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On 1/22/2011 7:05 AM, Dan wrote: > The number of unionized workers keeps falling, due to, in my > opinion: Perhaps it isn't so difficult to understand as we're making it out to be, we just don't want to accept it. More than 150 years ago, Engels was writing to Marx: " “...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.” * [see footnote] * * * Of course, Britain is now not the only country in that position. A handful of countries have organized themselves into a cartel that "exploits the whole world" and where even the AVERAGE worker enjoys a standard of living which most workers in the rest of the world could barely imagine. THIS worker, in particular, was shocked to realize that once you counted his 401K and medical, etc., his "Total Rewards" in 2010 was in the six figures. I was curious to look it up last December since --after a couple of decades at this company-- I'd just been told I would be "let go" in a restructuring and would soon lose access to the web page showing my "total rewards." Which I think goes to show that Engels's "bourgeois proletariat" is a two-side coin, and I just got my face shoved into the side opposite bourgeois. But then again, I'm getting several months of severance pay, plenty of time, many would say, to find a new job. The point is, yes, workers in the United States, Britain, France and so on are still exploited and screwed over by their bosses, but they are ALSO part of nations --bourgeois imperialist nations-- that exploit other nations through the mechanisms of financial markets, unequal exchange and --yes-- sometimes just plain extortion. And --judging by the differentiated situation of working people generally in imperialist countries as opposed to colonial and semicolonial countries-- the privileges that come with this exploitation of other nations are not limited to ONE class in the exploiting nation. I think by now it would be obvious that something there is that doesn't love a class in the leading capitalist countries, that wants them gone, that undermines unions, solidarity, militancy, and even any clear independent expression of the working people as a political constituency. That something, I believe, is the nationalism of the oppressor, a nationalism cemented by privilege, and that is the BOURGEOIS side of Engels's "bourgeois proletariat." Joaquín * A brief aside on hyper-links: "Engels was writing to Marx," in a world where hyper links existed, would have linked to the original. And I would have rephrased it to say that In this connection, Lenin quoted Engels writing to Marx, and linked the Lenin article there also. ________________________________________________ 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
