for all the great benefits unions have brought since the thirties, by the mid sixties they were as corrupt as the governments and the bosses, and fouled their own reputations.

i'd like to think they're important again, and that leftist thought could coalesce behind them, but with the de-industrialisation process going on in the western democracies with global outsourcing, their rank and file hardly have jobs any more any more, let alone the wherewithal to create and maintain the enthusiasm for unions.

it is a great pity, but perhaps the silver lining is that the satanic mills model is leaving our shores, to emerge in china, which is in its dickensian period. (no rights). tough for them, but they're just repeating the same choices we made 100 years ago.

we have no choice other than to invent something new, as a way of contributing to the world.

my guess is that it's (post-industrial) cultural memes, many embedded in the arts, already mightily appreciated in japan, but still not really cracking the vast, oceanic chinese markets.

i can't think of a country less likely to produce a new politically revolutionary thinker than present day china, if marx were reborn there he'd be a political prisoner in no time...

but i bet in 20 years many western jazz musicians will be touring there and pulling down great pay, likewise dance, multimedia, and movies, ditto iran, india...

our educated classes have been appreciating the manifold cultural gifts from the orient for centuries, they are just beginning with ours, and they're eating them up...

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~