Yoshie:
>American workers -- even in the midst of neoliberal capitalism's best
>boom times ever -- were not as comfortable as many PEN-l posters
>imagine them to be (and now the boom is practically over -- we only
>wonder how bad & how long the coming recession will be). Therefore,
>I conclude that it is *the absence of a clear political program &
>energetic political organizing* -- not economic booms, much less
>"comfortable" American workers -- that is responsible for a poor
>showing of the American Left.
Is that what we need? A clear political program and energetic political
organizing? That's odd. During my time in the Trotskyist movement, I was
around people who went into factories and mines who never were able to
recruit a single person to socialism, let alone bring them to a forum. Not
that I am an expert on what the rest of the left was doing, but nobody else
had any success either.
In reality, no significant section of the US working class is open to
socialism. It is not so much that they are comfortable, it is more that
they do not see any particular urgency to be revolutionaries. And that's
what Marxism is about, not DSA socialism which is virtually the same thing
as being a Democrat.
You can't tell workers that they are exploited because of a formula in
Wage-Labor and Capital. Some people, using the math in a perverse fashion,
have even argued that workers in the US are more exploited than they are in
places like Mexico since they produce more surplus value here per average
worker. This obviously is not what Marx had in mind. Furthermore, the
question of workers in the imperialist nations lacking class consciousness
is not a new issue. Lenin cited a letter from Engels to Marx as part of a
polemic in 1916 against the DSA'ers of his day:
>>In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: "...The English
proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most
bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession
of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the
bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course
to a certain extent justifiable." <<
(Imperialism and the Split in Socialism:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm)
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
