>>Do you find this true of trade unions everywhere or just in the USA? An old labor organizer from way back when told me that Americans were backwards in matters of egalitarianism. I think he said that Canadians are much better.<< MP: I am probably not the best person to ask this of. I am more than less opposed to the various ideologies of egalitarianism, which seems to me to preserve "something" from pre-industrial social relations, or rather various ideological conceptions of pre-industrial social relations, and attempt to graft the ideological ideas of ancient forms of collectivity and equality to fit into a modern society. Canada has a feudal history and we do not have such in America. That is to say that Canada has a historical recollection and ideology of noble obligation (noblese oblige) associated with feudal political, social and economic relations and expressions of culture. That is to say, noblese oblige as an ideological category corresponded with a lived experience, reproducing and confirming itself in real life. People in Canada feel they have a right to be cared for - such as health care system. The government feels a certain obligation to take care of the people, to a certain degree, and face continuous pressure to provide a floor beyond which no large segment of people should fall, with perhaps the exception of the Indians, whose plight remains extermination. Canada was a colony as was America, of England. The US was different. In the US, for the first time in history, a revolution for national liberation - 1776, was bound up with the revolution against feudalism. The American bourgeoisie wanted freedom from the restraints of feudal England. The United States might be the only country in the world, certainly in the Western hemisphere, that was never tainted with feudalism. Canada was, Mexico was and everything south of the border was. The subjective dimensions of the revolutionary process in America are going to be pretty different from anything in the past period. Anyone that tries to apply some formula from the past and other revolutionary movements in history are going to crash on the rocks of American reality. It does not matter how much one quotes Marx or screams "working class" and "Unite the working class" or preach their version of the ideological attributes of the best paid industrial workers, clearly in decline and decay. If the individual being or becoming an autodidact has any meaning - and I love this concept, clearly it means at least trying to understand and reconcile or describe ones history in a manner that makes sense to someone else other than ones "closed" and sectarian ideological grouping. The only thing close to the lived experience that is spoken of as noblese oblige was a certain ideology of dependence that evolved under Southern Slavery, that mimicked certain aspects the ideology and cultural framework understood as "noble obligation," and to see this play itself out is a rude awakening to real life in America. In our history this caricature of noblese oblige had been expressed as the concept, ideology and cultural artifacts and institutions governing relations between blacks and whites in the plantation South, by the saying "those are my white people and they are good." Or "leave them nig-gras alone. Them my niggas." This ideology in turn expresses a system of rewarding genuflecting or what is called "good conduct" of slaves. This "good conduct of slaves is under industrial conditions translated in our country into the "good employee." I am trying to answer your question but it is presented in a context that is not the cultural reality and history that is America. Then in the industrial North that has always been pressure from below for a certain industrial egalitarianism as ideological currents rooted in the most unskilled of the industrial work force. To a degree the old IWW expressed this striving for collectivity as an egalitarianism in the ideological realm. "An injury to one is an injury to all." Given certain realties of American history, above of that is was never tainted by feudal economic or social relations, I guess it is accurate to speak of a certain backwardness of American workers "in matters of egalitarianism" if - and only if, one is viewing this from outside the lived experince that is real American history. On the other hand America is uniquely revolutionary. Melvin P.
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