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Originally Posted by Robert Schunk
The reason I frequently refer to the America of a century ago is due to the regression which American society has undergone since about 1972, to the extent that today's American social reality resembles that of a century ago more than it resembles that of fifty years ago. I frequently read Comrade Victor Berger's century-old editorials in the Socialist newspaper "The Milwaukee Leader" (published as a book entitled: "Berger's Broadsides") because they speak to the century-old social reality into which the American ruling class has plunged us in the last 50 years.
The Democratic Party's solution to this social crisis is to mystify class conflict by confounding it with racial, religious, sexual and whatnot conflict in order to isolate the working class amidst a sea of petit-bourgois and lumpenproletarian elements who present themselves as "oppressed" rebels against the current unjust social order while hoping nobody notices that the government, the military, academia, the corporate media, and every other instrument of ruling-class power is concertedly supporting the controlled "rebellion".
It's a cute trick if you can get away with it. I see my job as making sure they can't and won't get away with it.
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You're right about this new 'woke' Left representing a kind of controlled rebellion but, given that industrialisation was the very thing that gave Marx's concept of class any real meaning, do you (as a self-proclaimed Marxist) really think that class, and especially class-conflict, is a viable idea within the context of an increasingly de-industrialised West? After all, many of those we'd traditionally consider working class moved away from the very kind of manual and manufacturing jobs that Marx saw as key to their revolutionary potential towards a very different kind of employment: within the service industries, or in white collar jobs, or in many cases continuing in manual or manufacturing work, but as their own bosses. Nor should we forget those made unemployed
as a consequence of de-industrialisation, who became part of the lumpenproletariat as a result.
These people (whatever we want to call them) definitely deserve far better political representation than I currently see them getting from the 'woke'/'progressive' Left but I'm no longer sure that an emphasis on class, especially in terms of Marx's rather narrow and historically-defined concept of it, is particularly helpful to them either right now.