[PEN-L:29475] Following Proyect & Yoshie: Who Make the revolution?

[Hari Kumar <hari.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Now that the anti-patronising is dealt with:
The substantive issue is highlighted by Yoshie's reply. Thanks for that
Y.
This view of Louis' -  I interpret to be a variant of defeatism. It gets
to asking of course, who is the 'leading class' of a revolution?
Some will not like even that phraseology, but it is still a stark
underlying reality - that "leaders" and "leading classes" - are in fact,
needed.
To look at the surface 'calm' of the working class over the last 30
years - is to look at a static picture. I think this was pointed out
before by Scott. It is definitely somewhat depressing if anything else.
But then - we must all grow up & be "realistic". Now which teachers in
the pantheon of bourgeois thought have offered that?
Louis: Surely you cannot seriously believe that the student activists
are the spine & backbone of any future tumults? Not that they cannot be
part of and indeed, perhaps key cogs - as described in "What is to be
Done?" (Please drop your spoons now, & do not choke on your rice
krispies Louis or JD - Perhaps no one may be there to do a Heimlich
Manoeuvre) But ...... only in so far as they identify (even subsume)
into the class.
Yoshi: Your stats are interesting. But certainly my reading is that
while there are more workers/children of workers in higher education -
they are still the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly enough Michael
Zwieg agrees with your overview:
"There seems to be relationship at all between the occupation of colleeg
graduates & the occupation of their fathers, suggesting that a college
education does provide a ticket out of the Working class"; "The Working
class majority - America's best kept secret"; Ithaca 2000; p. 44.
But he then goes right on to say:
"In 1996 however fewer than a quarter fo all people over 25 in the US
had actually competed a colelge education...... & college students are
drawn disproportionately form middle & upper-class families".
I have a difficult time seeing the majority of workers getting a higher
education. I came from a petit-bourgeois bankrupted family. Unless I had
got a full-grant - I would not have been the first of my extended family
to get a university degree. Shortly after my time, Maggie T slashed
student grants. So it is even worse now. Those of the working class that
do go to higher education tend to go to "post-secondary technical
schools & vocational schools" - just as Zweig says happens in the usa
(last citation p. 45). The students in biology & medicine that I teach
now - sure as hell don't come from any manual working class family that
I have recognised. With ONE exception - the Punjabi immigrants whose
parents are farmers.
So - who makes the revolution?
Hari Kumar