>clearly, i was not patronizing the working class by romanticizing them.
>like you, alex, i know better than to do such a thing. i know
altogether
>too well just how apathetic, narrow-minded, etc they can be. however,
if
>my experiences, particularly teaching, have taught me anything at all,
it's
>that we have far more to worry about than apathy, bigotry, racism and
>sexism among working class folks. there's heaps of all of that and more
>among the more erudite and supposedly educated, scribbling classes, as
>wojtex calls them. what the upper middle class learns is how to talk
the
>talk and give the 'socially acceptable response'
Yeah, but I could give two shits about winning the upper middle class over to the cause of socialism. It's the workers I'm worried about, so racism, homphobia, sexism among them is of far more concern to me.
>well, see, you're demanding that we view freedom as some sort of
personal
>choice to make. you're holding people morally responsible--which isn't
>bad per se, but without some sort of structural analysis then i'm afraid
>it's just blaming people.
No, not at all. Look, for any revolutionary movement to be successful, there has to be some real class consciousness among workers. Lenin says that workers are only capable of reaching trade union consciousness. Whether or not this is true is not that important. What is important is that the American working classes haven't even reached THAT level of consciousness. From where I'm writing (the good ol' South), shitkickin' redneck, Goldwater individualism prevails. When the Teamsters struck UPS in '97, you actually had people here talking about those spoiled, pampered union workers, "what the hell are they complaining about? I wish I made those kinda wages," etc.
So on one side we've got apathetic, racist, sexist, homphobic, individualistic workers, and on the other side we've got ignorant, idealistic, candy-assed Greens and Pacifists who wouldn't know a real struggle if it bit them in their tenured asses.
>oh thank the god i don't believe in that you've acknowledged that you
read
>nothing i type.
Don't feel too bad. Carrol doesn't read anything I type, I don't think. I asked him a question over on the marxism list that has yet to be answered. In addition to backwards workers and candy-assed Greens, I should add a third category of crotchety old professorial types who use radical politics as a means of masking their misanthropy, inability to cope, fear of intimacy, of whatever the fuck makes them such cranky assholes.
>ever listened to 'earth crisis' adherents? they truly believe that
humans
>are inferior to nature. humans have the capacity for reason and freedom
>and so choose to destroy the innocent earth. they sound like damn
abortion
>opponents: unborn babies are innocent and abortion is murder; abortion
>doctors are not innocent and so killing them is justified.
There was a pretty good review of Thomas Harris' book Hannibal in the Nation recently that likened Deep Ecology and Animal Rights to human self-hatred. But that's another thread entirely...
>you've captured moore's complaint right here in this post, this
intra-class
>struggle that manifests itself in a kind of identity politics in which
>people are sorted out by the things they buy, the products they boycott,
>e clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the books on their shelves and
>he magazines in their mailbox. so, yeah, the politics you describe are
>athetic, but at least there's something there that 'we' can work with
I wish I shared that optimism. I think these types are more concerned with cleansing their liberal guilt than anything else. But yeah, I'll continue to engage these snobs, in the hopes that they might achieve some epiphany (wait, didn't I just say I could care less about winning the upper middles to socialism? Ok, I was exaggerating..). Ditto the workers.
Marx's letter to Ruge is one of my favorites, BTW, but I'm sure the more ortho-Marxists would dismiss it as the naive young humanist Marx.
Loved the jail story, too.
solidarity,
Alex
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