[Marxism] Re Abandoning the working class or context

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I came across this article during my daily pillaging of the Monthly
Review archives (the most indispensable publication for socialists and
serious radicals, in my opinion), and thought it was extremely pertinent
to all the discussion and debate we've been having here about the
American working class. It is written by Michael Yates, a longtime labor
educator and activist, who's authored a couple great books, namely 'Why
Unions Matter' and 'Naming the System'. I should add that I offer this
not in the spirit of any kind of condescension - I don't see how
pointing to good reading material can possibly be so - but yes, I am in
general agreement with the analysis Yates lays out:

full: http://monthlyreview.org/700yates.htm

*· 1 ·*

Capitalism is a system of production and distribution driven by the
ceaseless efforts by capitalists to accumulate capital, that is, to
maximize both profits and the growth of capital. Accumulation, in turn,
is made possible by the exploitation of wage laborers, persons without
any direct access to society's productive property. Workers are forced
to sell their ability to work but when they do, they are owed nothing by
their employers except a wage. That is, the employers have no social
obligation to the workers; their relationship to them is impersonal in
the extreme. It follows that, in the abstract, employers do not care
anything about the workers' "characteristics." To them, black workers
are interchangeable with whites, men with women, one nation's workers
with those of any other. Employers are, in a word, equal-opportunity
exploiters. They will replace one worker with another, move their
capital to take advantage of cheaper labor (whatever its
characteristics), and pit one group of employees against another,
whenever such actions will, in their view, make it easier for them to
accumulate capital.

Isolated and disorganized at first, workers eventually figure out what
is happening to them. Herded together in factories and deskilled by the
detailed division of labor and mechanization, they come to see that they
must collectively organize to oppose their exploitation. If capital
considers them to be one exploitable mass, that is how they must
conceive of themselves. "In unity there is strength." "An injury to one
is an injury to all." "The working class and the employing class have
nothing in common." And, of course, "Workers of all countries, unite."
As workers come to see themselves as an undifferentiated mass, they take
action, forming unions that strike, picket, and boycott, and
constituting political parties that vie for state power. Marxists
believe that this propertyless mass of men and women, of all shades of
color, and of every nation, is nothing less than the historic agent of
the overthrow of capitalism and the beginning of communism.

*· 2 ·*

At the high level of abstraction implied in the words above, all is
clear. There are capitalists and there are workers; their interests are
diametrically opposed; and workers will unify themselves to end their
exploitation. Unfortunately, when we make our analysis less abstract,
when we confront the world in all of its complex and historical
concreteness, matters are not so clear. Two important problems confront
the unity of the world's workers.^1 First, capitalism has always
developed in the context of a nation, with an active and complicit
state. Second, capitalism has, from its beginning, developed unevenly in
different parts of the world. The original capitalist nations of Europe
and, later, those special cases of the United States and Japan
subjugated the rest of the world through their military and economic
might, creating an imperialist system of rich and poor capitalist
nations. These twin developments, nationalism and imperialism, have
erected substantial barriers against the unity of the workers of the world.

If capital is bound geographically within a nation, it is certainly
possible that organized workers will be able through their own actions
to compel their employers to pay them more money, offer better benefits,
reduce their hours, and better their working conditions. They will not
need solidarity from workers in other nations to achieve these things.
They may also be able to contest for state power on their own, so to
speak. English craftsmen could and did organize effectively within
England, and they did not require the help of French or German workers.
The same is true for workers in the United States. Automobile workers
organized the great sitdown strikes that brought General Motors to heel
and, while they needed their wives, other workers, and some sympathy
from the governor and the courts, they did not need an alliance with
Mexican or Canadian workers to establish their union and win their first
collective-bargaining agreements.

Not needing the support of workers in other nations does not, of course,
mean that such support might not be useful or that it should not be
requested. Perhaps the position of English craftsmen and U.S. automobile
workers would have been even stronger—if not in the short run, then
certainly in the long run—had they aligned themselves with the workers
of other nations. So, why hasn't international solidarity been labor's
rallying cry from the beginning? Two reasons suggest themselves. First,
the power of nationalism as an ideology of exclusiveness quickly became
very powerful. The establishment of official languages, the institution
of a universal propaganda mechanism in the public schools, and the
drafting of working people into national armies all had the effect of
encouraging workers to be loyal to the nation. The converse of this
loyalty has been distrust or even hatred of those who are "foreign." My
father was a union-factory laborer for forty-four years, but his life
experiences were not conducive to international solidarity. The Second
World War, especially, shaped him into an almost fanatical supporter of
the U.S. government (and de facto supporter of U.S. capital in most
respects) and into an outright xenophobe when it came to the Japanese or
the Soviets or the Chinese.

Second, nationalism in the advanced capitalist nations was intimately
connected to imperialism. The vicious exploitation of workers and
peasants in Africa, Asia, and Latin America went hand-in-hand with the
promotion of a racist ideology that taught that these peoples either
deserved what they were getting or were lucky to be associated with the
rich nations. Furthermore, the surplus value pumped out of the
peripheral nations gave the large multinational corporations money
which, under enough trade-union pressure, they could be convinced to
share with workers. This went along with successful efforts by the
corporations and the government to co-opt labor leaders, through the
formation of various kinds of labor-management organizations and
assignment to public boards and commissions. The goal here was to
convince labor's leaders, as well as union members, that imperialism was
good for workers in the core capitalist nations. All of these efforts
were, for the most part, successful. Labor organizations in all of the
advanced capitalist countries have not only supported their own
multinationals in the brutal exploitation of the economies and workers
of the poor nations, they have even supported wars in which the workers
of one rich nation fought against those of another.

*· 3 ·*

full: http://monthlyreview.org/700yates.htm

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