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Richard Seymore: >> The embourgoisement thesis doesn't have much going for it<< Leonardo Kosloff: >> such theories of the aristocracy of labor are unhelpful<< I noted before that imperialism per se has little or nothing to do with the decline of union density, but more generally some comrades, not least of the state cap variety, tend to downplay or deny the political effects of relations of relative privilege within the working class, internationally via imperialism, and within national social formations in terms of more skilled, educated and/or better off sections of national working classes. Sure the major aspect of imperialism is *not* the direct ripping off of profits from the oppressed countries into the pockets of the advanced countries, including the workers, most capital is invested in the rich countries where most profits are made and more intense exploitation in the technical sense happens etc etc. But that’s not really the point here, as an imposed international division of labour and unequal terms of trade still maintain a basic division in the world and big relative difference in conditions of life of rich country workers vis a vis the poor (including relative stability and apparent democracy), which I think is associated with feelings of superiority and lack of solidarity among rich country workers vis a vis their Third World brothers and sisters, though clearly not in any homogeneous and permanent sense (i.e. relative privilege within the working class is quite different from becoming bourgeois). Similarly positing an “aristocracy of labour” within a rich country is a useful concept, related to illusions in reformism, although it’s not useful to simplistically pose this as one homogenous bloc with a determinate political effect. Of course better off workers have often been radicals, from highly skilled engineers like Tom Mann in the late nineteenth century to the numerous teachers, IT workers and the like who are Greens activists today. I wrote about this last year in response to material from Socialist Alternative (dissident IST group here) which exaggerated the “middle class” nature of the Greens, confusing the nature of the working and middle classes today in the process in terms of not accounting for differentiation within the working class. The Greens in my opinion are more about particular skilled and educated sections of the working class, at least in membership and voting base, and this conditions their strengths and weaknesses. (Note though that the article linked to below, in comparing the class nature of the voting bases of the Greens, Labor and the conservatives, does contain an error in my typology of class structure derived from a social survey, in that I mistakenly included lower level supervisors in the ‘salaried manager’ section of the middle class rather than properly in the working class. I haven’t got around to fixing this. Anyway the point that there is no statistical difference evident between the *class* as opposed to the “status” nature of Greens and Labor voters, and as opposed to both these groups of voters and conservative voters, stands). ‘A response to Socialist Alternative on the Greens and class' http://links.org.au/node/1938 ________________________________________________ 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
