• jon

    Posted 1162 days ago

  • I am pretty much a fan of anything that Vivek Chibber writes. He understands and articulates the difficulties of the socialist and working-class movement unlike any others today. He does move between pessimism and optimism pretty quickly, and I am unsure if he really believes in his words or if he uses them to try to propel a younger generation forwards with ideas:

    Even while there is considerable doubt about what tactics might be effective in our time, we have good reason to be confident in the underlying strategy — of building a politics around and within the working class as it actually exists, not as we wish it to be.

    The final statement is an important one; the socialist tradition has largely become an academic one, and almost anybody can realize that the Left is largely displaced from real labor today. The struggle is understanding the difficulties of workers in the modern world, not idolizing how they should be or should live or what morales they should have. The Left tends to silence those that don't share the same gender, race, or identity based ideals that it self-proclaims.

    Labor organizations can be used to bring people together who have different ideas about the world, no matter how much they clash. Of course, there are some who will never be converted, they wish to see others struggle more than themselves, especially from other races or countries, but there are many in the middle who could be brought into a labor movement who don't share the current Left's ideals, if those were a bit more open and welcoming towards unification and not towards division and atomization as Chibber notes.

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