On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 18:49:34 -0400 sawicky at epinet.org (Max Sawicky) writes:
>Ruthlessness is not always constructive, as in, fulfills
>a serious purpose.
We disagree, but that's neither here nor there.
>Coming from a wc background, you may not appreciate that
>among middle-class radicals, there is a real aversion to
>rubbing shoulders with real workers
Undoubtedly. And I think some of that aversion might lead to Third Worldism/Weatherman type stuff, as you suggest, but the flipside of that is that some middle-class radicals divorced from the working classes lapse into romanticism and fetishism, ra-ra for the workers, by people who've never even bothered to talk to workers and find out what they're thinking.
>Most working people are good-hearted and competent.
Nobody disputes that, least of all me.
>If you are reacting against patronization of the
>masses, I think that is well-taken when there is
>a legitimate target for it. I don't see any in
>the other posts.
I do. Kelley came down on me for my musing about whether or not people really desire freedom, taking it as a slam of "the masses" and suggesting that such speculation is what turns people off from the Left. Please. I doubt if any of "the masses" give a fuck about what I have to say about JFK.
>You've got to accentuate the positive if you want to
>eliminate the negative, to coin a phrase.
Johnny Mercer beat you to it. ;-)
>There's also an issue of intellectual intolerance,
>re: "idiotic belief in God." We had a donnybrook
>on this last summer on LBO, so I have no appetite
>for a repeat. All I'll say is that religion is
>not idiocy. I don't think marx believed that
>either, for what it's worth. Religion is deep.
Deeper than it needs to be, IMHO. If the donnybrook is on the archive, point the way...
>Then there's a vanguard issue. We may want to
>fight for the people, but the fact remains that
>nothing much is going to happen until people
>fight for themselves.
Agreed. Don't interpret what I've said as an endorsement of vanguardism.
That's the last thing I want to be a representative of. People have to free themselves. Really, that's the heart of what I said in my first post: given the sentimentality over John-John, one wonders if people are willing to free themselves...
>That's fine, as long as you recognize that's all
>you're doing.
Absolutely.
>What matters is what is to be done, and the consequences of not doing
it.
Organizing. The consequences of not doing it will be disastrous.
Part of the whole process is recognizing the shortcomings of the wc, and middle class radicals need to stop accusing each other of being insensitive to the workers. They're seeking to enhance their own pseudo-street cred by guilt tripping each other, and that shit doesn't work on me.
Barbara Ehrenreich said recently that a big problem with the Left is that we like to see ourselves as some sort of secret majority, where the masses really harbor sympathies with Leftist ideas, but that they're just kept in the dark by the "manufacture of consent." I hate to break it to some folks, but a gift subscription to Extra and a collection of Chomsky's works isn't going to turn the working class around. The problems are a lot deeper than mere ignorance.
s ___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.