CDZ How did we get to this point?

[Trotsky's Spectre]

I would personally be for what we had when I grew up

Those conditions were as class-riven and driven as ours are today. Union leadership dutifully aligned itself with the bourgeoisie and betrayed the working class. How Trotsky merits a pick axe in the ear for saying this eludes me. But that's immaterial. We are at a later stage of capitalist/imperial development. The past cannot be recreated, and you cannot return to it. You must also outline the class basis and nature of this catastrophe. Otherwise 'catastrophe' comes to mean the 'catastrophe' of partisanship, and/or the 'catastrophe' of my unresolved material interests, etc.

-- Trotsky's Spectre --

 

[Trotsky's Spectre]

Most Americans have chosen Apathy...

How would we know this?

Maybe citizens behold the institutions and processes of state, including elections, with well-deserved contempt. Perhaps they conclude that the process is essentially alien to them. Maybe they regard successive slates of candidates as criminals meriting not election but prosecution. Again, perhaps they find the lordly kakistocrasies these glorious elections perpetuate to be so foreign to their experience that they cannot contentiously vote for what they perceive as an essentially foreign political power. Maybe these citizens want to de-legitimize the state and repudiate its claim to speak as their federal head and its pretended prerogative to act as their legal representative. Maybe they just don't want to be answerable for the crimes of the state. And maybe they're apathetic.

There may be any number of reasons for which 46% of 'eligibles' in 2016 elected not to vote. How would we know which rationale or combination of multiple rationales applies?

-- Trotsky's Spectre --

 

[JoeB131]

Those conditions were as class-riven and driven as ours are today. Union leadership dutifully aligned itself with the bourgeoisie and betrayed the working class.

Oh, noes, not the "bourgeoisie"!!! The unions did exactly what they were supposed to do. We are in the place we are in now because too many people on the right think they can be successful without a union... (Also because governments took over a lot of what unions did and then proceeded to do them badly when Republicans were in charge.)

How Trotsky merits a pick axe in the ear for saying this eludes me. But that's immaterial.

because he was a commie A-hole who caused the deaths of millions of people...

But that's immaterial. We are at a later stage of capitalist/imperial development. The past cannot be recreated, and you cannot return to it. You must also outline the class basis and nature of this catastrophe. Otherwise 'catastrophe' comes to mean the 'catastrophe' of partisanship, and/or the 'catastrophe' of my unresolved material interests, etc.

Actually, we are at a different stage of development. Because of Automation, we don't need as many people to provide the food and material comfort of all of them. 10% of the US worked in Agriculture in the 1940's, and 40% in manufacturing. Today those numbers are 3 and 15%.

So it really has less to do with "Class" and more as labor as a commodity. More people work in the service industry now... those jobs don't pay as well because they don't require as much skill and can be easily replaced.

So this idea that you are going to get in front of a bunch of Starbucks Baristas singing the International is just... kind of silly. Half of them have no ambition to be anything more, and the other half has too much ambition for socialist mediocrity.