Relevant to this discussion: It has become fashionable to declare that class struggle has faded into the past — dissolved by deindustrialisation, scattered by fragmented labour markets, eclipsed by identity-based movements, and exhausted along with the institutions that once gave it political form. From this vantage point, class appears to have lost its centrality, surviving at best as a residual category of analysis.
Yet this verdict rests on a fundamental confusion between the visibility of class struggle and its structural necessity. Rather than transcending class antagonism, capitalism has shifted and restructured the battleground. What has weakened is not the antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, but rather the political and organisational forms through which that antagonism was once legible, durable and effective. The present crisis of class politics is therefore not a crisis of absence but one of recomposition under adverse conditions. To understand class struggle today, one must begin from this reorganisation, rather than from nostalgia for lost forms or retreating to cultural explanation... https://links.org.au/class-struggle-today-fragmentation-and-crisis-political-form See also: Objectivity requires acknowledging that the model of the party-affiliated union and mass organisation was not wrong in all circumstances. It played a pivotal role in certain historic phases, particularly periods of left-wing growth and mass ascendancy, when organisational centralisation was needed to maintain cohesion and protect cadres amid repressive realities. Affiliated unions and organisations were able to serve as effective incubators for union and mass work under conditions of extreme hardship. Yet time has changed fundamentally, and with it the mechanisms of mass thinking and organising. People today, especially the new generations raised on a culture of instant access to information, horizontal organising and direct participation in decision-making, no longer accept being mobilised in the service of a specific party agenda, however sincere its intentions. Real popular power today is not built through organisational decree; it is built through rootedness in people’s daily lives and honest and effective representation of their interests, regardless of intellectual or political affiliations... https://links.org.au/trade-unions-mass-organisations-and-left-historical-necessity-reassessment-and-renewal -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41851): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41851 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119000131/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
