raghu schreef:
On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Don't pick out some special group, whether GM workers, teachers, or
street sweepers, in advance. You are just generating "oughts" out of
your own head rather than examining how social movements actually work.
What did the UAW ever do for the larger worker's movement in the world
in their Golden Age in the 1950-60's (apart from negotiating good
pensions/benefits for themselves)?
-raghu.
I agree with this sentiment. I think that while support for Western
workers against Western capital, including their unions, is necessary,
we shouldn't conveniently lose sight of the fact that these unions have
been very succesful in negotiating with capital to share the spoils of
the plunder of the Third World with their members. The corruption and
reformism of Western major unions is not a coincidence - they are a
labor aristocracy in many cases, if you look at it from a global
perspective.
I think it is disingenuous for us to focus on the increase in relative
immiseration in the First World, even though that is of itself true,
because the increases in absolute wealth among (white) workers in this
part of the world have been so enormous that they cannot be swept away
as irrelevant by pointing at relative difference. Instead, we should
recognize that the social-democratic movement has had success in sharing
the profits gained from the real immiseration of the Third World, both
relative and absolute (although more so relatively), among First World
workers, sufficient to make the vast majority of them supportive of the
current world system. Therefore, the real revolutionary kind of
immiseration, whether you conceive of it as relative or as absolute, is
_for the greatest part_ going to be found in the Third World.
Matthijs Krul
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