I hear Bernie is going to join the striking Kellogg’s workers tomorrow and speak at a rally in downtown Battle Creek at 3pm. I would love to road trip there and join the rally and hear Bernie’s pitch. Probably won’t, but who knows. I was a member of the union decades ago. Anyway, this is a big show down for the union and labor movement. And kudos to Bernie and President Biden for their support.

In an earlier post(s) I commented on socialism and socialist democracy. Here is a long piece that I wrote more than 15 years ago. It was an attempt to rethink the Communist Party’s vision of socialism and the place of democracy in a socialist society and much more. It was overdue.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, we heaped blame on Gorbachev and re-emphasized our commitment to “Bill of Rights” socialism, but we did nothing to critically look at some of the assumptions that shaped and informed our understanding and vision of socialism, not to mention come to grips with socialism’s implosion.

Anyway, here is my attempt to do that.

White workers accrue skin privileges in the form of higher wages and salaries, superior health care, access to quality schools and safer neighborhoods, promising job opportunities and promotions, longer life expectancy, and more compared to their brothers and sisters of color. I’m hardly the first one to make this observation in recent years. A legion of commentators have made the same point far better than me. But what goes unmentioned in many instances is the other side of this dialectic. Which is that white privileges, which are a product of racist exploitation and oppression, aren’t an unalloyed blessing for white workers.

If that is so, and I believe it is, one of the great challenges of our time is to convince white workers that in joining with their sisters and brothers of color in a common class and anti-racist struggle, they have much more to win than to lose, politically, economically, culturally, and morally.

I think the term “bourgeois democracy” is more trouble than it’s worth. It should be quietly retired. In the interpretation of too many on the ideological left, the term is understood and employed in such a way that it minimizes the importance of democratic structures and governance in a capitalist society. They’re more hollow than substantive. And who needs that at this moment when the future of democracy in our country, not to mention many other countries, hangs in balance.

Any measure of class understanding and development of the labor and working class movement has to account for the fact that a substantial section of organized workers – in the 40 per cent range and more – voted for Trump in the last election. And that includes trade unionists in the midwest states. The current strike surge that goes back to 2018 is reflective of a new level of class militancy and confidence, but it isn’t yet clear to what degree it expresses a new level and scale of class consciousness across the working class. The elections next year and then two years later will in many ways provide a rough answer to both questions as well as the degree to which the working class and labor movement is politically bifurcated.