Alex LoCascio wrote:
>Three long posts in one day...and I haven't even gotten to my first bowl
>of Total..
better make sure it's the kind with raisins.....
>Yeah, but I could give two shits
three mebbe?
> 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.
why are you upset about the greens, etc?
what i'm not quite understanding, too, is why you'd not worry about racism, etc among the upper middle class. they are, after all, the people who produce economic policy, standards of what constitute health and illness, social science, assessments of psychological health, the images in the visual media, the text in the print media, the textbooks, the bestsellers, the bestsellers lists, etc.
>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.
honey pie, bless yo heart, but i be living further south than you is so's i hears plenny of dis kinna talk. but lez not go stereoypin' da south coz i grew up in upstate new yolk where deys lotsa attitudes like deez hearya you'se talkin' 'bout. iyah. [ok, john, call me a damn yankee]
seriously, i grew up in a hugely anti-union town. indeed, it was part of the research on deindustrialization that bluestone and harrison used in their work. the community was exemplary in the lit for it's anti-union sentiments and for having been subject to plant closings every decade of this century. it's no accident that it was the location of real life events portrayed in dreiser's American Tragedy. anti-union sentiments were entrenched in spite of AND because of those plant closings.. isn't that what's going on? intra-class battle? is that not why some workers will bitch about other workers who get paid well because of unions? isn't it another version of the prison guards against the prisoners here? as for the south, isn't there a long history of anti-unionism that is linked directly to the history of industrialization and slavery in the south.
now, of course, recognizing this doesn't mean that i don't get pissed at the prison guards and hold them accountable for their actions and ditto workers who bitch about union workers striking for better wages. but what's the point of holding individuals morally accountable, treating them as if they're the enemy? i'd like to shake some sense into people sometimes too, but then don't you think, as another lister wrote early on, we have to remember how hard it was for a lot of 'us' to get here? what did it take? who did we encounter in our lives? what books did we stumble over and read? what music did we listen to? what organizations did we belong to? what was the political/cultural milieu like?
by that last one i mean this: what was going on in the wider political-economy/culture that might encourage us to see things differently? my mother tells me i was a natural born rabble-rouser. but i have to remind her that i grew up watching her and other women in my family fight 'the system' in their own small ways. and i watched my gram slave away in a non-union factory for decades and watch my gramps get laid off several times. and i watched neighbors lose really great union jobs only to end up as janitors and security guards. i have to remind her, too, that i grew up in the 60s and 70s and witnessed the various social movements. i have to remind her that my first foray into organizing with some h.s. buds was because of those images on the tube, because of that legacy of working class women's snittiness, because an english prof gave us a positive introduction to marx in the ninth grade, and because a history teacher spent a couple of days associating the teacher's strike with the various rebellions of the 60s and the history of working class struggle in general. so, it was no surprise that we organized a s tudent strike in support of striking teachers w/o a contract.
so, sure, hold people accountable on some level, but i think the more important thing to focus on is asking what it takes to get people there to begin with. it is surely not the result of some inner compulsion, some genetic imperative, some natural endowment, or anything of the sort. class consciousness isn't simply about individuals achieving some epiphany, it's about history and about the availability of an entire political milieu that will encourage the crystallization of that consciousness.
>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.
you left out the heroic alex in the middle who's neither a candy-assed idealist nor racist, homophobic, etc. heh. oh sorry, i'm just teasing you. i'm in a mood. and i'll readily admit that i'm just as guilty as you are of this. we all are. it's called methodological dualism: other people are dupes but we somehow see through the veil of ideology. as someone else said, i think we tend to forget about the struggle that it took for us--the enlightened ones--to get here. and i think, if we're honest, it is always a struggle.
>Don't feel too bad.
ooops i guess my Xtreme amusement wasn't evident enough.
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.
curious as to what it was now....was it last year or early this year? i seem to recall you asking that question. not sure.... anyway, i keep meaning to say, 'glad you're back.'
smoochy smooch,
kelley