Mearsheimers' Views are Interesting. But the Working Class Is Irrelevant for Him

He's in for a shock if he lives long enough.

 

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

A great example describing liberal thinking and how it is liberals cannot be trusted allies of the working class any more than Mearsheimer and what he calls the "realists" can. I assume realists like Mearsheimer, if asked would be more honest in his response and just dismiss the working class as irrelevant.

But the realists have a better grasp of society and human behavior under certain conditions; his example of the former US ambassador in Moscow is spot on. Mearsheimer talks of tribal and nationalist unity though but what is missing from the stuff I have watched is the complete absence of the working class. Not only the working class, but a system of production we know as capitalism.  I will admit I have read very little by him.

We are just humans in society it seems.

But for the vast majority of human existence, we have acted collectively, and the social product was not privately owned long before there were class societies and nation states. We learned that this was the best way to survive and also to advance our interests. The same is true with class. We have class interests that are very powerfully expressed at certain times and this in a period where working class history has been viciously suppressed and replaced with identity politics particularly in the US.

More global billions are spent convincing workers that we are not workers and that our position in  a society is due to our individual choices than on wars between nation states most likely. But all the advances we have made, just here in the US, were a product of class solidarity and engaging in class warfare.  In the last analysis, conscious is a product of being as ideas have a material base. As Marx pointed out, the way we earn a living determines our social outlook.

The history books, the mass media, and the education system that the capitalist class controls spend those billions hiding this. But look at this quote from early US colonial history for example:  "A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and views.”  James Madison. 

Or this one from New England laborers in the 1840's, "Brethren we conjure you...not to believe a word of what is being said about your interests and those of your employers being the same. Your interests and theirs are in a nature of things, hostile and irreconcilable.  Then do not look to them for relief...Our salvation must, through the blessing of God, come from ourselves.  It is useless to expect it from those whom our labors enrich." (Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192). That was about the same time as the Chartist movement wasn't it? 

I think there's different class interests expressed from both sides there.

History is full of expressions from the exploited class about the oppressors. From colonial wars to the feudal serfs and even in the US where I once saw on a porta potty wall on in a building site that, "Life is like a turd sandwich, the more bread you have the less shit you have to eat." Rather a crude example I admit, and there were other musings in the bog, some against immigrant workers. But we are a mass of contradictions as they say; I'm not arguing that the propaganda is not effective. Throw enough mud at a wall and some will stick. 

That the heads of organized labor today, the Labor Lieutenants of Capitalism De Leon called them, even the lefty liberal, or "progressive" ones, accept and promote the Team Concept, the view that workers and capitalists have the same economic interests, is a reflection of the crisis of leadership within organized labor and the delay of a mass movement against a decades long assault by US capitalism on US workers, the middle class and poor.