What the heck is that supposed to mean? How is that supposed to work at a practical level?
Certainly there's cause to reject some political elite, some "vanguard party" that imagines it knows better than the working class(es) what the working class(es) really wants and needs, but how is the working class supposed to free itself? Seems to me that working after being educated in our systems creates only docility and confusion. How are people who work all day supposed to arrive at an understanding of the whole picture of our society and how to overthrow it? Workers can rebel in the face of immediate injustices, but it seems impossible to be able to conceptualize how to destroy this system and replace it with something else. You need to have the time to think about this stuff in detail, and some sort of material independence to be able to plan a course of action. Finally, there's the possibility that workers, by their daily subordination to bosses and machinery, are the most unrevolutionary of classes. In the great revolutions of the past, it was peasants and intellectuals who led the way.
Maybe this present system of capitalism has done its job too well?
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There is a vast gulf between those who "have the time to think about this stuff in detail, and some sort of material independence to be able to plan a course of action." and the so-called working class.
The people with the time are, of course, academics. But left-wing academics are often mired in impenetrable and self-destructive philosophies (e.g., post-modernism), and speak their own secret language. What's more, most haven't a clue what it means to be "working class." For them it's an abstraction, the reality of which is only occassionally glimpsed through the window of their beamer.
Well, I do think that there's a disconnect between a lot of left-wing professors, and the working-class. (As well as between the goons in our "conservative" political constellations who claim to speak for the majority but who serve the elite.)
But what I'm mainly concerned with is finding out just how exactly the working class is supposed to do it on its own. What are the practical steps that overworked, economically dependent, apolitical Canadian workers supposed to do to attack the system at its weakest points and radically transform it.
Marxists used to spend a lot of time talking about how capitalism debased workers lives and culture, but then made buffoons out of themselves trying to celebrate what they imagined this culture was.
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