Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 24/01/2011 03:39, Nick Fredman wrote: Richard Seymore: The embourgoisement thesis doesn't have much going for it Leonardo Kosloff: such theories of the aristocracy of labor are unhelpful I noted before that imperialism per se has little or nothing to do with the decline of union density, but more generally some comrades, not least of the state cap variety, tend to downplay or deny the political effects of relations of relative privilege within the working class, internationally via imperialism, and within national social formations in terms of more skilled, educated and/or better off sections of national working classes. Surely not? First of all, as you're talking about state caps, Tony Cliff argued that imperialism is central to the strength of reformist political attitudes. He differed with Lenin's analysis of 'labour aristocracy', but nonetheless held that capitalist expansion in the form of imperialism provided the economic basis for the Right within the labour movement. With regard to sections within the working class, Cliff's simple argument was that these tended to be more pronounced the weaker the working class is, but are reduced when the workers' standards of living go up. As for myself, I would not use the language of 'privilege', but I would agree with you on the relevance of 'feelings of superiority', or chauvinism. I am the last to deny or 'downplay' the relevant political effects of, say, white supremacy on working class cohesion and strength, which is certainly at the heart of long-term difficulties faced by the US working class for example. It's just not clear to me how theories of 'embourgoisement' or 'labour aristocracy' help with this. -- *Richard Seymour* Writer, blogger and PhD candidate Email: leninstombb...@googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder Book 2: http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Richard Seymore: Tony Cliff argued that imperialism is central to the strength of reformist political attitudes... With regard to sections within the working class, Cliff's simple argument was that these tended to be more pronounced the weaker the working class is, but are reduced when the workers' standards of living go up... As for myself, I would not use the language of 'privilege', but I would agree with you on the relevance of 'feelings of superiority', or chauvinism. I am the last to deny or 'downplay' the relevant political effects of, say, white supremacy on working class cohesion and strength, which is certainly at the heart of long-term difficulties faced by the US working class for example. It's just not clear to me how theories of 'embourgoisement' or 'labour aristocracy' help with this. Ok, Cliff was and you are very aware of and very against imperialism and chauvinism, but... is there no relation between differentiation in the working class, and opportunism and chauvinism? Haven’t some relations of differentiation been quite stable, for many decades, such as the relative privilege of white workers in the US, Australia and South Africa, defended both by law for a long time as well as exclusivist union practices? Wasn’t the White Australia Policy part of the Laborist mainstream from the 1890s to the 1960s? Wasn’t this mainstream formed in the early 1890s-1900s, shaped not only by the concurrent formation of monopolising capitals and Pacific colonialism, but by the fact that it was largely based on craft unions (as well as farmer and middle class elements), keen to keep women and Chinese out of their trades as well as fight the bosses and use arbitration and protectionism to defend what they understood as their interests? Aren’t the cadres of labo(u)r and social democratic parties and union apparatuses today largely drawn from highly skilled and educated layers of the working class? (For my PhD I conducted focus groups with three Labor branches totaling 25 people, which included one blue collar union organiser, one blue collar worker, and the rest from such layers Large scale surveys of ALP members have shown the same). I’m happy to reject the embourgeoisment concept, as it implies a qualitative transformation of class. But the concept of labour aristocracy, understood in the careful way I’ve put it, can help us discuss these questions. But I repeat I don’t want too be too determinate about it, and that one political expression of skilled, white collar labour in Australia today is the rise of the Greens as a particular type of left social democratic formation, a progressive, if of course partial alternative to the ALP (Greens branches I also interviewed were sociologically quite similar to the Labor branches, and the labour aristocratic/social democratic nature of the Greens is discussed empirically in the brief article I previously linked to as well as an academic article I’m hopefully publishing soon). Also one important material basis I think not just of union decline but also of anti-refugee, anti-Indigenous chauvinism in the last 20 years in Australia was a neoliberal fuelled process of *actual* petty-bourgeoisification of hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers from the early 90s (when Laborist neoliberalism accelerated), due to their jobs being forcibly transformed into self-employed contract relations and the fact that large numbers made redundant through restructuring had little choice but to use their severance to buy a van and tools and set up a business. Cut off from the solidarity of work and union membership they first (on the whole) helped vote Labor out in 1996 and were then prey to the petty-minded suburban-reactionary outlook of John Winston Howard. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Joaquín Bustelo jbust...@bellsouth.netwrote: More than 150 years ago, Engels was writing to Marx: “...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.” * [see footnote] * * * Of course, Britain is now not the only country in that position. A handful of countries have organized themselves into a cartel that exploits the whole world and where even the AVERAGE worker enjoys a standard of living which most workers in the rest of the world could barely imagine. ... the privileges that come with this exploitation of other nations are not limited to ONE class in the exploiting nation. The embourgoisement thesis doesn't have much going for it, and the above suggests you're arguing for the weakest version of it. The primary reasons why the average worker enjoys a better standard of living in the advanced capitalist societies are: 1) the development of infrastructure etc means that *the rate of exploitation in the imperialist core is higher* even when living standards rise. The reason why the vast majority of firms in advanced capitalist states continue to invest chiefly in those self-same states is because there the rate of exploitation tends to be higher, and thus the rate of profit tends to be higher. 2) the *accumulated outcomes of past class struggles* has compelled ruling classes in imperialist countries to accept parliamentary democracy, welfare and trade unionism, which ensured that living standards would rise. Moreover, if you're trying to explain the low rate of trade union membership in the United States, it makes no sense to refer to imperial privileges. Imperialism does come into it, but rather in the sense that it consolidates the power and cohesiveness of the ruling class and divides and weakens the working class, thus reducing its bargaining power. That is how white supremacy works. The reality is that unionisation is low because the working class was defeated by a combination of imperialism, the domestic slaveocracy and the peculiar binding force of anticommunist nationalism. The major defeats for organised labour and the Left in the country as a whole in 1919-21, then in the South in 1934-6, then as a result of the anticommunist purges in the period from 1947-56, then from 1978 onward have all shared different combinations of these elements. Imperialism by itself is not necessarily incompatible with high levels of unionisation, but combined with racist paternalism on the part of employers, and with anticommunism in the form of state-sponsored countersubversive inquisitions, it is toxic for working class self-organisation. -- Richard Seymour Writer and blogger Email: leninstombb...@googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book: http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/seymour_r_the_liberal_defense_of_murder.shtml # # # # Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == One of the most worrying things I found when trying to recruit people to the union in my last job -- administration work in a university -- was that many people under 30 had no idea of what a trade union was and what its role was in the workplace and more generally. I remember in the late 1970s and 1980s when I went around the workplace trying to recruit people that I met those who were hostile to the idea of unions, people influenced by right-wing ideas, but even most youngsters had some idea of what a union was for and what it did. I spent a fair amount of the 1990s studying at university and so was outwith a working environment. When I returned to work in the early 2000s, such had been the decline in organised labour in Britain that I found that many young people weren't hostile to unions, but didn't view them as having any relevance to their life. They seemed almost alien to them. Recruitment was not at all easy, although, on the positive side, when we had successful actions in respect of pay or conditions, or when we managed to beat the management on a personal case, then recruitment would improve a bit. Have list members had similar experiences in other countries? Paul F Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 2011-01-23, at 6:45 AM, Lenin's Tomb wrote: The reality is that unionisation is low because the working class was defeated by a combination of imperialism, the domestic slaveocracy and the peculiar binding force of anticommunist nationalism. The major defeats for organised labour and the Left in the country as a whole in 1919-21, then in the South in 1934-6, then as a result of the anticommunist purges in the period from 1947-56, then from 1978 onward have all shared different combinations of these elements. Actually, for most of the period described above, through to the end of the twentieth century, the unionization rate rose steadily in line with US global manufacturing supremacy. Trade unions were born, grew, and fought their most militant battles prior to their legalization ( and subsequent institutionalization) by the bourgeois state, so repression of the trade unions and the left - which has been a constant feature of the conflict between the classes, varying only in degree and overtness in accordance with the tempo of that conflict - does not in itself serve as an explanation for the low rate of unionization. The preciptious decline in unionization in the core capitalist countries seems to have been due primarily to a) the increase in the relative weight of the service sector, which is structurally more difficult to organize, and b) the revolutionary advances in transportation and communications technology since the 80s coupled with the opening of vast new pools of cheaper labour in the former Soviet bloc, China, and elsewhere. This combination predictably led to a flight of Western industrial capital and the relocation of production in these new more profitable zones of exploitation. The decline in trade union density, bargaining power, consciousness, and combativity is an effect of these deeper changes, as is the correspondingly more adverse relationship of forces between capital and labour and, within the unions, between conservative officialdom and opposition caucuses. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Also, the embourgoisement idea doesn't preclude unionism. In many ways, it almost requires unionism historically. Almost nobody I know from my pre-movement youth are even middle class in the traditional sense. Almost none of them are union members or even remotely friendly to the idea of unionism. Some of them are not doing well at all, despite a college degree and a lifetime of work. But they talk as though they own oil companies and banks overseas. We're dealing with something very, very different where consciousness requires less and less of a material check. ML Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mark wrote: Some of them are not doing well at all, despite a college degree and a lifetime of work. But they talk as though they own oil companies and banks overseas. We're dealing with something very, very different where consciousness requires less and less of a material check. This is the damnest thing, isn't it? Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mark L. wrote: We're dealing with something very, very different where consciousness requires less and less of a material check. I'm not sure what exactly this means..., but following on what Richard was saying about the increased rate of exploitation in the, what I would prefer to call, classical capitalist countries (rather than advanced, imperialist cores, etc., which gives the idea that the form of the other countries is less determined by capital, so “underdeveloped” that they actually need more capitalism, which is so progressive these days), I think the central material determination of the break-up of trade-unionization is somewhere else. In other words, the rate of exploitation as I see it has been increasing globally, this we may say initiated in the classical countries but took a global character –as it must- due to a deeper process underlying it which is the fragmentation of the productive powers (or productive subjectivities) of the working class as a whole, or what Marx called the collective labourer. This is a consequence of the development of large-scale industry itself, which particularly since the 70’s (though this process which Mandel called the 3rd technological revolution had started before) accelerated concurrently with the process of over-accumulation of capital. The absolute contradiction of capital is its tendency toward the socialization of *private* labor, so that as much as much as this process needed to homogenize the working class through de-skilling it also had to do it by determining the individual worker as the appendage of machinery, who as the personifications of labor-power have now to reproduce themselves with a differentiated specificity. The ideologies of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, etc. are the manifestations which are needed to perpetuate this fragmentation, and this is why the struggle of undocumented immigrants, not just in the US but as far as Argentina, is central to a reconstitution of workers political power in order to force capital to reproduce the labor-power of the working class on the same universal conditions, and which is therefore to go against the current national form of accumulation and international division of labor. In that respect, such theories of the aristocracy of labor are unhelpful, to say the least. I would write more but I have to go now. Luckily, most of the things I wanted to say (which are not originally mine of course) can be found in these two articles: 'Transformations in capital accumulation: From the national production of an universal labourer to the international fragmentation of the productive subjectivity of the working-class’ by Juan Iñigo Carrera www.iwgvt.org/files/03Inigo.doc ‘The New International Division of Labour and the Differentiated Evolution of Poverty at World Scale’ by Nicolas Grinberg http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/events/conferences/povertyandcapital/grinberg.pdf Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Paul Flewers: One of the most worrying things I found when trying to recruit people to the union in my last job -- administration work in a university -- was that many people under 30 had no idea of what a trade union was and what its role was in the workplace and more generally... Have list members had similar experiences in other countries? This roughly accords with my experience in the higher education sector particularly spending several stints of casual work around 1999-2002 on my campus helping the union branch in recruitment drives. But the consciousness around the question was very much related to specific structural changes, particularly the massive growth in casualisation, up to around half the workforce on many campuses such as this one. Many would be more or less supportive but weren’t that motivated in joining if they were only there for a year’s research contract or didn’t even know if they’d be in the following week. And of course casualisation was associated with younger workers. Joaquin’s points on this thread about imperialism are quite irrelevant because union density decline is much more to do with more recent processes, i.e. neoliberalism. Australia was just as imperialist in 1983 when union density was 50% as it is today when it’s slipped below 20%. Related processes of tariff cuts decimating (highly unioinised) manufacturing, the concurrent growth in (lowly unionised) service sectors, privatisation or corporatisation of public enterprises, contracting out, casualisation, the conversion of real jobs to self-employed contract work, etc, have all hit union membership. The rapid decline in Australia happened from when the Labor government’s social contract was introduced in 1983, and it’s been a slow drift since. The union tops are of course on the whole hopeless but at least there’s a general recognition that being completely tied to a Labor government and incorporated into the state apparatus isn’t a good idea, and a turn fromn the 90s from a “services model” to an “organising model” (apparently based on the US public sector union’s methods) which was some improvement. Those unions which have taken the latter most seriously, such as the nurses which have made a serious effort to develop workplace reps, have grown. The former academics union made a serious turn from the 90s to “industrial” unionism and grew rapidly among admin staff, although it has been stagnant in membership in recent years. Some list members would know of a successful response to the new economy in the form of the New Zealand Unite union http://www.unite.org.nz which, from a tiny base a few years ago, has organised thousands of young casual workers in fast food, cinemas etc., and in which socialists have played a leading role. The CWI group in Melbourne has taken the name and the general idea but while they’re carried out some creative and worthy actions, without being an officially recognised and supported union this Unite is more of a local action group. As far as I can see consciousness as opposed to membership has actually held up quite well in this context. A number of union-sponsored surveys have shown a lot of people would join unions if they knew how or which one or if their employment was more secure. General social surveys that have asked similar questions since the 80s show people are on the whole *more* pro-union, anti-big business, anti-deregulation and anti-privatisation than people were in the early 80s (with quite a noticeable jump in these regards between surveys taken in 2005 and 2007 in the context of the high profile campaign against the former government’s anti-union laws, although membership only rose slightly). This suggests to me that the former “closed shop” which existed in some industries, while we would have defended as it was removed in the 80s, led to some actually anti-union union members and complacency by many unions in winning workers to basic consciousness. Some time in the first part of the year I’m doing a talk for Socialist Alliance in Melbourne on “class today”, for which I’ll update an outline I did for my PhD a few years ago of such structural and attitudinal changes, and I’ll post that on our blog and notify this list when it’s done. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Richard Seymore: The embourgoisement thesis doesn't have much going for it Leonardo Kosloff: such theories of the aristocracy of labor are unhelpful I noted before that imperialism per se has little or nothing to do with the decline of union density, but more generally some comrades, not least of the state cap variety, tend to downplay or deny the political effects of relations of relative privilege within the working class, internationally via imperialism, and within national social formations in terms of more skilled, educated and/or better off sections of national working classes. Sure the major aspect of imperialism is *not* the direct ripping off of profits from the oppressed countries into the pockets of the advanced countries, including the workers, most capital is invested in the rich countries where most profits are made and more intense exploitation in the technical sense happens etc etc. But that’s not really the point here, as an imposed international division of labour and unequal terms of trade still maintain a basic division in the world and big relative difference in conditions of life of rich country workers vis a vis the poor (including relative stability and apparent democracy), which I think is associated with feelings of superiority and lack of solidarity among rich country workers vis a vis their Third World brothers and sisters, though clearly not in any homogeneous and permanent sense (i.e. relative privilege within the working class is quite different from becoming bourgeois). Similarly positing an “aristocracy of labour” within a rich country is a useful concept, related to illusions in reformism, although it’s not useful to simplistically pose this as one homogenous bloc with a determinate political effect. Of course better off workers have often been radicals, from highly skilled engineers like Tom Mann in the late nineteenth century to the numerous teachers, IT workers and the like who are Greens activists today. I wrote about this last year in response to material from Socialist Alternative (dissident IST group here) which exaggerated the “middle class” nature of the Greens, confusing the nature of the working and middle classes today in the process in terms of not accounting for differentiation within the working class. The Greens in my opinion are more about particular skilled and educated sections of the working class, at least in membership and voting base, and this conditions their strengths and weaknesses. (Note though that the article linked to below, in comparing the class nature of the voting bases of the Greens, Labor and the conservatives, does contain an error in my typology of class structure derived from a social survey, in that I mistakenly included lower level supervisors in the ‘salaried manager’ section of the middle class rather than properly in the working class. I haven’t got around to fixing this. Anyway the point that there is no statistical difference evident between the *class* as opposed to the “status” nature of Greens and Labor voters, and as opposed to both these groups of voters and conservative voters, stands). ‘A response to Socialist Alternative on the Greens and class' http://links.org.au/node/1938 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Almost exactly the same figures here in France, as far as unionizing is concerned. Around 10-11% of the workforce is unionized, and only around 8% in the private sector. The number of unionized workersd keeps falling, due to, in my opinion : a) the shift away from heavy industry (car manufacturing, steel production, ...) towards the service industry. b) extreme casualization of the workforce and out-sourcing, which means workers are cut off from each other. c) high unemployement (around 11%) d) increase in the control of middle-management resulting in fear of being singled out. e) decrease in the size of the workforce in many firms. Workers have no control over their role in the production process, are periodicaly shifted from one production role to another, meaning that they see themselves as mere labour input, perfectly intercheangeable cogs. The failure of unions to mobilize workers outside heavy industry (petro-chemicals, auto-manufacturing, transport, railways, steel production, chemicals..) and education-health (teachers, hospital workers, social workers...) resulted in the failure of the 10/10 movement to counter Sarkozy's policies. We must find ways to organize among casual labourers, workers who are employed by employment agencies (Manpower in France), serive workers (shops, shopping malls, small businesses, the Telecom and internet sector...) Any ideas on this very real problem ? Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:05:46 +0100 Dan d.koech...@wanadoo.fr writes: Almost exactly the same figures here in France, as far as unionizing is concerned. Around 10-11% of the workforce is unionized, and only around 8% in the private sector. Unionization levels in France have long been close to those of the US, but the big difference between the two countries, it seems to me, is that in France enjoy much greater prestige and public support than they do in the US. In France, labor actions will often be supported by workers, who are not themselves union members, whereas that sort of thing seems almost unthinkable in the US. The number of unionized workersd keeps falling, due to, in my opinion : a) the shift away from heavy industry (car manufacturing, steel production, ...) towards the service industry. b) extreme casualization of the workforce and out-sourcing, which means workers are cut off from each other. c) high unemployement (around 11%) d) increase in the control of middle-management resulting in fear of being singled out. e) decrease in the size of the workforce in many firms. Ditto for the US, UK, and many other advanced capitalist countries. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math The failure of unions to mobilize workers outside heavy industry (petro-chemicals, auto-manufacturing, transport, railways, steel production, chemicals..) and education-health (teachers, hospital workers, social workers...) resulted in the failure of the 10/10 movement to counter Sarkozy's policies. We must find ways to organize among casual labourers, workers who are employed by employment agencies (Manpower in France), serive workers (shops, shopping malls, small businesses, the Telecom and internet sector...) Any ideas on this very real problem ? Ring in the New Year. Start the year off right with a free camera phone from ATT. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4d3ae64e7adf57f930bst05vuc Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Unionization rate drops to 6.9% in private sector
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 1/22/2011 7:05 AM, Dan wrote: The number of unionized workers keeps falling, due to, in my opinion: Perhaps it isn't so difficult to understand as we're making it out to be, we just don't want to accept it. More than 150 years ago, Engels was writing to Marx: “...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.” * [see footnote] * * * Of course, Britain is now not the only country in that position. A handful of countries have organized themselves into a cartel that exploits the whole world and where even the AVERAGE worker enjoys a standard of living which most workers in the rest of the world could barely imagine. THIS worker, in particular, was shocked to realize that once you counted his 401K and medical, etc., his Total Rewards in 2010 was in the six figures. I was curious to look it up last December since --after a couple of decades at this company-- I'd just been told I would be let go in a restructuring and would soon lose access to the web page showing my total rewards. Which I think goes to show that Engels's bourgeois proletariat is a two-side coin, and I just got my face shoved into the side opposite bourgeois. But then again, I'm getting several months of severance pay, plenty of time, many would say, to find a new job. The point is, yes, workers in the United States, Britain, France and so on are still exploited and screwed over by their bosses, but they are ALSO part of nations --bourgeois imperialist nations-- that exploit other nations through the mechanisms of financial markets, unequal exchange and --yes-- sometimes just plain extortion. And --judging by the differentiated situation of working people generally in imperialist countries as opposed to colonial and semicolonial countries-- the privileges that come with this exploitation of other nations are not limited to ONE class in the exploiting nation. I think by now it would be obvious that something there is that doesn't love a class in the leading capitalist countries, that wants them gone, that undermines unions, solidarity, militancy, and even any clear independent expression of the working people as a political constituency. That something, I believe, is the nationalism of the oppressor, a nationalism cemented by privilege, and that is the BOURGEOIS side of Engels's bourgeois proletariat. Joaquín * A brief aside on hyper-links: Engels was writing to Marx, in a world where hyper links existed, would have linked to the original. And I would have rephrased it to say that In this connection, Lenin quoted Engels writing to Marx, and linked the Lenin article there also. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
