The Left and Labor
The “left” has for a long time been on an ideological journey away from Work as a fundamental economic factor and cultural community of values. This may seem strange given the obvious world that work possesses, as a value creator, as the putty of a work-sharing economy, as the natural point, for balancing consumption and production. And above all, the political legitimacy it gives the working classes.
That there are major interests that in every way supported this ideological and political desert migration is not difficult to understand. The contradiction that stretches our economy and the building of society between work and capital bears the explanation. In order for capital to maintain its hegemony, the ideological positions of the adversary must be undermined and capital made the primus engine of our civilization.
The explanation for the left’s cancer in the last 50 years, I think, has much to do with the orientation away from the cohesive power and community of values of the working people at work. One’s failure can never be explained by the resistance but only by how one’s own resources are formed and used.
By sucking in both the revolutionary and reformist part of the labor movement and developing an elitist approach to political struggle, the basic preconditions have existed for a drift away from the value of labor to take place. In the case of reformism, by making parliamentary work the governing part of their activities. The revolutionary part in that the question of class power was formulated according to a model in which power was placed in the hands of an intellectual elite in a political party with its environment of line fighting and intrigue. The fact that the movement’s common theoretical basic texts also adhered to a tradition of theoretical academism instead of being characterized by an empirical historical tradition has widened the rift between the movement’s masses and its leaderships. The great drive away from the work of both reformism and revolution has been the choice to see its class problems as a lack of advantage of the opponent. Capital instead of work has therefore come to the fore for discussions and method choices. Marx saw property itself and homelessness as the main problems of the economic-political power system, leading to a political strategy according to very rigid class struggle patterns, to a struggle for life and death in a struggle for power in the state. The theory, the thought model is closed and dogmatic and the control over one’s own struggle is handed over to the already described clique in a political party. This theoretical model is in the absence of the self-movement and dynamics that a focus on the power of the working people as a carrier of work provides.
Due to its fundamental theoretical errors, the last 50 years have been marked by a discussion of economic development and democracy that has been conducted entirely on the terms of capital. Even when a new vision for economic democracy was formulated, it became dependent on capital, and built entirely on capitalism’s destructive accumulation and centralization of capital, packaged in wage earners’ funds, it was intended to lift the working people into a new era of democratic development. , economic democracy.
Political choices are linguistically expressed, that the international labor movement that was formed in the 19th century was named socialism is a legacy of liberal influence. It is the “goodwill” of the government to want to solve the “Social” issue it is about. Socialism was then filled with different content during the decades to come. How the Left has increasingly slipped under the liberal agenda can be described in the view of taxation and the transfer system built on it and the distribution of the value flows of production. Taxation of labor has become increasingly stringent, while capital taxation has declined during the post-war period. In the 1950s, companies in the size paid 30% of a Swedish municipality’s tax base, today their contribution is barely measurable. Criticism of this system is taboo within the left, much due to the looting that bank capital has exposed the public economy to. But neither the former nor the latter is in favor of criticism and discussion.
When the representatives of the working people have switched to competing with capital on its terms, there are no longer any lines of defense to consolidate and maintain, that point occurred for Sweden at the end of 1985, the so-called The November Revolution, when Sweden threw the last defense against international capital overboard. Since then, development has accelerated and we are in a very difficult situation.
During this time, discussions about the role and significance of work have increasingly been pushed aside. The word work has almost become a non-word. That this is the case is confirmed by the only book I have found where the workers’ issue is taken up for a serious discussion, namely “Promoting Abilities – a model for human development”. The book is writing
