More Class Struggle

Lots of parties and pundits courting the "working class" lately. They generally mean wage workers, maybe blue-collar, or "people who shower at night rather than in the morning." They might not have any college, they might work at a trade or craft. You know em when you see em.They might be ready to challenge the boss with collective action or they might kiss the boss's ass in hopes of favors. According to the radical Left there remains: the "possibility of forging a creative, non-sectarian “socialism from below”, in contact with the stirrings of the forces of labour." Quote from an article titled The late, late Capitalism Show by Joseph Choonara in International Socialism This "stirring" probably refers to calls from the UAW to coordinate contract renewals among organized labor so as to create the threat of a general strike across sectors. This would be a powerful gesture were it to come to pass, inspiring others to organize. The question remains however; organize for what? Greater levels of production and economic growth? A more just distribution of the surplus? System change that might preserve the biosphere? This working class also finds Trump and MAGA something to rally around. What Seymour calls "disaster nationalism" has sparked a fervor for disruption and patriotic desire to kick China's ass. With more fossil fueled growth they can have more treats and the CO2 can be sucked up by carbon capture and whatever. Meanwhile the liberal view is that the old antagonism is a relic. " Perhaps most strikingly, the old class divide between rich and poor and capital and labor has seemingly vanished." Nate Cohn NYTimes political analyist. According to this cohort, the friction is between competing superpowers and proxies, it's about who can out innovate who with new technology. Competition between the best and the brightest. Workers only exist to buy the gizmos the clever ones invent while somehow staying ahead of the machines wanting their jobs. What happens when all you have is "dead labor"? The one thing these workers know is that whatever keeps them from living like folks "out there", that is Syria or Bangladesh or Madagascar or Haiti or you name it, the plethora of gangster-controlled or imploding states around the globe, they support it. Keep America Great. Whatever it takes. Fuck the rest of them.