Re: Re: Re: Re: the Kaiser

["Nathan Newman" <nathan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
>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.

And yet blacks are more likely to be in unions than whites at this pont and
the autoworkers and such are an increasingly smaller proportion of the labor
movement.  The largest single new block of workers in the last few years has
been home health care workers with a range of other service workers
following up.

In fact, most studies show that the vast block of white well-paid blue
collor unionists, what was dubbed the "labor aristocracy" by Maoists and
others in the late 60s and early 70s, have been the ones who have suffered
the largest relative decline in wages and standard of living in the last
twenty-five years.  A vestigal group through seniority have held on at a few
outposts like the Big Three automakers, but they are a tiny fraction of the
vast number who saw their wages collapse under them.

And yet that group feeling the collapse of their status did not necessarily
turn to class consciousness- instead race and religious consciousness and
even guin-based cultural consciousness were powerful political organizers.

Which reinforces the idea that bad economic times is not necessarily good
news for the Left.  In fact, historically, militant unionism has done well
only during good times or during times of expected improving times.  This
includes the Depression where unionists made gains only when the New Deal
had gained enough momentum to give hope to folks- and  unionism took a big
step back with the 1938 recession to be revived numerically with the full
employment policies of World War II.

-- nathan Newman