Would it be presumptuous of me to assume you are of the male gender?
Are you also white/Anglo/Euro-American?
Do you work for wages?
If the answer to each of those is affirmative, you are by your own definition a scab.
While you may have silenced the letter campaign from workers at Mitsubishi, I doubt that you have ever held a real conversation with any of the multitude of white male workers there who you have summarily dismissed with this one-word epithet. What comes through in the tone of your response is not principle but contempt. On that basis you are unlikely to make much of a contribution to changing the society of which you are so critical, unless you believe that a revolution in this country will be made in the absence of, nay with the outright opposition of the vast majority of white male working class folk. That must make you a very depressed, angry, frustrated, and demoralized individual. (Pardon the cyber-psycho analysis.)
I will add one other observation, based on personal experience. Having spent nearly 30 years in the labor movement and having returned to school late in life to pursue a graduate degree, I would say that a higher proportion of white blue collar working class men I know are and have been inclined to engage in active struggle against capital on various bases than has been true of the white male academics/intellectuals/scholars & professionals I found in and around the universities. If I was about to get into a serious political battle and needed help, I'd much rather run into the nearest factory than the nearest university to seek allies. (No inference should be made about the participants on this list.)
When the call went out for pickets to mount a boycott against the Neptune Jade on behalf of the Liverpool Dockers (more of those pink penises), I am not aware of a single University of CA-Berkeley professor (pink-penised or not) who showed up on the picketline, but there were lots of those folks of whom you speak with such contempt (along with many people of color and women, of course).
Oh well, this is California, after all. They must not count.
In solidarity, Michael E.
At 09:54 PM 5/25/98 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:
>I would suggest that calling a sizable minority of these people
>> "scabs" is not going to be helpful.
>
>One can only speak the truth. How well acquainted are you with the history
>of racism in the United States? How much do you know about the work force
>at the Mitsubishi shop in Normal, IL? I called the workers at that plant
>scabs in a letter to the local newspaper for their rallying around the
>Boss in the case of the charges of sexual harassment brought against the
>company. Up to that point, there had been a flood of letters from workers
>in the plant defending Mitsubishi. That flood stopped: not a single letter
>more. My wife at that time was the president of the APWU local at the
>Bloomington Post Office. When she went to work the next day, everyone she
>met praised the letter. And that in a union local that three years earlier
>had been so fucking sexist that when she ran for president with the
>support of the outgoing president and against a former president who
>everyone hated she won by only 10 votes out of 180. It really does help to
>tell the truth, even if it offends people.
>
>If people are objectively scabbing, how do they ever stop if someone
>doesn't tell them what they are doing?
>
>How do *you* plan to fight racism and sexism?
>
>What is your opinion on defending Mumia?
>
>What is your opinion on waving the flag that committed genocide in Viet
>Nam?
>
>Carrol
>
>