PEN-L message, Re: All-out assault on UAW

>> Why is it that it is so much more difficult for workers to see
themselves as a class than for immigrants to identify with each other?
The media had given the impression that a good number of
second-generation immigrants saw a continue inflow of immigration
undermining their own position. <<

Comment

I have thought about this question (Why is it that it is so much more difficult for workers to see themselves as a class?) for a life time. Many people I have talked to in my life and scores of writers in American history of every conceivable ideology and body politic speak of the relative good life of the American workers and their absolute good life, as standard of living, compared with the majority of humanity. And how an awareness of this good life is the basis for large groups of workers to identify their interest with their employer and the capitalist as a class.

The Leninists and Marxist of all persuasions, speak of a bribery of the American workers as the lynch pin holding in place concepts and ideology that justify compliance with the laws of our bourgeois society. Other speak of racism as a social bond in which various ethnic groups and peoples identify themselves on the basis of those folks they understand are "just like them."

I believe that none of the above describes the social logic of our life.

What if the question . . . "Why is it that it is so much more difficult for workers to see themselves as a class" . . . is posed incorrectly or not even a valid question in the first place?

I'm just saying and not trying to be incorrigible. What if we have been looking at this thing called the working class and its unity and identifying itself as a cohesive class with certain more than less obvious common interest . . . all wrong? What if it turns out that it is not possible for the working class to move as a class as the result of huge sections of the working class perceiving themselves as being fundamentally different from other sectors of the working class?

It has been extremely difficult for me to get honest with myself and the keyboard over the years but it gets easier with each passing day. I mean that my own ideas and what I imagine myself to think and believe is bound up with the social logic we are an intimate part of and attempting to understand.

My experience or what I imagine to be my experience leads me to believe that it is impossible to unite a poor worker with a more economically secure and prosperous worker as a social group or class sector. These poor and more economically stable sections of the working class in fact express a social logic that says they have different class interest in their daily living and experience.

For instance, why would Walmart workers and most of the very real working class - making lets say under $25,000 annually, give two cents about the UAW as a union and its workers? Here I do not means envy or jealousy but an awareness of class divergence. Most of the autoworkers live in neighborhoods with others whose economic status allows them to occupy the same neighborhood. Most of my working life in auto I did not live in the most poverty stricken neighborhoods by choice . . . my money said I could live somewhere else and I did.

The working class as a whole does not understand its economic interest and perceive itself as a class or rather I think we look at this thing called the working class through romantic lens. The reason a wealthy worker cannot be united with a poor worker is because the wealthy worker intuitively understand his relative wealth (absolute in comparison with the poverty stricken hoards of earth) is the result of the poor worker being poor. That is the skilled workers understand he is paid more because he possesses a skill. The tenured professor is paid more than the untenured and the former generally has more job seniority than the latter. The doctor is paid more than the nurse and the RN - registered nurse, is paid more than the LPN, license practical nurse.

I am trying to get a hold of this thing called class without a bunch of ideological baggage and kowtowing to ones particular flavor of Marx and Lenin. As long as we define class as a practical body of politics on the basis of its abstract setting we remove ourselves from the actuality of our lives. Telling me for the better part of 40 years that class is a relationship to the means of production and a property relations tell us nothing about the reality of class as American history.

Damn near everyone in America - 290 million folks, is working class or proletarian, meaning having no other means of consumption of the society products - from water to housing to transportation, etc., other than the sale of their labor power. Class must also involve dimensions of wealth. Class must also - for us, embrace the subjective dimensions expressed in group behavior or the behavior of segments of the working class.

This is a very complex issue and simply quoting Marx - (which no one really does because he did not write much about what is class and its definition), for 150 years, without attempting to describe the reality of class we face . . . Well, this is not for me.

A huge section of our working class came out on the immigration issue - well over a million, because this sector or section of our working class views its class interest from the standpoint of the plight of the immigrate worker. In a real way it seems to me that this movement of the Mexcian/Chicano sections of the working class mimic certain behavior within the working class during the Civil Rights era.

I reject the ideology and politics that simply label the white workers as racist as an explanation of their aloofness from the era of struggle against Jim Crow. The white workers fight have been for economic expansion as the basis of their mobility within the working class while the African American had to fight against the system of segregation as the basis of their entry and mobility within the working class. If we close our eyes to color for a moment, what we are left with is an abstract motion of sections and sectors of the working class. One sector enters and stabilizes its employment as the less skilled at the bottom of the industrial social order, while the seniority sections of the working class advance up the social ladder on the basis of expansion of the entire system. This class divergence is expressed in the ideological realm as say white chauvinism or male supremacy as rationales for a more elementary logic.

In my opinion this was most certainly the case with the Irish and Italian workers at the turn of the last century. Exclusion was the case with say the Chinese immigrants, which is just another way of saying workers from China or Chinese who immigrant to America and become part of its working class.

Immigration awareness or "old world historical remembrance," is part of the identify of all the peoples of America and most certainly our working class. In the case of the Mexican immigrant, we witness class divergence within the American working class based on ones understanding and lived experience as a complex of competing economic units and social position within the pecking order. This is the abstraction of course.

In real life many blacks are utterly backwards or just as backwards as their white counterparts in demanding closed or regulated borders to limit the pressure of the immigrant workers on wages. These backwards social groupings within the working class is a complex movement, where I have discovered they are formed on specific issues and then re form with different players on other issues. There is a section of third and four generation immigrants and Chicano's that feel the newly arrived Mexican workers threatens their economic security.

The point is that I believe we approach class unity wrong and the question . . . "Why is it that it is so much more difficult for workers to see themselves as a class? . . . may not even be valid, because class is a complex and varied experience. I believe the proper way to formulate the class question is "how do we win a critical majority of workers - or a deceive section in motion, over to specific class stirrings of sectors - the poorest sector, of the working class?"

Of course we have to compromise with and not ignore the striving of not so poor sections of the working class in their moral option to bourgeois rule.

I guess here I get kicked out of Marxism for not being a true believer.

And the UAW is going to be very alone in its efforts to protect the livelihood of its members. It is not like the UAW has a history of compassion towards the unorganized and poorer workers. Being a union means protecting the economic interest of your members at the exclusion of those who are not members or why join?

It is not like the UAW is going to stop plant closing. The process being faced at GM and Delphi was faced by the Chrysler workers some time ago, when they spun off their "parts workers." The UAW as we have known it is the past was the United Automobile, Agricultural Implements, Aerospace Workers and this form of industrial unionism its way beyond its end. The last large group of workers brought into the UAW in Detroit was the Casino workers.

Very complex issue. Lots of change under way that will destroy the last remaining ideological concepts of the industrial workers as the pistons in the combustible engine of revolutionary social change. The engines of the future have no industrial configured pistons as such.

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