On 4/16/07, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The point I explained in my previous post helps explain why the present generation of college students show so little interest in activism. They are working class, as were the 'rebels' of the '60s, but the sector of the working class that attends college is less privileged today (has less leisure and less certain prospects) than the working-class students of the '60s. And in every epoch the more privileged sectors of the working class (or peasantry in peasant nations) are the sectors that form the backbone of the left. (Middle, not poor, peasants made the Chinese Revolution.)
About peasants, I remember a good article in an old issue of Socialist Register that confirms your point about the more privileged sectors of peasantry being more politically active, at least in the initial stage of social change: Hamza Alavi*, "Peasants and Revolution" (1965), <http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1965_Alavi.pdf>. Highly recommended. What's true of peasants may be also true of educated proletarians, and there may be work that can empirically confirm it in resource mobilization theory literature. * Alavi died in 2003: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1109996,00.html> -- Yoshie
