Class as a revolutionary force in advanced nations

[Guest1]

I had a weird conversation with an anarchist companera I consider to be pretty intelligent, but I really didn't like the argument that was being made, or the implications of it.

Basically, the analysis was that the west has moved beyond actual production, and is gradually shifting more and more towards service industries and professionals rather than production industry.

That's all fine and dandy.

But then the argument was made that as a result, labour organizing cannot be the basis of any major revolutionary change, that labour doesn't have the same power it once had, as the working class in advanced capitalist countries is basically comprised of people who have little connection to the means of production.

Of course, I disagreed, and said it was a far too limited interpretation of Marxist class warfare, that strategic organizing can guarantee a strong position for labour, as all the shipyards, airports, trucking lanes and train lines, to give one example, are essential to the economy and to those products being moved.

Any response to this "post-industrialist" analysis of Capitalism? I think it's a limiting and defeatist view, and it depressed me quite a bit, which led to a pretty incoherent response.

Which is why i'd like to get some responses and opinions here.

[coda]

I don't have time to make a more extensive comment, but You are right.

<<Of course, I disagreed, and said it was a far too limited interpretation of Marxist class warfare, that strategic organizing can guarantee a strong position for labour, as all the shipyards, airports, trucking lanes and train lines, to give one example, are essential to the economy and to those products being moved.>>

that is correct. all the gears and wheels of a working society depend on the worker. Especially agricultural, import/export, public works infrastructure industries. These things are still produced and moved around manually.

service industries as are paper pushes are not imperative to a running society.

I&#39;ve put all my chips on the labor movement and think of everything else as affinity to that.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Rachel, perhaps? Yeah, WUO-Redux.
Don&#39;t tell her I said that.

The first-world service industry is still part of production, albeit in a way that is less useful in-and-of-itself outside of the dominant logic of capitalism. As such, there is still a large part of the bourgeoisie that relies on the functioning of the first-world working class, and in its absense would find itself, to whatever degree, fuckx0r3d.
That is, capitalism defines what is/isn&#39;t necessary based not on "real" criteria, but on the market. Sam Walton needs the third world, obviously, but he is also reliant on the other end of things - he needs his army of clerks, greeters, and so on. Thus, the contridiction around which the clerks mobilize, and Bob Loblaw struggles to maintain.

[Led Zeppelin]

I basically agree with her, give me her number.

[Guest1]

Originally posted by Virgin Molotov [email protected] 17 2005, 12:45 AM
Rachel, perhaps? Yeah, WUO-Redux.
Don&#39;t tell her I said that.
Haha, yeah. I won&#39;t.

What does WUO-Redux mean?

[coda]

<<But then the argument was made that as a result, labour organizing cannot be the basis of any major revolutionary change, that labour doesn&#39;t have the same power it once had, as the working class in advanced capitalist countries is basically comprised of people who have little connection to the means of production.??

Even those workers are important too and wield much power. the service industry workers who are removed from the of integral parts of production can organize and stop Capitalism,i.e., the flow of money, dead in it&#39;s track. the laborers involved in the imperative mechanisms of keeping resources and infrastructures running smoothly can bring Society to a grinding halt.

Organized labor is the key.

I am wondering what she thinks is the alternative in bringing revolution>?

[Guest1]

I have no idea&#33; She seemed to be implying that we need to shift from a focus on the "big", to the "small". Which... isn&#39;t very clear. I suppose she means local issue-based organizing, though I have no idea how that does not lead to a defeatist attitude and a slippery slope to the abandonment of most of the ultimate goals which we all hold.

Weird, since she&#39;s so violently opposed to people like CrimethInc.

[ComradeOm]

Of course this could simply mean that the focus on revolution continues to shift from the West to developing nations. Which I don&#39;t see as a bad thing. Let&#39;s face it, the prospects of revoltuion in the West have been almost nil for at least 15 years. But as Asia continues to industralise and develop, its workers continue to organise. Western society today is built on cheap Asian goods and should these dry up, or jump in price, the impact will be huge.

[Guest1]

I don&#39;t deny the fact that real change in the west will most likely be triggered by an upset in developing countries. That&#39;s imperialism. I just don&#39;t see any other option but to organize amongst workers to be prepared for such an occurrence, and to expand the class struggle enough so that international workers&#39; solidarity is on the agenda. The point is, when the time comes, how will we be able to implement change? I don&#39;t see issue-based organizing as a viable solution, and I think the working class will still be the only part of society with enough influence and common interest to be capable of such a change.

[percept¡on]

It is very important to note that the current form of advanced capitalism is shifting power from manufacturers to merchants, and so as long as workers in merchants like Wal-Mart and such are difficult to organize (as they always have been), and as long as work becomes more temporary and precarious, it&#39;s going to be difficult to construct a workers&#39; movement capable of taking on big business let alone accomplishing anything politically.

What is for certain is that production is changing and so workers&#39; organizational strategies need to change as well.

[YKTMX]

I had a weird conversation with an anarchist companera I consider to be pretty intelligent

There&#39;s your first mistake :P


De-industrialization is, basically, a myth.

Read this Harman - Workers of the World (http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/harman.htm)

A brilliant analysis of the real trends in terms of production.

Here&#39;s a little snippet:

The argument that the working class has disappeared usually rests on superficial impressions about what is happening to the old industrial working class, at least in the advanced economies. So there is much talk about &#39;deindustrialisation&#39;, the &#39;post-industrial society&#39;, or the &#39;weightless economy&#39;.

Restructuring of industry through successive economic crises has certainly caused some formerly central features of the industrial scene in any locality to disappear. At the same time there has been an increased insecurity of employment and a rise in the proportion of jobs which are part time, temporary or on short contracts. But this does not justify the claim that the working class has disappeared.

Take, for instance, the number of industrial workers in the world&#39;s biggest single economy, that of the US. At the end of the 1980s there was much panic in the US about &#39;deindustrialisation&#39; in the face of challenges to US industrial pre-eminence in fields like auto production and computers. But in 1998 the number of workers in industry was nearly 20 percent higher than in 1971, roughly 50 percent higher than in 1950 and nearly three times the level of 1900:

WORKERS IN INDUSTRY, US22 1900 10,920,000
1950 20,698,000
1971 26,092,000
1998 31,071,000


The working class is in lots of way diffirent to what it was 30 or 40 years ago. It is more mobile, bigger, more diffuse - in some way more nebulous.

[ComradeOm]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 17 2005, 01:01 PM
I don&#39;t deny the fact that real change in the west will most likely be triggered by an upset in developing countries. That&#39;s imperialism. I just don&#39;t see any other option but to organize amongst workers to be prepared for such an occurrence, and to expand the class struggle enough so that international workers&#39; solidarity is on the agenda. The point is, when the time comes, how will we be able to implement change? I don&#39;t see issue-based organizing as a viable solution, and I think the working class will still be the only part of society with enough influence and common interest to be capable of such a change.
Well let’s look at this in a fairly straightforward way. Assuming that major change does take place in the developing nations (I’m looking at China, Taiwan, India etc) how will that impact the West? As you point out the proletariat in the western nations have been significantly weakened by globalisation – the very system that increases worker organisation and class consciousness in the developing countries – and I don’t think its much of an exaggeration to say that the manufacturing sectors (traditionally the bastion of the unions) in a number of North American and European nations now make up a small fraction of the workforce. So your friend has a serious case when she points out that traditional tools of the revolution are severely lacking.

But let’s imagine a scenario where a major developing nation (assume China) has a worker’s revolution (or, in the long term, even a liberal reform will do). In a second their major attraction to multinationals disappears as the Western companies can no longer ruthlessly exploit their labour. Short term result – we’ll see a massive jump in the price of everyday commodities throughout the West. Forced to choose between continuing to pay off the everyday white collar worker with cheap goods or retain their profits the capitalists will choose the latter. Only when that happens will the labour aristocracy rejoin the fold so to speak. In the longer term we’ll see the manufacturing jobs begin to return to the West which will only strengthen the growing worker’s movement.

Anyway, to actually answer you, its not going to be an instantaneous worldwide revolution. Or at least not without some sort of global economic crash that might accompany events. Rather I’d imagine there’d be a period of a few years between the first revolution and the resulting revolution in the West. We need that long to rebuild. And there’s little we can do except prepare the day that the capitalists can no longer pay off the workers.

[NovelGentry]

Take, for instance, the number of industrial workers in the world&#39;s biggest single economy, that of the US. At the end of the 1980s there was much panic in the US about &#39;deindustrialisation&#39; in the face of challenges to US industrial pre-eminence in fields like auto production and computers. But in 1998 the number of workers in industry was nearly 20 percent higher than in 1971, roughly 50 percent higher than in 1950 and nearly three times the level of 1900:

WORKERS IN INDUSTRY, US22 1900 10,920,000
1950 20,698,000
1971 26,092,000
1998 31,071,000

Is this accounting for population increase? It would seem to me that the pertinent question would be whether it has rose in proportion or in a higher proportion to what it has risen to before with respect to population.

[YKTMX]

No, the numbers are absolute levels.

The point is that the theory of "deindustrialization" paints this picture of whole advanced economies without manufacturing, or were manufacturing work is declining in importance.

In fact, in the U.S, there are 30 MILLION industrial workers. Most of them will be male and many of their wives will be "service workers".

[NovelGentry]

The point is that the theory of "deindustrialization" paints this picture of whole advanced economies without manufacturing, or were manufacturing work is declining in importance.

Importance is really a value statement. Whether we have 10 manufacturing jobs or 30,000,000 it is difficult to say whether or not those jobs have declined in importance. Given technology it may be true that at some point in our future 10 manufacturing jobs will produce the level of 30,000,000.

The big point of deindustrialization seems to be simply that services grows in greater proportion to manufacturing. I think we are in agreement here that the concept of that means very little outside of it being possible to say exactly the same thing, that services hold larger employment than manufacturing. What this means in the greater picture cannot be determined from such statements alone, but I would imagine those who write about deindustrialization make some points on certain correlations.

I would hope that one of their points is the advancement of technology requiring less manufacturers.

[Severian]

Isn&#39;t this just the conventional wisdom of society at large?

Besides what&#39;s already been said: if all manufacturing work moved to the less-developed countries...they wouldn&#39;t be the less-developed countries anymore. They&#39;d have the most economic power in the world, or the leverage to take it. Which is why some people worry about the great rising Chinese superpower and all that.

Also, this is not a new prediction by a long shot.

"In fact, in the U.S, there are 30 MILLION industrial workers. Most of them will be male and many of their wives will be "service workers"."

"most", true, but this could tend to imply an overly traditional picture of gender in industry....32% of manufacturing workers in the U.S. are female. Then there&#39;s shifts in family structure like the prevalence of divorce.

[RedJacobin]

One related topic is how the dominance of finance capital over industrial capital effects labor organizing.

If the means of production are controlled ultimately not by long-term industrial capitalists with a stake in their company, but by mutual funds and other short-term financial oligarchs, does union organizing still have the same impact? If workers try to unionize, can&#39;t the rentier-capitalists just shift the funds out of their investments overnight? Is this one factor in the significant decline in union density in the US?

Does this mean that the workers struggle has to be political (as in struggling for state power) from the get-go?

[workersunity]

if the workers in the west (post industrialist countries) arent organized and fight for socialism, i.e. no one drives them to it, there wont be a worldwide revolution, lets face it, there wont be a worldwide socialist revolution without USA becoming socialist or at the forefront of the revolution, it would only work if nearly all other countries became socialist, then possibly

[tunes]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17 2005, 04:41 PM
Is this accounting for population increase? It would seem to me that the pertinent question would be whether it has rose in proportion or in a higher proportion to what it has risen to before with respect to population.

Got some numbers for you.

WORKERS IN INDUSTRY, US (Source) (http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/harman.htm)
1900 10,920,000
1950 20,698,000
1971 26,092,000
1998 31,071,000

POPULATION, US (Source) (http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/popclockest.txt)
1900 76,094,000
1950 152,271,417
1971 207,660,677
1998 270,248,003

RATIO BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL WORKERS AND TOTAL POPULATION, US
1900 6.96%
1950 7.35%
1971 7.95%
1998 8.69%

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17 2005, 01:24 PM
If workers try to unionize, can&#39;t the rentier-capitalists just shift the funds out of their investments overnight?
In the case of industrial investment, a fair bit of those funds are tied up in land, buildings, machinery, inventory, etc.

***

Thanks, tunes. I didn&#39;t know that. In a way not so surprising, considering the declining percentage of the population directly engaged in agriculture.

[NovelGentry]

RATIO BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL WORKERS AND TOTAL POPULATION, US
1900 6.96%
1950 7.35%
1971 7.95%
1998 8.69%

So in the first 50 years of industry we saw a .39% increase. Certainly expectable since this is the primary growth in industry. In the 21 after that we see post WWII we see .6 (also expectable). And then .74% 27.... this is where it gets somewhat interesting. WHat would of happened at regular intervals, say we had it for every 25 years, would we see a decline or a growth? For example, say we had 1950 - 1975, would the percentage difference of that be greater or less than 1975 - 2000? It would seem so. We&#39;ve only got .14% difference in the two most recent examples you have here, and one of those has 6 more years than the other. How much of that growth was done in say 1971 - 1975 compared to the later stuff. It may be the case that more than .14 was done in that period of time, given that between 1950 - 1971 if we are to merely divide percent by years we get approx .114 for a 4 year period. Of course none of these are accurate because it could be the case that 80% of the growth between 1950 and 1971 was done in the first 5 years... we simply don&#39;t know with more stats. However, I&#39;m also not completely certain when it was safe to say that the US had become post-industrial, I would only wager 1990 onwards. In which case, the decline may be far more visible from say 2000 - 2005.

[Severian]

What? Even if the rate of growth has slowed, that doesn&#39;t mean the U.S. has become "post-industrial". "Post-industrial" people always tend to imply the number of industrial workers has declined to unimportance.

Your post strikes me as an attempt to explain away facts in order to cling to a preconceived position.

[JC1]

All that could mean is that is that worker&#39;s are not working in traditional sector&#39;s.

I would also like to point out comparing the number of "Industrial" (Actualy Manufacture,every worker is in industry) worker&#39;s to the total population is misleading. Try comparing amount of Industrial worker&#39;s to the total earning population and you get a higher number. Then take away the petit-bourgoise and bourgoise from the earning population, the number grow&#39;s again.

Let&#39;s pretend that the working Class makes up 65 % of the US population. that&#39;s around 175,661,201 people.WOW MAN &#33; All of a suddun, the myth disapear&#39;s, cuz manufacter makes up a fifth of the working class &#33;

[NovelGentry]

What? Even if the rate of growth has slowed, that doesn&#39;t mean the U.S. has become "post-industrial".

Your right, the criteria for being post-industrial is actually far less. It requires that services make up the majority of your economic power, that is all.


"Post-industrial" people always tend to imply the number of industrial workers has declined to unimportance.

Well the stats show that&#39;s clearly not so, and I&#39;m not sure if I&#39;m a "post-industrial" person, however, I certainly think the US is a post-industrial society, and I do not declare in any sense that the number of industrial workers has declined to unimportance. As I noted before, importance is a value issue... there could be 10 industrial workers, all just as important as 30,000,000 under some other productive forces.


Your post strikes me as an attempt to explain away facts in order to cling to a preconceived position.

I&#39;m merely interested in whether or not industrial work is still a growth industry, because at the point it no longer grows, it has only one place to go with relation to the rest of the population. Does this ever mean it&#39;s unimportant... again, no, see my earlier point on "importance."

It&#39;s merely interesting to look at. I don&#39;t know why you assume a decline in numbers automatically means a decline in importance.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19 2005, 09:37 PM
Your right, the criteria for being post-industrial is actually far less. It requires that services make up the majority of your economic power, that is all.
That&#39;s less? Ridiculous. Industry and agriculture - actually making things - are still essential to economic power, regardless of the percentage of the population engaged in them.

[NovelGentry]

That&#39;s less? Ridiculous. Industry and agriculture - actually making things - are still essential to economic power, regardless of the percentage of the population engaged in them.

Are you even listening to me? I never said they weren&#39;t essential, in fact, I said pretty much what you just said, regardless of how many people, one cannot deem importance merely from that. AGAIN I made the example that if 10 do the work of 30,000,000, it does not deem their labor any less important, it merely means that far less are needed to do that labor, important or not.

It is, however true, that the criteria for being post-industrial is less than all the criteria we have discussed prior to this. That is how sentences work... "the criteria for being post-industrial" = subject, that is thus all of which I am speaking.

For example, if in order to be a post-industrial society you had to be:

Over 102,000,000 in population

it would be true that the criteria for being considered post-industrial would be far less than if you had added these:

A federation of states
Over 30,000 square miles

In short, because I don&#39;t feel like explaining how to read and understand words any longer, what I am saying, more, what I did say, is merely that the criteria for being post-industrial does not demand low population in industry, while services make up the bulk of your economic power, quite the contary, you could have a very high population in industry, but that it&#39;s criteria are far less in that to be considered post-industrial one must only find the bulk of their economic power to be in services. AGAIN we are not talking about importance, merely quantity. I take in far more air by volume than I do water, that doesn&#39;t mean water isn&#39;t important.

[Guest1]

I don&#39;t care what the criteria are.

Fuck the "post-industrial" analysis. But it doesn&#39;t matter. This thread is precisely about importance, rather than numbers.

Can labour organizing still be the revolutionary way forward in these western societies? I say yes, what do you have to say about it? That is the discussion.

[YKTMX]

Can labour organizing still be the revolutionary way forward in these western societies?

Well, the point is that it is, independent of what people think. The reason Marxists say the w/c are the revolutionary agents is because they have a specific relationship to production - it&#39;s not an abstract thing. Whether a train driver thinks he is working class or not is independent of the FACT that him withdrawing his labour means his train doesn&#39;t move. If the train doesn&#39;t move, people don&#39;t get to work, things don&#39;t get delivered.

Now, of course, if the train driver thinks he&#39;s middle class then he is less likely to strike, or partake in class struggle - that&#39;s a real, political issue, but class consciousness is not a fixed variable. Someone can think of themselves as a comfortable middle class service worker, but at the end of the day, when the crises of captialism come - and they always do - her "subjective class position" won&#39;t stop her ass getting fired by the boss.

It won&#39;t do for her to say, "you can&#39;t sack me, I own my home".

In my opinion, the whole "post-industrial" thing is inextricably linked to the rise of postmodernism. They reject historical materialism as a "meta-narrative", therefore it&#39;s impossible for them to submit to a notion of class struggle or revolutionary change. Therefore, like CyM&#39;s friend, they tend to advocate "heterogenous" movements - the so-called &#39;Rainbow coalition&#39;.

Now, that is fine. The women&#39;s movement, the black nationalist movement, the LGBT movement are all important and worthy - they&#39;ve won real reforms from capital, but were are they now? Co-opted. The feminists are all middle class lawyers fighting for equal pay legislation (so we can all be exploited equally). The Black movement is, well, moribund. The militancy and radicalism of the black communities has been smothered in a mountain of crack cocaine and gangster rap. The Gay movement, once a powerful thing which challened bourgeois values, is reduced to self-parodying game shows on television.

Why did these movements fail? The reason is that NONE OF THEM, in America at least, made any serious attempt whatsoever to bring itself into contact with the working class movements. In the case of the women&#39;s movement, some of them were openly hostile to the "ignorant" working class males.

Therefore, what I think we as Marxists should be arguing is this: the working class "narrative" IS the main one, we unshamedly do prejudice it. Not because we&#39;re dogmatists. Because they are still the only group who have a hope of remaking the world, so that all people can be free.

Anyway, that&#39;s how I feel. Hope that answers your query CyM.

[Guest1]

Absolutely.

That&#39;s exactly what I was looking for. Sometimes it&#39;s not the ideas you need to discuss, but how best to express them, and your post helps me build a coherent response to the "post-industrial" analysis. This is what happens when you go out of your way to avoid pomo crap :P

[anomaly]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 16 2005, 10:52 PM
I had a weird conversation with an anarchist companera I consider to be pretty intelligent, but I really didn&#39;t like the argument that was being made, or the implications of it.

Basically, the analysis was that the west has moved beyond actual production, and is gradually shifting more and more towards service industries and professionals rather than production industry.

That&#39;s all fine and dandy.

But then the argument was made that as a result, labour organizing cannot be the basis of any major revolutionary change, that labour doesn&#39;t have the same power it once had, as the working class in advanced capitalist countries is basically comprised of people who have little connection to the means of production.

Of course, I disagreed, and said it was a far too limited interpretation of Marxist class warfare, that strategic organizing can guarantee a strong position for labour, as all the shipyards, airports, trucking lanes and train lines, to give one example, are essential to the economy and to those products being moved.

Any response to this "post-industrialist" analysis of Capitalism? I think it&#39;s a limiting and defeatist view, and it depressed me quite a bit, which led to a pretty incoherent response.

Which is why i&#39;d like to get some responses and opinions here.
I have said it before on this forum, and I&#39;ll say it once again: the chances of revolutionary activity taking place in the 1st world in the not-to-distant future are extremely remote. Your counterpart was right, comrade.

The US economy is becoming a service, information oriented one. Manufacturing jobs, those which have traditionally led the labor movement, have been moving south for some time now. Currently, manufacturing makes up only about a quarter of the US economy, and more and more US manufacturing workers are being laid off.

These jobs are moving to places that prove much more profitable for the US capitalist, many going to Mexico, Taiwan, and China (to name just a few).

The labor movement in the US is declining steadily, partly because of this migration. Your friend was also right that the new service jobs being created are very unlikely to prove potent ingredients for a renewed labor movement. These service jobs are white collar, usually high paying, and have decent benefits for workers. I reccomend you lose what faith you have in the potential future of the US labor movement.

However, that is not to say that our hopes of revolution have also died. They are quite alive and well, actually. We must, however, give up our naive hopes of a new American revolution. The revolution(s?) will most certainly occur on foreign soil, mostly in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It is to these places we must now turn.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 21 2005, 02:58 AM
I don&#39;t care what the criteria are.

Fuck the "post-industrial" analysis. But it doesn&#39;t matter. This thread is precisely about importance, rather than numbers.

Can labour organizing still be the revolutionary way forward in these western societies? I say yes, what do you have to say about it? That is the discussion.
What is labour?

Undoubtedly the class spectrum is fundamentally different to how it was 200 years ago. There are much fewer essential workers than there were back in the day. The amount of workers who actually have the power to shut down the infastructure of capitalism has vastly decreased.

The majority of working class people now work in service industries and the increase in consumerism has created a facade that implies working class doesn&#39;t exist anymore. It&#39;s a warped definition propagated by new age politicians like Tony Blair. "We are all middle class."

Not really, we all get to have the same electronic goods and similar holidays, but the working class relationship to the means of production still exists as it did 200 years ago. There a vast section of society exploited to create profit and they are still the only means in which communism can be achieved.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 17 2005, 04:52 AM
Any response to this "post-industrialist" analysis of Capitalism? I think it&#39;s a limiting and defeatist view, and it depressed me quite a bit, which led to a pretty incoherent response.

Which is why i&#39;d like to get some responses and opinions here.
I don&#39;t think it&#39;s defeatist. A large part of it is fact.

Many workers aren&#39;t apart of the "means of production" in any classical marxist sense. This post-industrial analysis is necessary in order to redfine class struggle, which is happening with or without our attention.

If we are to encompass service industries, i.e. call centres into the defintion of "the means of production" then the relationship of the people who work within those industries is that they work within it to create profit.

I also don&#39;t think it&#39;s limiting. Although the defintion of "production" has shifted, the relationship to profit making is exploitative and oppressive to the vast majority of people. A working class still exists within the marxian defintion of relationship to the means of production. The only thing that has changed is what the means of production actually is.

[Guest1]

I meant the conclusions she reached, the post-industrialists go beyond simply stating that the focus has shifted from production to service, which is not being debated. They insist on setting up the most limited definition of working class possible (that they must be involved in production, nothing else), then knocking it down as any sort of force in society, and then accusing you of being closed-minded and dogmatic about how society can be changed.

Any attempt to explain that it is they who are dismissing service workers, not us, only brings on further insistance that there is little to no industrial working class in advanced capitalist society. Which, again, is not a point I contest, but post-industrialists never seem to be able to accept that you agree on that, and refuse to allow the power of transportation and shipping workers to enter into the conversation.

They&#39;re so slippery.

[angus_mor]

The advance of modern day society will always have an affect on how labor relates to the essential means of production, but it is not due to one form of society&#39;s economic viewpoint. While the role of workers apears to be growing apart from what makes their labor necesary, it is in fact the mere advance of industry as a whole, not particlarly the influences of any one nations industrial innovation, that is changing each aspect of labor to focus in more detail upon the objective of each workers task. Although there are new kinds of seemingly unrelated work to be done, the importance and demand of the old forms of labor is not left behind. If a new mode of production apears that eliminates the demand of a certain type of labor, the demand for such a workforce is unchanged, and the labor itself still aplicable in many other areas of society. There will always be surplus commodities to make, ship, and handle, so the energy required to accomplish this will always be in demand. In recognition and acceptance of this, it is quite clear that Labor Organization can not only have a say in the shape of revolution, but will be a focal point of revolution.