>This is a bad mannered misinterpretation on your part,
>it is obvious that what I meant was
>their class-conscioussness, which is you are as aware as me, giving
>the programmer example above. As the vast majority of human kind is
>working class as per the definition above, I can't see anything wrong
>with described as a mass of people I am proud to belong to.
>You may call it a nonsence, but without an informed concensus
>and active participation of said masses to take over and transform
>the economy, any attempt of yours to reform capitalism is futile -
>and a nonsence, utopistic ideology...
Eva
Eva, I give up. I'm sorry if I was bad mannered. But you do seem to argue
from an impenetrable ideology. Let me explain my point of view, perhaps
equally impenetrable. Some years ago, I arrived at the conclusion that
idealism and ideology are the worst things that have ever happened to
humankind, even though I know that they go with the territory of being
human.
What has happened time and again in history is that great ideas have become
religious or secular ideologies which have then become mantras and formulas,
which have then been fanaticized, and have then become marching boots. Look
at Christ becoming the Crusades, Calvin and the Inquisition; at Hegel and
Marx becoming Stalin and the gulag; at Nietche becoming Hitler and the gas
chambers. Because of the ever-present possibility of this sequence, I would
be apprehensive about a motivated and mobilized working class which has
achieved "consciousness" in accordance with some ideal or ideology. Would
its members, like Mao's Red Guards, begin to turf the capitalists wherever
they thought they found them?
I do recognize that it is not idealism itself, but the distortion of
idealism into iron-clad ideologies, that is the fault. Yet I would suggest
that such distortion is more the rule than the exception. While I haven't
lost sleep over it yet, I know that there are many millions of angry people
around just waiting for the next great distortion and the next great
crusade. If you could assure me that we could proceed to the ideal state
owned and operated by the working class without persecution and bloodshed, I
would buy it, but, knowing something of history and its ability to repeat
itself, I might be pretty hard to convince.
I recognize that people's lives are organized around work. But I would
argue that, in doing their work, people in general have little in common
other than having to get out of bed and having to go to a place of work.
People who do a particular kind of work or who work in a particular
establishment have common interests, and if these are not being satisfied,
they should take collective action, but action through negotiation and a
democratically derived system of laws, with strikes as an ultimate threat.
There are many instances in which broadly based opposition to unjust laws or
circumstances make sense, but the issues in question usually transcend the
interests of a particular group or class. Poverty and homelessness, for
example, require the attention of all members of society. But on all such
issues, I would like to think that whatever action is taken would be aimed
at solving the problem, not at restructuring us into conformity with some
ideological dogma about how a society should function. We've surely had
enough of that.
Ed Weick
