Michael's conclusion here is central to the discussion of social security. If we do not have the mechanisms to talk to people, except for issues such as social security, which will take place in a highly distorted way -- the system is crashing!!!! -- then we will not be able to get our mechanism across. The old corrupt Democratic machines had people in ever ward helping people that they trusted. I assume that many people would listen to the local rep, despite the corruption.

Of course, the right wing churches are already there. Where is the social gospel????


michael a. lebowitz wrote:

What is called for, in short, is the necessity to go beyond economism and to develop a new strategy rooted in the recognition that workers are not one-dimensional. By searching for those aspects that unite working people around the world, it is possible to prevent capital from playing workers off against each other. Insofar as we can see each other as members of a human community, we overcome the fetishism of commodities and no longer see only commodities and faceless competitors.
This point often has been grasped intuitively better by religious and charitable societies than by organisations of the Left; it reveals the importance of efforts to establish direct relations of solidarity between communities. For, insofar as workers of the North act in solidarity with workers of the South as human beings, they not only come to recognise the latter as allies in the struggle against their common enemy, capital, but also develop their own social nature. When a conscious process is undertaken to create new relations among producers, then despite capital’s efforts, the contradictions among the people are non-antagonistic.



--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901

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