John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, recently posted the following on Facebook:
This is so true and it might be a good moment to say that you can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough but, unfortunately, nobody wants to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay anymore.
Although it is important to point out the conscious creation of ideologies that justify the class power of employers, the above quote underestimates the ideological challenges for the radical left. It is not just a question of the “ruling class creating a common-sense ideology that becomes the norm.” So-called leaders of workers frequently express, in subtle ways, ideas that express the class power of employers, such as the idea that collective agreements are somehow fair (see for example Fair Contracts (or Fair Collective Agreements): The Ideological Rhetoric of Canadian Unions, Part One: The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)).
Furthermore, the quote neglects an important aspect of the capitalist world that prevents us from understanding its real nature–commodity fetishism, where processes in social reality prevent us from understanding the nature of our exploitation and oppression (see for example Economics for Social Democrats–but not for the Working Class, Part Three: Critique of Jim Stanford’s Theory of Money, Part Three, or How Commodities and Money Dominate Our Lives).
The Abolitionary 