Three of the most important and transformative movements have had either no or very precarious labour. Look at MAS in Bolivia it's about the social movements and not just workers. Workers will play a big part but you need a broader communist agenda , and this is what Lenin suggested. Look at the October revolution, it was a coalition of workers and peasants. Mao had to rely even more heavily on the peasants as there was very little proletarianization in China.
The issue with over emphasizing workers is that you end up with a situation like the new deal. Workers get a bunch of goodies, but it wasnt until the civil rights movement that Blacks were able to make serious advancements. This is the danger if a worker centric movement, what's to stop it from simply renegotiating the terms of class collaboration for the renewal of the labour aristocracy?
As Malcom X said, it's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. And that means the movement must be for everyone and give all the revolutionary forces in society an equal voice.
But we have these movements and they don't really seem to be changing much. They help but for the large scale changes that are necessary they have to be linked to real power
But I do agree if the workers organization really only consists of one specific slice of the population it will also basically suck ass (kinda like what's happened with feminism and how it mainly caters to the needs of middle and upper class women) and I don't know how you would work around that other than maybe hoping the demographic shift dulls the edges of that particular issue.
In short, support social movements, including unions, if they are strong enough, it will force a state response. If they state is too weak to make adequate concessions, it will be forced to respond violently. This will remove facade over the state and reveal it's true nature: the violent maintenance of class. This will galvanize the militancy of the people. The people, thus galvanized, will produce a professional revolutionaries. The professional revolutionaries should, imo, apply mass line to win the trust of the people through examplary service. Having won the trust of the people, they can unite the social movements against the state. Smash the state, create a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then defend it against the intesified class conflict characterized by the counter revolutionary forces.
Women's movements? Youth movements? Indigenous resistance movements?
Three of the most important and transformative movements have had either no or very precarious labour. Look at MAS in Bolivia it's about the social movements and not just workers. Workers will play a big part but you need a broader communist agenda , and this is what Lenin suggested. Look at the October revolution, it was a coalition of workers and peasants. Mao had to rely even more heavily on the peasants as there was very little proletarianization in China.
The issue with over emphasizing workers is that you end up with a situation like the new deal. Workers get a bunch of goodies, but it wasnt until the civil rights movement that Blacks were able to make serious advancements. This is the danger if a worker centric movement, what's to stop it from simply renegotiating the terms of class collaboration for the renewal of the labour aristocracy?
As Malcom X said, it's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. And that means the movement must be for everyone and give all the revolutionary forces in society an equal voice.
But we have these movements and they don't really seem to be changing much. They help but for the large scale changes that are necessary they have to be linked to real power
But I do agree if the workers organization really only consists of one specific slice of the population it will also basically suck ass (kinda like what's happened with feminism and how it mainly caters to the needs of middle and upper class women) and I don't know how you would work around that other than maybe hoping the demographic shift dulls the edges of that particular issue.
In short, support social movements, including unions, if they are strong enough, it will force a state response. If they state is too weak to make adequate concessions, it will be forced to respond violently. This will remove facade over the state and reveal it's true nature: the violent maintenance of class. This will galvanize the militancy of the people. The people, thus galvanized, will produce a professional revolutionaries. The professional revolutionaries should, imo, apply mass line to win the trust of the people through examplary service. Having won the trust of the people, they can unite the social movements against the state. Smash the state, create a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then defend it against the intesified class conflict characterized by the counter revolutionary forces.