>It's not self-evident that today's workers are more militant, better informed, more >socially aware or have a better understanding of the inner dynamics of capitalism >and of what must be done to end it, than did workers in Germany or England or Russia >in the 1900s, or in Chicago or elsehwre in the US for that matter. I don't think we >should be patronising. And Lenin's point is the simpel one that workers are too busy >surviving to have much chance to educate themselves in political theory. The work >has to be done by others with more time and opportunity, and they by definition are >not workers. This lesson was being thoroughly learnt by the masters of the mass >media and mass education just at the time when the left was forgetting it, which has >resulted in the dumbing down of today's workers. Well, I take your point, but we must look to some social conditions to see how better education and critical capacity might not translate to more militancy and more radical critiques. A couple of thoughtlets - certainly not wholly satisfactory responses, but contributory factors at least: [1] the worker of 2001 is more alienated from her peers than before (does not share a shop floor, competes for contracts, does 'casual' work when all are asleep, living in suburban sprawl, television, etc); [2] after several decades of the welfare state, we (the 'northern' proletariat have more in the way of physical possessions to protect and service than the working class has ever had before; [3] our pension prospects depend more directly on the equity markets; [4] children are now 25-year investments, and ever more so as education and health insurance are privatised and entry-level housing becomes harder to afford; [5] the first reaction to hard or insecure times is to cling more firmly to the boss's skirts; [6] not a word of Marxian critique (or any other radical critique beyond fragmentary feminisms) has inhabited high-school courses for a generation, so it's off the cultural agenda; [7] a reactionary left (especially corporatised trades union and hypocritical 'social democrat' parties) that had (sometimes has) too often and too long opposed women's struggles for full proletarian status, ignored the fact that most of 'em have actually managed it, and perpetuated xenophobic and racist cleavages, within and across national borders, and [8] a confused, demoralised, pretentious, poncy, opaque and abstruse left, which rabbits on in journals rather than pubs, about 'differance', 'the phallus', and 'the subject' more than it does about people, death, despoliation and exploitation - oh, and hope. Of course, going some way towards balancing these are [1] people are less credulous with respect to the media; [2] people are universally suspicious of, nay, contemptuous of, their institutions and the democratic 'guarantees' which underpin them; [3] people have higher material expectations; [4] people widely and eloquently crave 'community' (admittedly a craving with as many right-wing potentialities as left); [5] people are fearful of the power and hidden agendas of big capital; [6] experience of the welfare state and its gradual decimation; [7] 'northern' people's nationalism (a wholly understandable reaction to WTO-style globalisation-as-imperialism) is more anti TNC and anti-USA than expressly anti-brown/black; [8] 'northern' women are more fully and articulately integrated into the 'simplified class antagonisms' of high capitalism - where once women tended to more conservative values, they now lead leftist debate and activism. due to better education, the confidence that comes with the (relative) economic independence of full proletarian status, the fact that they're still generally the most directly concerned with the practical job of rearing and funding the kids, and the experience of (moderately successful) feminism; [9] and a widespread sense of impending social, economic, institutional and environmental decline - if not actual crisis, to which the cosmetic responses mooted by socdems and media pundits seem ever less convincing. _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
