************ Introduction ************ "Who is the backbone for socialism today?” is required, but it is not the first question. Asked too soon, it becomes sociological bookkeeping: Which demographic categories are most exploited, most progressive, most unionized, most downwardly mobile, most likely to vote for socialist politicians, or most alienated from the existing order? Those questions are big. But they can also mislead, because they believe that the socialist base exists somewhere in the social structure, waiting to be uncovered by better messages, better candidates, better campaigns, or better organizers.
A Marxist method must begin differently. It has to investigate how capitalism has transformed the working class itself, how it has reconfigured the labor process, atomized communal life, altered the relationship between production and reproduction, and eroded or subsumed many of the institutions that formerly made class politics sustainable. The main problem is that socialists have failed to identify the base. The difficulty is that the historical processes through which workers constituted a class-for-itself have been weakened, decomposed, privatized, bureaucratized, or replaced by much thinner forms of affiliation. what happened to the working class as an organized historical subject? The Base.docx ( https://1drv.ms/w/c/c3598b38f68269be/IQBm9khs-w7KSKM5SFZA2vGGAeveF0yU1gZJsGvmlg5FilA?e=HeaVxa ) -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41957): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41957 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119690949/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
