> Who has anybody excluded from a definition of the w.c.?
see below.
> Whoever said the homeless were not w.c.?
wojtek.
> What year is it?
according to my machine, it was 1995 a week ago... but now it thinks it's 1999, so it must be a time machine.
> mbs: My only axe to grind here is that lefts ought to reflect
> on why they think differently than the w.c., even when they're right
> and the w.c. is wrong. It'll happen some day. I'm optimistic.
the left and the working class are different? those who are working class and left are no longer part of the working class?
dear machine, whilst on the one hand i appreciate your operator's notion of sorting thru the connection between the left's politics and the working class as an antidote to the kinds of distinctions (between party and class made by orthodox - ie., leninist - marxists), me thinks that connection should be principally one of organisational form. the changes to work organisation, the expansion of capital beyond the immediate production process, etc all means that the centralised, mass party form is no longer (in my view) the most appropriate kind of organisational form _for the working class_. this perhaps is where a decisive, and in my view important, cleavage between the left and the working class resides, and one which gets passed over by having reified the organisational forms of past glories.
as to politics and the political differences _within_ the working class, me thinks that's decidedly not a question that gets resolved or determined by a majoritarian empiricism: the working class is, after all is said and done, a part of capitalism, and any decisions about which politics prevails within left working class organisations and fora is always going to be a question of which sections of the working class are organised through which organisations.
an eg., the federal trade union body here has been since 1901 stuck in the legislative and labour market composition strategies laid out in the 1900's. they haven't been inclined to organise workers in the informal, part-time, casualised economy, and certainly not those in sectors where women and 'minorities' predominate. twenty years ago, these sectors were a small part of the economy. today, they're largest and growing part of the economy. union membership in the meantime has taken a serious battering. now, this not only relates then to the question of organisational form, but to the issue of which issues are regarded as priorities. all those issues regarded as 'social issues' suddenly become quite central union issues, don't they?
Angela _________