Superbly well said, if you don't mind my saying so.
Keith
At 11:33 02/10/2010 -0700, Sandwichman wrote:
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.
[Sandwichman]
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
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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