees. While their conditions of work are less conducive to union consciousness, organization, power, and militancy, they are still wage and salary earners with the same objective interest in improving their working conditions and living standards as their blue collar forbears. Except for the very highest paid stratum, they do not in their many tens of millions represent a new managerial-professional class with distinctly different interests.

They are also overwhelmingly concentrated in the urban areas and have made common cause with other Democratic Party constituencies in opposing Republican candidates hostile to the rights won by trade unionists, blacks, women, and gays over many decades. 


> On Feb 3, 2015, at 2:38 PM, Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 4, 2015, at 07:15, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 5:08 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Increasingly the latter more than the former, as the party dropped its
>>> labor/social democratic side in favor of courting professional-managerial
>>> class suburbanites
>> 
>> 
>> That seems to be a broader trend elsewhere in Europe, no?  "Old" left
>> parties converting to neoliberalism to court techno-managerial voters and
>> selling the working class down the river to fascists and nationalists.
> 
> That sounds like the PS, although its members were historically mostly composed of local elected officials and public employees.
> 
> JC
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