> While you may have silenced the letter campaign from workers at Mitsubishi,
You forget the positive response to the letter of my wife's fellow postal workers (white/male). How can workers who are scabs without realizing the fact ever change if they aren't told the truth? I do not doubt that I and some of those workers who put shit in black workers' lockers will *some* day be comrades. But not by crooning black and white together to them.
> 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.
I have no problem face-to-face with individual white male workers. And it didn't interfere with my wife being elected an officer of the McLean County Trades and Labor Assembly, nor in my friendly relations with the members of her union local. And some day those men may be very glad that they have a friend (even if he does call them scabs when they are scabs) who has solid relationships in the black community, relations which go back 30 years.
What comes through in the tone of your response is
> not principle but contempt.
Not contempt for male workers in general; contempt for those on lbo-talk who claim to be leftist but are seemingly so naive about how real and terrible a barrier to progress racism within the working class is. (And yes, racism is even worse among university faculty, professionals, petty producers, and capitalists proper. But I don't care about them. I do care about workers, including white male workers, and so I do care about the history of their racism.
One of the first principles I adopted when I became radicalized in my late 30s was not to blame people for believing their leaders. It is perfectly "natural" to trust one's leaders, even when like Lydnon Johnson and George Meany they were genocidal mad men. It is the responsibility of those of us who by luck know better to bring about a change. But while I'm not interested in assigning personal guilt, I remain damn interested in telling the truth. And the truth is that for 200 years white workers, generically, and with many many individual exceptions, have sided with the bosses against blacks, immigrants, etc. I think that under the right circumstances they can and will change. But your attitude won't ever give them a chance to change.
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.
They, some of them, perhaps many of them, will be there. But only if blacks, latinos, and women lead the way, without mollycoddling of white male feelings.
That must make you a very depressed, angry, frustrated,
> and demoralized individual. (Pardon the cyber-psycho analysis.)
I never pardon psychoanalysis, cyber or otherwise. I do happen to suffer from clinical depression, but other than that I'm a pretty happy guy.
>
> 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.
I agree. I once almost got fired for referring, in a formal faculty meeting, to the majority of the isu faculty as racist motherfuckers. But that was long ago and I am now retired and beyond the reach of the regents.
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.)
It all depends. But probably I would too, even if the university was the one I retired from and the factory was Mitsubishi. But that still doesn't change the real and terrible task of leftists in the U.S.A., including most specifically those in the unions, to fight u.s. working class racism, which remains the main barrier to class unity.
>
> 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).
Most of us are aware that Harry Bridges left quite a tradition behind him. It's one of the nobler stories in the history of U.S. labor.
One last query: What would have happened if in 1936-40 the CIO had carried its organizing drive into the south, basing it on strong anti-racist principles? Talk to Bill Fletcher (Education Director, AFL-CIO) some day.
Carrol Cox