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On 5/15/2010 9:45 PM, Manuel Barrera wrote: > What is the best Marxist analysis of who and what is the working > class now; well over 160 years since the Manifesto and the working > class of the time for which it was written? It's great to see Manuel's name on this list as well as the message he sent me about my picture on the facebook page (actually my alter-ego's facebook page). I kind of agree with Mark Lause about the Peter Camejo test -- if you stop working and the checks stop and you don't have enough to eat, then you know. That's who the working people are. But there's another level to this, which is what has happened to the working class as a class. I think that is the question of questions and in its innards lie the source of our misfortune. Because --there's really no way to hide this-- there is not now and there has not been in mine and Manuel's entire political lifetime a working class *movement* worthy of the name in the United States. I mean a movement of the class as such, just like the Black movement is a social/political movement of Blacks as such. I've said before to illustrate this point that people have talked about gay identity politics, Chicano or Latino identity politics, and so on, but nobody ever talks about worker identity politics. Because working people do not cohere as a group, as a social layer. And it seems to me the *obstacles* to this cohering taking place must be pretty substantial. The radicalization of the 1960's and after put into motion sector after sector and its repercussions are being felt down to our day -- just look at Evo Morales in Bolivia and the push to transform the government into a plurinational state, explicitly recognizing and giving constitutional status and protection to indigenous peoples. Those of us who are old enough should think back on how that developed, and why: it starts with the outcome of World War II that gave rise to the anticolonial revolution, the emergence of a "socialist" bloc, then the rise of the Black movement after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and following that then the student movement (first among Blacks -- SNCC), the women's movement, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements, even a gay movement. I say "even" because it seemed that gays were universally reviled and despised. Yet this powerful radicalization, which brought all sorts of very downtrodden and previously unorganized social layers into cohered movement, did not lead to the emergence of a comparable workers social movement. And this even though there was already a ready-made structure of unions, labor councils and so on through which such a movement could have found expression. Yet it didn't happen. Well, all that came after an extraordinary quarter century of unprecedented improvements in the standard of living of working people. It could have been said then --this is what I thought, and I think pretty much everyone on the Marxist left in the United States-- that this was just a parentheses, and when the extraodinary circumstance of post-war reconstruction ran its course, then things would go back to normal. And resolutions of the Trotskyist movement in those years spoke of a long "detour" in the course of world revolution that was now coming to an end. The big class battles in the imperialist centers were coming. You could almost hear the heavy armored divisions of the proletariat as they assembled just over the next ridge in the class struggle. This turned out to be pure fantasy. The noise we heard wasn't the proletarian army assembling but the factories in heavy industry being disassembled. So it's been 40 years since the post-WWII boom ended, and there have been some pretty tough times since then, including now. But no real movement has emerged. There have been more than a few exemplary struggles and developments of multiple character, everything from the UFW to Steelworkers Fightback to DRUM but it has never led to workers cohering as such, the beginning of a *class* movement even if only among a sliver of the masses. Yet if you look in the Manifesto's description of the emergence of the class movement, it is something that inevitably arises from the counterposed interests of workers and capitalists and the constant clashes this leads to. And for a century or so what the Manifesto said held true, including in the main imperialist countries. But then it changed. I think that post WWII change was a deepening and resulting qualitative transformation of another change that had taken place a half century earlier. That big change at the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th Century was the rise of a dominant opportunist (reformist) current in the labor movement of the countries that were becoming imperialist (imperialist in the sense Lenin meant). Lenin believed imperialism was the behind the opportunist wave that destroyed the Second International. He lays it out in the article "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism," written on the eve of the February Revolution, which is here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm. "Is there any connection between imperialism and the monstrous and disgusting victory opportunism (in the form of social-chauvinism) has gained over the labour movement in Europe," Lenin asks. And he adds: "This is the fundamental question of modern socialism." Take note. Not "a" fundamental question but "the" fundamental question. And he then goes on to make the case that imperialist superprofits permit the bourgeoisie to "bribe" a section of the working class by placing them in a privileged status. He largely bases himself on repeated comments by Marx and Engels on the English working class during the second half of the 1800s, which, as Lenin explained, was the forerunner of this phenomenon because of England's colonial empire and industrial supremacy: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy," Lenin quotes Engels in a 1882 letter to Kautsky. "Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.” Another Engels quote, this one from a quarter century earlier: "...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." The parts of the quotes I think comrades should think most deeply about are: "the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies,” and "For a nation which exploits the whole world this [a bourgeois proletariat] is of course to a certain extent justifiable." A few years after the Lenin article, after the seizure of power, there was a significant discussion of this issue at the Second Congress of the Comintern, under the point on the national and colonial question. And theses proposed by NM Roy were adopted, with Lenin's specific and explicit endorsement, together with an amended version of Lenin's theses. Roy's theses say without any hemming or hawing that revolution in the European imperialist countries is *impossible* unless the flow of imperialist super-profits is "stopped up." That was the phrase, if I remember right. The privileges of the "Western" working class *taken as a whole* are immensely greater today than at the time of the Russian Revolution. The world economic and financial systems have been reshaped so that the colonial and semicolonial countries are systematically looted through unequal exchange and the workings of the financial markets in addition to profits extracted directly by imperialist corporations. I believe the changes in the world capitalist system as it reorganized after WWII have led to a situation where working people in the imperialist countries --especially of the dominant nationalities, but not only-- tend to identify much more with their nation than with their class. Capitalist propaganda and government policy do everything they can to re-enforce this, of course, it is hardly a spontaneous phenomenon. But it isn't merely people being duped by capitalist propaganda. There is a very real material phenomenon which underlies and empowers this propaganda, and it is imperialist privilege. This is not a particularly encouraging line of analysis. But if we hope some day to change the situation, we had better begin by understanding just what it is. Joaquin ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
