We must be careful not to be overly influenced by the capitalist's propaganda. Capitalism is not as popular as they make out and workers are not as conservative or stupid as they portray us.

I have been thinking about a few things today. I have been retired for a few years (one of those greedy overpaid public sector workers) and that has meant that I have been absent from the class struggle in a particular way. I no longer have my Union activity that consumed my life for so long and I miss that.

When I say “Union activity” I don’t mean doing phone banking for the candidates of Wall Street in the Democratic Party or walking precincts for them. I mean the day to day struggle in the workplace, what a fellow Union activist used to refer to as, “Where the rubber meets the road.” It may not seem important, but in my immediate workplace which was overwhelmingly men (one time all men), we fought and won women’s showers and we won a struggle to shift the drip feed urinal cleansers in the men’s bathroom from in front of our faces to the side. These simple things didn’t happen without a fight. Struggle teaches us great things.

It was probably the most rewarding and the most exhausting and difficult period of my life. I know it was where I got the best education.

I got to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this morning and read the economic analysis of our times by Greg Ip, who is no lightweight. He is the US economics editor of the “Economist” the respected capitalist journal based in Britain. Mr. Ip goes on and on about a number of things I am interested in but he mentioned something that made me stop and think for a while.

Ip is concerned about restraints on capital and the interference of the state in the marketplace. Defending the misery and devastation that the market wreaks on humanity and the planet (theoreticians of the free market like Ip refer to it as “creative destruction") Ips finds in the US some hope as we love free enterprise which gives us an edge of our (really their) rivals

“Only 43% of Japanese have positive views about free markets, compared to 68% of Americans” he writes quoting the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

So I have been thinking about this. My first thought was that Pew also found that over 30% of Americans look favorably on socialism. Then I began to think a bit more about it and something I have expressed many times to my wife, who was born here, as well as to friends and co-workers; and that is that the US working class are in the forefront of the ideological onslaught of capitalism. In one sense, the US working class are the first victims of the capitalist offensive, of the system whose “generals had been the most ruthless of his oppressors”, wrote John Burns, the British 19th century socialist and trade Union activist. *

The US media is the most censored in the so-called free world. The US working class has the worst pay and working conditions, they have no maternity leave to speak of, a dismal amount of time off compared to the Europeans and no national health system. We are among the poorest when it comes to public transit. And television is something else for those of us not brought up here; we live in a 24 hour marketplace.  I could go on but I think you understand what I mean.

We have had no national political mass party of our own and this is significant in that a party is different from the Union. A party fights for political power. The British workers and the German workers have had a mass workers' party through which they can wage a political struggle with the political representatives of the capitalists. In the trade Union in the main we discuss wages, jobs, issues about the job. Many Unions do more and globalization has changed the Union’s outlook considerably but in the main, economic issues are what workers deal with in the Union. But in a working class political party, issues like trade, the environment and other social matters have more significance and that party fights to be the party in power in order to implement some of these reforms. This has a major effect on the consciousness of working people.

The Union leaders today have no significant difference with the capitalists, the employers, bankers, corporate chiefs, when it comes to society and how they view it. The head of the steelworkers this week sounded no different than a steel mill owner chiding the Chinese bureaucracy for undervaluing their currency and calling on the capitalist politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties to punish China. This protectionist sentiment is no answer to the crisis of overproduction that is an inherent problem for capitalism and makes international solidarity impossible. It is an important question but I am not going to say more on it now.

So leaving aside how the question on the support or no support of the free market was put to workers here in the US by the capitalist institution, the Pew group. I said to myself, Despite massive propaganda day in and day out on the merits of the free market. Despite socialism being linked with Stalinism in the capitalist media whenever it comes up and despite the garbage movies that come out of Hollywood on all sorts of subjects, including the Unions which is not common but when it occurs usually mostly teach us that the Mafia built the Unions. And despite the billions of dollars and billions of media time on the worst television in the industrial democracies, that is spent perpetuating the false idea that individualism is what makes society advance and that humans are inherently rotten-------despite all this, only 68% of Americans have positive views about the free market according to their own findings.

This is compounded by the fact that there is no social force combating this ideology so just like the political arena, US capitalism has a complete monopoly in the struggle for the consciousness of the working class. The leaders of the organized working class in this country, that is, the heads of the International Unions that make up the AFL-CIO and Change to Win group have no independent position at all. They offer no alternative to this ideology and instead support it..

So given all this and that the capitalist class has to drag out its experts to write articles on the economic state of affairs aimed at cheering their class up and the best they can come up with is to boast that 68% of Americans look favorably on the free market, I feel very upbeat. It is a reflection of the fear and weakness of our enemies and the strength and potential that we workers have. It shows me what is will happen in the face of significant movement.

I should add that I have often been reluctant to put it this way, that the US working class is the first victim of the ideological war that the capitalist class wages in order to maintain control. The reason is that liberals, particularly left wing and especially white liberals, tend to have a contempt for workers really and industrial workers in the advanced economies in particular.

But then I’m not directing my remarks at them.

* The Great Strike, John Burns. Quoted in: Live Working or Die Fighting, by Paul Mason