I guess if you're talking one-man restaurant where the boss does it all, he's a worker. I've never eaten in any place like that in my life, so I have to wonder what planet you guys are living on. Usually a restaurant is a pretty big operation, a dozen or so employees at a bare minimum, hostess, servers, cleaners, and cooks. Bigger places, add busboys, sommeliers,and various classes of servers. But I dunno, it's planet Earth I'm talking about, you guys obviously live (or at least dine out) somewhere else.
Professor, I'm a boss but I've had it both ways. When I started out, I was working for somebody else. Bottom line is, when you live in a capitalist system, you might as well live like a capitalist cuz the system won't change to accommodate you. If I were a worker, I'd assess the situation as hopeless from a revolutionary point of view - - it was Lenin (I think) who said things have to get worse before they can become better - - in other words, the working class will put up with a lot of shit before they see the Revolution as their salvation. The Revolution comes at a terrible price, so you have to be in terrible straits to even consider it. So as long as things aren't too bad for the working class, they'll settle for second or third best (capitalism) instead of making the effort to bring about communism through revolution.
At the ballot box, fuhgeddabowdit. Money is the only determinant of success in "democratic" elections, and guys with left-of-centre views - - Kucinich, Ralph Nader - -are edged out to the fringe, barely with any media coverage; given enough air-time so that "censorship" charges are refuted and never enough to make their case. Similarly with the "experts" who appear on the MSM- - the appearance of normality is maintained by carefully selected experts appearing many times and by letting a radical onto a panel once in a blue moon, where he or she is usually outnumbered two, three or four to one, making the radical look like he's so far out of the mainstream that he must live in another universe, an impression reinforced by everything the media watcher hears 24/7 on news, panel discussions, etc.
I gotta be a realist - - I can't butt my head against the wall fighting for change because there isn't gonna be real change. That's just the way Canada and the U.S.A. are set up, Canada a little better in some ways, teh U.S.A. a little better in others. I don't own this country and the people who do have made it reasonably comfortable for me and my family, such that I can take advantage of the capitalist system to live. Even the workers have it OK. And IMHO that's due to communism also - - the ruling class decided that rather than provoke another revolution by unrestrained greed on their part, they'd better make some concessions to the working class, limit hours of work, unemployment insurance (we call it "pogey" in Canada) sick benefits, affordable insurance, "socialized" medicine. The Russian Revolution and the success of the U.S.S.R. in the 20s and 30s scared the living shit out of the ruling class and produced a much better life for the workers than they had before.
