Being a spot welder in the south apparently did not give Louis the glasses (nor the theoretical ground) he needed to see what was happening in Flint where, on the one hand, the UAW was busy helping with the layoff of its members, but on the other hand, public sector workers united with industrial workers to fight the cutbacks that were taking place in welfare and unemployment benefits. Dozens of peoiple went to jail, hundreds were involved in actions against the government and the companies. Moore was there, stood on the sides and chuckled, promoted his little local paper, used his friends, and split. Inside the UAW, caucuses grew (and largely failed over time) trying to build a fight-back inside a group designed to capitulate. Some of that was helpful in the later creation of the union democracy stuff we see coming out of Labor Notes" crowd (which may or may not go somewhere interesting).
Like Nathan, Moore grew fascinated with the bosses and their power, and denied the possibilites inside actions people were, in fact taking--actions which may have been not fully informed, but at least they were engaged in struggle on the job. One friend pointed out to me that if we had gone searching for the Prez of GM, we would have found him.
Roger and Me doesn't look at workers through rosey glasses. It looks with contempt.
We do not need to be told that life is unjust and that we can lose. We know that. We don't need to make Moore rich in the process of pretending to create a form of cultural resistance that has nothing resistant to it.
Yup, it is the nineties, and like every decade before it, class struggle is afoot. The problem isnt that there isn't any "real resistance". At least part of the problem is that people remain convinced that they cannot understand and change their lives, that they must rely on someone else to analyze their situations and chart the course, that they cannot win. What does Moore contribute to change that?
Center stage, by the way, is always contested terrain. Best, rich
At 05:32 PM 5/17/98 -0400, you wrote:
>> [Michael Moore] obliterates the history of real resistance (there were big
>>battles in Flint when Moore was making his bogus docu-drama), and suggests,
>>with a sly wink, that if we only knew what he knows (you can do well be
>>acting like you are doing good), things would change.
>
>Oh please, I was a spot-welder in Kansas City when all those layoffs were
>taking place in the 1970s. There was no "real resistance" anywhere. That
>was the problem, wasn't it? All the "Marxist Leninists" assumed that the
>working class would take center stage in that period, but it was the
>bourgeoisie that did--and things haven't changed that much. What's
>refreshing about "Roger and Me" is that looks at the working-class without
>rose-colored spectacles. Even in the case of P9, one of the few acts of
>"real resistance" in this period, the working-class solidarity eroded in a
>truly dismaying fashion, as Barbara Kopple's documentary pointed out. This
>is not the 1930s.
>
>Louis Proyect
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
Rich Gibson
Director of International Social Studies
Wayne State University
College of Education
Detroit MI 48202
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap.html
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.