On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Ray Harrell quoted Michael Hudson: > The choice is between who will be destroyed: the banks, or labor? > > European politicians now view this as being truly a fight to the death. This > is the ideology that has replaced social democracy.
There needs to be a clear distinction made between the collective of working people and the institutions that represent -- or purport to represent -- the interests of that collective. Social democracy was long ago replaced by a tenuous "deal" between the public sector workforce and the State. The terms of that deal were rather straightforward. Economic growth was the vehicle through which increased State revenues could be acquired to fund expanded government spending, service accumulated public debt and/or improve the pay of public sector employees. Public sector unions, and the organized labor in general as it became increasingly composed of public sector unions needed only to ignore two inconvenient facts -- the inherent social and environmental contradictions of induced economic growth and the environmental, social and financial limits to that growth. Jurgen Habermas wrote about this stuff back in the 1970s in Legitimation Crisis before he went on to even greater heights of incomprehensibility. At this point there is no returning to the regime of growth that the unions hitched their star to. But rather than considering other strategies, organized labor continues to clamor for "more growth". Yes, the austerity being pursued by neoliberalism is harsh. There IS an alternative but that alternative is not the union's nostalgic dream of return to the political Keynsianism of the mid-20th century. There is only an alternative if labor -- meaning the collective of working people -- awakens from its "dream of itself". "It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future, but to complete the thought of the past. Lastly, it will becomes plain that mankind will not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the completion of its old work." Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843. -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
