Class conciousness

[Buddha Samurai Cadre]

Does the drop in class conciousness have anything to do with the closing of the coal mines, the drop in shipyard labour and other exhaustive and very overtly working class Exploitative jobs?

In the old days, there were far less office and intellectual jobs given to workers, so many in industrial towns were forced into either fields shipyards or mines, many straight after school.

Has this labour been moved to the third world on a large pat, in order to disguise what the workers must do to feed this capitalist economy and provide the goods for the rulling class?

BTW, i know we have masses of labourers still in the shipyards mines etc, and im sure we all know the hard and exploitative work they do.

[BAM]

Does the drop in class conciousness have anything to do with the closing of the coal mines, the drop in shipyard labour and other exhaustive and very overtly working class Exploitative jobs?

I don't know if there's been a drop in class consciousness as I don't know how exactly you'd measure it, but there was a drop in class struggle in terms of working days lost to strikes. By the late 1990s it had plummeted. Still, there has been a rise recently. I don't have figures to hand but you can look this up.

Of course it has a lot to do with the decline of mass industry. It was easier for workers to group together if hundreds and thousands all work in the same plants.

However, with the decline of heavy industry in the West, we have seen the rise of militancy elsewhere in the world, eg, Korea, South Africa, Brazil, and so on. The Chinese working class is currently militant and highly organised ... so it's far from over yet ...

[AK]

Does the drop in class conciousness have anything to do with the closing of the coal mines, the drop in shipyard labour and other exhaustive and very overtly working class Exploitative jobs?

In the old days, there were far less office and intellectual jobs given to workers, so many in industrial towns were forced into either fields shipyards or mines, many straight after school.

Has this labour been moved to the third world on a large pat, in order to disguise what the workers must do to feed this capitalist economy and provide the goods for the rulling class?

BTW, i know we have masses of labourers still in the shipyards mines etc, and im sure we all know the hard and exploitative work they do.
Of course it has something to do with it. The drop in class consciousness and the rise of false class consciousness (believing you are "middle class" -or other similar BS) is result of the loss of many stereotypical working class jobs - such as factory work - as they are outsourced to the Third World.
And I don't mean to sound like a self-righteous prick but here's a blog post of mine on the matter that could help you: http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=891

[Jimmie Higgins]

Edit: sorry all these examples are yank-centric but only because I am more familiar with recent US labor struggles.

Certainly the attacks on unions - specifically industrial unions and now, rapidly, public workers unions have effected class consciousness and added to demoralization of workers. But I don't think the decline in consiousness has to do with declines in industrial jobs in the abstract. If there is a correlation I think it has more to do with the decline in union militancy and union power as industry has changed, not the changes in the workforce itself.

For a long time, people didn't think industrial workers were capable of being organized and some of this had to do with the racism and elitism of the trade-union movement before the 1930s, but it also had to do with the difficulty of unionizing people who were supposedly interchangeable and could easily be fired. In the US, the IWW and the CIO were able to break this myth and now we all seem to think that only industrial workers are class-conscious.

A Wal-Mart worker, though a service worker is pretty much in the same position as a industrial worker in the past (before industrial unionism). UPS drivers are just as class conscious as truck drivers used to be and deal with many of the same organizational difficulties.

Now the trade-union bureaucrats tell us that service workers are the "unorganizable" group (but mostly they are just not interested in organizing the unorganized). But the Justice for Janators movement, the UPS strike, the IWW's Starbucks union, repeated attempts of workers to crack Wal-Mart and organize unions there show that it is possible and that workers want to unionize in these sectors.

[Buddha Samurai Cadre]

Of course it has something to do with it. The drop in class consciousness and the rise of false class consciousness (believing you are "middle class" -or other similar BS) is result of the loss of many stereotypical working class jobs - such as factory work - as they are outsourced to the Third World.
And I don't mean to sound like a self-righteous prick but here's a blog post of mine on the matter that could help you: http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=891

Self righteous prick :)

Joking buddy.

An dthanks for the link

[The Ungovernable Farce]

Jimmie Higgins puts it well. I'd also say that there's a connection, but it's not that the change in employment caused the change in consciousness/struggle, it's that (at least in the UK), the destruction of industry was only made possible by the defeat of the mass struggles to retain it, so the low level of struggle and the changing patterns of employment are both a result of the defeats of the industrial struggles of the 1980s.