Workers don't need their face ground into the dirt: capitalism does that quite nicely. What they need is hope. For all their sophistication, the capitalists are still arguing the same thing 100 years on: 'we can't afford it.' The 8 hour day, well-funded, community-based healthcare - it's too expensive. And people believe it, because it resonates with their lives: most things are too expensive for them.

Still fighting after all these years - Rochester NY workers striking for the 8 hour day, 1913

It's only when they see that the capitalists are not suffering equally, that they get angry. This isn't just conjecture; there are many historical examples to show it's not poverty and desperation that motivate workers, but their absence. As Craig Heron argues in The Workers' Revolt in Canada, 1917-1925:

World War I... virtually created the workers' rebellion. It made workers "free from the haunting fear of unemployment and bottomless poverty ...." ... The combination proved explosive when many workers felt that the rich were not sharing their sacrifices, leading to an upsurge in workplace actions.

In 1919, the head of the Canadian Manufacturing Association warned that allowing workers "to work for less than it costs them to live is unwittingly opening the gates to revolutionary doctrine and inviting anarchy to run wild."

At Delphi last year, workers were told they had to accept a 2/3 pay cut, or the company would close. Then management awarded itself $90 million. Air Canada was saved on the backs on its workers losing benefits, only to reward shareholders with a dividend a year later. Those kind of contradictions make people angry.

Delphi workers threaten to 'cripple' GM

Again, expectations are differential. Neither 'rich' nor poor workers have a monopoly on resistance. France and Venezuela show the power, not of absolute comfort, but of raising expectations. Once working people feel their own power, "anarchy" can finally "run wild".

Never mind the answers, what are the questions?

I think the Frankfurt School did fascinating, original research. I'm particularly interested in the Marx-Freud encounter which they investigated. Having not lived through fascism myself, I'm not judging them personally. But I think their separation from real working class movements was part of a shift of Marxism away from the problems of class struggle, towards an individualism that concealed a thorough-going pessimism - grounded in real experience, but generalized in ways that were historically inaccurate.

This is not an argument for 'optimism' instead, but a plea to focus on the questions that concerned previous generations of Marxists: political organization. The problems of class struggle remain. Elitism - thinking working people are too brainwashed to act - becomes a barrier to real-world activity, because most people don't respond well to hearing they're ignorant. Our job is to organize resistance. That happens by appealing to people where they're at.

More importantly, socialists don't approach everyone, but only those who are ready to listen - because they're discovering for themselves how power works. They're struggling for change. Then it's a matter of getting the best fighters to work together in an organization.

Communists know only too well that revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily, but... [are] the necessary outcome of circumstances quite independent of the will or the guidance of particular parties - Alexei Sayle, Lenin of the Rovers

Even if you believe everyone's in thrall to TV, cars and malls, I think my argument stands. We, the lucky, 'privileged' few who get to step back from the misery of capitalist alienation and study it, have a choice as well. We can study submission or resistance. So why not study resistance? There are way more interesting questions than why revolutionary socialism failed. They start with "How, historically, did it fail?" Then "How did socialist movements succeed?" And finally, "Using our past experience, how can we apply Marxist methods, in the here-and-now, to build movements today?"