Hans writes:
>Excuse my exuberance, I am so happy to be on this list. I will try to
>be more serious and also more specific. If the capitalists introduce
>new machinery, so that the workers see that they are producing more,
>and at the same time real wages are not rising, then this will be
>taken as such an affront by the workers that they will simply not go
>for it.
Hans, I share the exuberance over your presence on the list, but not your
conclusions. You state this claim as if it were a theorem, but I don't see
it. Capitalists in the US have been introducing new machinery right along,
and real wages have been falling since the late 1970s. If workers have
taken this as an "affront", it has been on strictly individual terms and not
as a self-conscious class, and they have most certainly "gone for it" for
almost 20 years. In 1994 they helped elect a Congress (as we have now seen)
sure to make the situation even worse.
> Just as they would not go for slavery.
I don't see the claimed equivalence.
> No unions are
>necessary, no organization is necessary, they will oppose this *as
>one man*.
But they haven't.
> All the time the capitalists told them: we cannot pay you
>more because there is not more to go around. Now they see that there
>is more to go around, and they will demand at least a part of it.
But they haven't.
In puzzlement, Gil