The debates or academic musings over militia, white male workers, christians, christian left, anti-abortion working-class people, etc. come very close to being a version of how many angels would dance on the point of a needle (which was, in context, more sensible in fact, because it imaged the question of the ontological status of angels while endless talk about who should we reach or should we try to reach so and so have no connection to anything in the real world (unless you are running an electoral campaign for Bill Clinton or Jack Kemp or ....)
The first question the left must ask itself is *never* "who should we try to reach?" or "how should we reach X?" (And the question remains absurd even if for X one substitutes "The Working Class.")
The first question is, always has been, always will be, What is Our Program.
But that is only question 1, and presupposes question 0: "Who is 'we'?" And that at any given time and place is a dull empirical question. In the present case "we" consists of subscribers to lbo-talk. So the question has to be something like, "When a left comes into some minimum sort of coherent reality in the United States, what should the core elements of its program be?"
Answers to that question will more or less mechanically and irrefutably answer the question of "Who do we try to reach?"
A second preliminary point. "The Left" as I will use that term here has programs but no platforms. A platform is a nonentity which an anti-working class candidate ignores while she/he attempts to sway how individuals will spend 45 seconds of their life every two or four years (those seconds in the voting booth). A program, on the other hand, operates primarily outside the electoral arena and enters into the daily lives of those supporting it. Within capitalist society the way elements of such a program get embodied in legislation is not a result of electing politicians favoring the reform. It is the result of politicians deciding that the price of peace in the streets or in the factories is such a reform -- all of these politicians, with only minor exceptions, will of course oppose bitterly the substance of the reform but recognize that legislation PARTIALLY embodying it (with as much obstructive clutter as possible). The Wagner Act and the Social Security Systems flowed not from the love of Franklin Roosevelt and/or democratic congressmen for the people (or for workers or for the elderly) but were aimed at blunting EPIC and the CIO.
Obvious elements of such a left program include:
*Real affirmative action. [See end note]
*Free abortion on demand for all women of any age.
*Repeal of the ban on secondary boycotts (which will require the organization of workers to defy that ban, not the election of politicians who wish to repeal it).
*A living wage ("welfare" or "social security") for the unemployed, the old, the lazy, the disabled, the criminal.
*Free bond for non-violent offenders of the criminal code (violence to be defined as serious assault on the bodies of other people)
*Elimination of Prisons
Continual harassment of all concerns paying less than $10 per hour (1990 dollars)
Total withdrawal of all state support to private educational institutions.
And so on
Then who do we reach? Who do we talk to? How do we talk to them. In terms of an ongoing program, these questions will answer themselves. [See also End Note 2]
Obviously first we talk to each other. We have to become we before we can talk to anyone. (The sneers at the left talking to itself are the ultimate in parliamentary cretinism.)
Beyond that we talk to anyone who will listen to us talk about *how to implement the program?* (Not, repeat NOT, to those who do not already accept the program. It is by the practice of the supporters of the program that more and more will come to listen, on their own initiative, to those explaining the program. Up to and beyond the revolution "the left" will always talk only to itself, but the content of that "itself" will continually expand as the program of the left *demonstrates in action* what it stands for.
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End Note 1: "Affirmative Action" is a blank check here, but any definition of it that does not outrage at least half the population is probably silly. Only party hacks first poll "the people" to decide what should go into their platforms. Their *platforms*, not their programs, which are never discussed in public; the chief reason, I imagine, that Katrina vanden Heuvel hates Alex Cockburn is that he insists on exposing the difference between the platforms and the programs of the likes of Clinton or that "socialist" representative from N.H.
End Note 2: A related question, "How do we reach the working class?" embodies, deliberately or blindly, the profoundly non-marxist (I would say anti-marxist) concept of "the middle class." With demographically minor exceptions, all those who are called or call themselves "middle class" belong to the working class. Probably all but a handful of subscribers to this maillist are working class. We are already there. We don't need to do any "reaching."
Carrol