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The high school I attended used to play basketball against Ambridge High School. I taught union workers in a nearby town. Bleak, miserable places now. If the fact that Ambridge (no doubt like my own hometown, in which nearly every man was a union member when I was a boy) went solidly for Trump is not a sign of the utter, total, and complete failure of the labor movement in the US, I don't know what is. Yes, there are bigots and religious nuts aplenty in the places now. But their labor leaders abandoned them, the political elites did the same, and the left intellectuals in our cities never took the time to visit these places, which are scattered all across the nation, to learn about the people who lived and worked away their lives in the factories, to engage them, to teach them. It's really too late now. But proof positive that inequality, economic hardship, and the like can, in the absence of an alternative radical politics, drives the working class to the left is a foolish myth. As I have been arguing for at least 40 years. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
