Anthony D'Costa: What does the last sentence mean? 'Discipline the working
classes'
(My posts on this topic, on this & other lists, are essentially crude drafts
of a position I'm trying to work out. Your post has helped my further
thinking.)
Your question. It underlines the last sentence in the quotation from Marx:
"By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would
certainly
disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement." Leaving
aside Marx's moralistic adverb ("cowardly") the working classes of the
'developed' nations did, in the 1970s and subsequent decades, certainly
reduce their level of struggle, and the resistance that has emerged since
Wisconsin has been (mostly) from marginal sectors of the class. We can hope
(and work) for the intensification of that embryonic resistance, but
Austerity (precariousness) tends to focus each person's attention on his/her
own circumstances; while it provokes _some_ to resistance it causes many or
most to scramble for personal survival. A heavy load of debt keeps a
person's "nose to the grindstone."
And I might add, the chances of serious worker resistance are not enhanced
by those leftists or Marxists who treat an economic crisis as a crisis of
capitalism.
Carrol
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