[PEN-L:28189] Re: RE: To Nancy Brumback <hari.kumar@sympatico.ca>

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 7/18/02 6:12:07 PM Pacific Daylight Time, Nancybrumback@xxxxxx writes:


> <<iii) The W.C. has nothing to lose "but its chains";>>
>
> Maybe when Marx wrote the Manifesto, and the working class was suffering horribly, but not now, when workers, women, and nature are exploited freely in the underdeveloped so that a portion of our working class can continue to live in the comfort to which it has grown accustomed. If we are going to define the working class as Zweig does, then we must also recognize that economic differences persist in that class just as they persist in the entire society. I just think that at different times and different places throughout history, different segments of the working class, whether defined in terms of income, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity or whatever, are going to be willing to listen to socialist ideas.
>
> <<I participants
>  have a 'false consciousness' that they are somehow not workers. In
> reality, that is all they (& I) are.>>
>
> And isn't it too bad that they don't realize it. This is exactly why revolutionists need to relate to them in terms of what else they are besides workers, and teach them the facts about their condition: that they are workers, and the capitalist class is their real enemy.


Comment:

The working class is most certainly stratified as your statement says or what old school Marxist like myself call "sectors of the working class." As we live out our lives the stratification of the working class is undergoing profound changes and the historic emphasis of a section of the Marxist movement on the industrial proletariat is probably outdated thinking.

The era of the last reform movement in capital arose on the basis of the mechanization of agriculture or the qualitative expansion of the quantitative configuration of the industrial infrastructure and birth what was called the Civil Rights Movement. Later the various sector movements of which freedom from harassment and discrimination based on sexual being was an _expression_, ushered forth after the primary - not total, completion of the legal reformulation of equality took place.

Today, it seems that the working class movement is seeking its new forms of _expression_ and demands.


Melvin P.