> Greenpeace, CISPES, some carefully selected unions, etc. And once you are
> there, keep the Marxist jargon to yourself.
I don't think it's right to just brush off "Marxist jargon" like that. In the first place, a good deal of what is called "Marxist jargon" happens to be just ordinary English. In the second place, let's make some elementary distinctions. I doubt that anyone would very often on this list have occasion to come out with long quotations from the *Theories of Surplus Value* or the *Grundrisse*--or, as I remember saying in a context something like the present, no one is advocating passing out Volume III of Capital as a leaflet at the factory gate.
There is an element of "have you stopped beating your wife yet" rhetoric in most general attacks on jargon, a suggestion in advance that of course that's what those other so-called marxists will do.
I am getting very close here in B/N to having the core group (all non-marxist but Jan and I, a few fundamentalist xtians even) to enter into mass struggle around the destruction of social security: several of them have *already* felt the preliminary blows which have chipped away at SSI and SSDI benefits. And while I have no intention or no need to lecture any of these people on the finer points of the law of value, I do have an obligation to tell the truth, which currently is that *it is capitalism* that is hurting them. And I do have to confront any anti-immigrant feelings of theirs, and the only way to do that is with arguments which, while mostly "free of jargon," become lies in effect unless I *do* insist on the existence of U.S. imperialism. (They don't have to agree, but I have to say it, and the only word is "imperialism.")
And so forth.
Carrol