Re: Re: Re: the Kaiser

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>I've only sampled this material today, and its been over two decades
>since I read it carefully, but my impression was and is that _It was
>ONLY an upper strata of workers (and even within that strata primarily
>leaders, not rank and file, that Lenin regarded as being bribed by
>imperialist profits_.
>
>Carrol

Of course. Lenin referred to the upper strata as furnishing "the bulk of
the membership of co-operatives, of trade unions, of sporting clubs and of
numerous religious sects" in Great Britain. The trade unions that Lenin
referred to were craft unions, which in the USA were composed of the upper
strata as well. Those outside the craft unions did not benefit from
imperialism, at least that's the argument.

During the 1930s, the unorganized and excluded masses of lower strata
workers were drawn into the industrial trade union movement (and it was a
movement) that challenged capitalism and imperialism. Although the CIO
concentrated more on specifically American problems of economic and racial
injustice, it also solidarized with working class resistance throughout the
world.

During the cold war two things happened. The prosperity made it easier for
workers to forget they were workers. When an auto worker can buy a 4
bedroom house in Detroit and own a boat, etc., it makes it more difficult
for them to achieve class consciousness. On top of this, you have the
problem of reds being purged from the unions. With the long boom and the
anticommunist purges, workers organized in basic industry such as
teamsters, steel, auto, oil and chemical, etc. have evolved into a kind of
upper strata that Lenin talked about in 1916. This is not to say that
militant trade unionism is not possible--just look at the Teamsters for a
Democratic Union--just that socialism on the scale of the 1930s is not on
the agenda.

Louis Proyect
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