var digesttext = "The concept of intermediate strata is not really helpful. The working class is not a layer cake where consciousness can be read off mechanically by an over analysis of fine distinctions.The subjective element, history, especially history of struggle is more important.
Right wing ideas, including some fascist ones, do come from a petty bourgeois mentality, but a mentality refined by concrete historical circumstances. In 19th and 20th century Germany and Austria for example teachers thought of themselves, snobbisly, as part of an intellectual patriotic antisemitic stratum. Teachers in Britain today are a conscious part of the working class.
Is the distinction between productive and unproductive labour wrongly concieved? Workers produce surplus value, not necessarily a morally useful product. Is an electrician wiring lights for an entertainment event unproductive? Is a worker providing training in a factory situation productive, whereas a schoolteacher is unproductive? Is a bus driver productive when taking employees to a factory productive, but unproductive when taking nurses to a hospital (unless he is about to attend a factory worker) ? Does the class consciousness of a bus driver therefore depend on what route he is driving? No, no, no no. And a reading of Capital agrees with this.
Of course class consciousness and effectiveness is affected by mass of numbers working together, and by every detail of the organisation of the working day and how surplus value is extracted. But not mechanically by what layer you might belong to. The precariousness of work, where some living hand to mouth, switching from employed to self employed to unemployed means that continuity of political connections is of much greater importance than continuous connection to productive work - whatever that is.\">
Freedom fries revisited.\">
And why should anyone give a crap about what he has to say about Jews or politics in the Middle East? Because he\'s Jewish? But he\'s the one always warning people not to give any \"special\" credence to Jews just because they are Jews! By his own admission then, Atzmon has no special authority when it comes to polical issues involving Jews. So let\'s treat him like we would any non-Jew, who on the one hand professes a deep humanitarian concern for Palestinians and, on the the other, rails against Jewish Communism, Jewish financiers, Jewish world domination. In other words, let\'s think of him as a David Duke who happens to be a very talented saxophonist.\">
striking words from \'lenin\': \"the very intelligent, cautious and successful intervention in Libya\"
I presume he means those adjectives from the Allies\' perspective, because, from what I\'ve read, the intervention has been disastrous for many Libyans (what proportion that \'many\' is, I don\'t know).
But isn\'t it too early anyway to tell whether the intervention was successful even by the Allies\' parameters? After all, didn\'t the Iraq intervention also look \'successful\' to begin with. And how can anyone know whether it was \"cautious\"? Don\'t we need some (Wiki)leaks first before we can know how \"cautious\" the bombing was? \">
So bored with 911\">
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02fernandez.html?scp=1&sq=ronald+fernandez&st=cse\">
http://wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/pers-s01.shtml\">
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