Two hundred years of Waiting for Godot

During the early days of industrial wage-labor, when working conditions were especially brutal, there were movements for labor rights and many were successful to a significant extent. On that basis Marxists thought they saw the potential for the industrial proletariat to become a “class-for-itself” agency of transformational social change.

The extended history, now a period of almost 200 years, shows little evidence of such. And: there’s also little evidence that workers are particularly interested in self-managing their dreary workplaces, not to mention the insane-scale economy as a whole.

The “working-class-for-itself as the primary agency of social change” is like some kind of delusional religious belief. The idea doesn’t correspond to reality. Clinging to it makes the left look disoriented. For example, Howie Hawkins, like so many other “go to the class” radicals, had little success trying to organize his fellow Teamsters to struggle for socialism.

Instead of the potentially broad resonance for a movement to “green” our society (cultivating ecological responsibility by living more lightly, undermining the concentrations of wealth/power of the corporations and nation-states via re-localization) there has been a misguided effort to turn the Green Party into a “Working Class Party.” The concept is retrograde and marginalizing. What the Green Party should be doing is embracing a transformational deep green ideology and encouraging the left to transition from Red to Green.