rc-am wrote:
> b) i think nathan is right to point to the advances in the AFL-CIO on
> migration. and they're certainly not communists. the question that
> remains though is to what extent the current leadership of the AFL-CIO
> regarded it necessary to acknowledge (and include) the energy and fight
> that was apparent in the anti-Prop 187 but limit those recognitions to la
> linea and 'legality'. if there's a basis for an internationalist workers'
> movement in the US, it's always been here rather than in the moral
> inflections of 'solidarity'.
Could you expand and clarify. Are you saying that (1) the AFL-CIO leadership opposed Prop 187 only because they were forced to by their members or (2) that leadership's motives were correct but they can't be depended on to see the logical implications of their original motives? Or what? I don't understand the first part of your paragraph and so can't respond to the last sentence, which is where the interest lies.
> max continues to sniff at the prospect of
> internationalism because he regards it as without foundation; but he does
> so only because he omits these workers from the sense of 'north american
> workers'.
Max really, as far as I can see, regards issues of race, gender, etc. as unimportant and divisive. Which means that very fundamentally he sees the only important u.s. workers as straight white males, and any consideration of the 75% of the workforce which is not white and male is a "diversion." It follows, then, that he necessarily despairs of mass action and hopes only that somehow our rulers can be persuaded to be nice to us.
He sniffs at internationalism then because he quite correctly sees that a strategy grounded purely in "class" (and which leaves out the centrality of race to class questions in the u.s.) dare not offend white males. What is your conception of the route to class unity in the united states?
Carrol