[Marxism] On workerism

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Haines Brown: "Walter L. was upset with the workerism of the SWP. Given my
comments above, I fail to understand his point. I wonder if he would specify
in what sense the SWP was workerist. More broadly, how is the left generally
workerist in a negative sense of the word? This seems to me as a very
important issue that strikes at the heart of what we are all up to."

There is a separate Yahoo group dedicated to discussing SWP issues. The
specifics of the SWP's degeneration into one of the more bizarre workerist
sects are considered off-topic here, and if Haines wants to dig into it, he
should look into that group.

But, briefly, on "workerism" as a generalized political phenomenon on the
left, it includes things like denigrating various social movements because
they aren't real "workers" movements; centering all your efforts in unions
and neglecting/abstaining from political struggles, glorification of
economic struggles as the "real" class struggle and so on.

Many will not agree, but I consider attempts to interpret various social
struggles solely in CLASS terms as a form of workerism, though I think class
reductionism is a better term.

The issue is a big one on the U.S. Left because, although Marxist analysis
says the working class is the only revolutionary class and the only class
with the social power to change society and so on, the plain, unvarnished
truth is that however much those statements may be true on a world-historic
scale, they are not true in any practical political sense in the United
States TODAY and have not been true since the 1940's. 

This means that there is a much bigger problem that workerism is just a
symptom of. Marxism is supposed to be the conscious expression of an actual
movement going on before our very eyes, but THAT movement, at least in THIS
historic period in THIS country, does not exist. There is no "class for
itself" movement of the workers as a class, and even the union movement and
economic struggles over wages and working conditions, which Marx and Engels
viewed as the  PRECURSOR of the actual class-political struggle of the
workers, has retrogressed many decades. And even such unions as exist today
by and large do not function as workers organizations, but rather as
businesses that workers pay to handle negotiations with the employers, sort
of a poor man's version of a Hollywood agent. 

Moreover, we don't see the sort of pitched battles for unionization that
were common in the first couple of decades of the 20th Century, when the
rate of unionization was comparable to what it is today. The reality is that
the level of economic struggles by the workers has never been lower in the
United States. 

Yet family incomes have fluctuated within a narrow range in constant-dollar
terms for nearly four decades, and all sorts of other indicators (average
size of houses; number of cars; number of TV's, radios, phones; number and
type of appliances; amounts spent on entertainment, etc.) suggest that in
material, use-value terms, the standard of living of most working people has
gradually increased over this period. 

Those facts and many others point to a central conclusion: U.S. imperialism
has been able to use its superprofits from its world domination to "bribe"
its own working class with concessions to the point where "Americanism" has
overwhelmed class consciousness and the latter REALLY exists to a
significant degree, as a rule, only among the minority of workers who are
also nationally oppressed.

This sort of phenomenon was first analyzed by Marx and Engels in relation to
Britain in the second half of the 1800's; then by Lenin in relation to
opportunism during WWI; and then by the national and colonial question
commission of the Second Congress of the Communist International and that
Congress as a whole, which came to the conclusion that no revolution was
possible in the European imperialist countries unless the ability of these
countries to draw superprofits from the colonial world was stopped.

That conclusion has certainly been confirmed by the nearly 80 years of
experience since the Second Comintern Congress, and although imperialism in
that day was based on one country directly and exclusively exploiting
certain other countries or territories (colonialism), and that morphed after
WWII into the neocolonial domination and the generalized exploitation of the
Third World mainly through the mechanism of a manipulated world market,
multinational institutions, the world financial system etc., the practical
result is the same: the imperialist countries reap tremendous super-profits
from their imperialist domination.

I think we can safely say that talk of a classical workers revolution in the
main imperialist countries while these sorts of conditions prevail, while
the capitalists retain their ability to "bribe" much/most of the working
class within the imperialist country, is just hot air.

In this sense, I would say pretty much the ENTIRE Marxist left in the United
States suffers from workerism to at least some significant degree.

Joaquin


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