I couldn't agree more. In fact, one of the reasons I signed up on this list was to hear from people about how we could get things done. Doug's early point that few of us have any good ideas about "What Is To Be Done (aka WITBA) is, for me at least, the real point of a list like this. I don't disparage the theoretical talk one bit; but I feel many of us have a rough idea of what we need to do but little idea of how to connect with folks who, for want of a better way to say it, ain't on this list.
I have been impressed by Carrol's tales about real conflicts she's been part of and about their significance for organizing a movement that would work. I work in a private school in NYC and have been trying to organize my fellow teachers for a long time--talk about slow going! (Katrina vd Heuvel and her husband, the noted scholar Stephen Cohen, send their child to this school--do they know of the "planatation" mentality of private schools with regard to workers' power--in my contract it says that "there is no concept of tenure at Trinity". Not only is there no tenure in fact or law, there is not even the IDEA of it. Do they care? They spend nearly $20,000 a year on tuition. Maybe THE NATION's cruise to the caribbean will help subsidize this family budget item. My father-in-law wants to know what the hell is going on in American education when a school charges this much money to have a person like me teach their kids that capitalism is evil.) So if the time I spend doing what I can where I work is so pitifully inadequate to the task we talk about theoretically on this list, what's the real hope?
By the way, what do people think about the prospects of the new Labor Party? Could it possibly become a way, for example, to connect the cabbies in NYC with the rest of us, so that when fights like the present one arise in new york city, WE HAVE A WAY TO MOBILIZE the coalition we so often speak about?
Steve
********************** Steven R. Cohen lomco at pipeline.com