> revolution in the sweet bye and bye (Carrol), or the endless
> critique of reformism and w/no proposed alternative (Doug).
This is another of Max's comforting dreams. Comforting in that it allows him to dream forever that reforms can be gained without struggle. My attitude towards "reforms" is pretty exactly what Marx sketches briefly in the last chapter of *Wages, Price and Profit* -- namely, that unless the working class fights hard for immediate reforms (wage increases, I assume, are shorthand for all needed reforms) it will become one degraded mass incapable of any higher struggles. That is, reform struggles (including winning ones) are essential in any revolutionary program.
What I object to in Max's politics is not that they are not revolutionary. I think they are utopian and utterly incapable of adding a kopek to a ruble.
And one of the reasons Max's reform hopes are utopian is because he has a crippled conception of what the working class is or might be. He writes:
> This gross inflation of unionized prison guards
> and other bad stuff associated w/unions bespeaks
> the fundamentally booshwah, anti-working class
> orientation of the speakers. The working class
> is great in idealized form, rotten in real form.
Mary McCarthy once claimed that every word of Hellman;s was a lie, including "and, the, and a." The *and* in Max's "unionized prison guards and other bad stuff associated w/unions" is such a lie. When he perpetrates such lies Max is worse than any cartoon liberal. There are criticisms, heavy criticisms to be made of the AFL-CIO as it now exists. But the criticism of prison guards is on an entirely different basis. (Unions-in-general come in here only as they make the mistake of allowing prison guards in.)
My point about prison guards is not that they are rotten. Lots of workers (including lots of black workers and women workers) are all fucked up. That is no big deal. They are still the only potential source of power for either real reform or revolution. But prison guards are not fucked up workers. They are objectively criminals, and an attack on them is no more a criticism of the working class than an attack on the mafia would be. No change of consciousness on their part can make them otherwise -- they can change only by quitting their jobs. (When a cousin of mine, no radical, realized this, he quit his job as a cop.) Cops, prison guards, other agents of the police power of the state are declassed -- one may appropriately use the Chinese cliche in respect to them: they are lackeys and running dogs. They do not belong in unions -- not even in corrupt unions. Unionized prison guards makes as much sense as unionized hit men.
One may for comparison and contrast consider certain sectors of the working class that, depending on how they subjectively define themselves, may be jerks and scabs but are still workers: I am thinking of (for example) firefighters, social workers, and school teachers. Members of these groups often are asked to act like cops, and all too many of them do. (For example, those teachers who willingly throw themselves into enforcement of "zero tolerance" programs in the schools; firefighters who turn the firehoses on pickets or demonstrators; social workers who won't cheat to help clients.) When those workers act like cops, they are (temporarily, one hopes) scabs and traitors -- but they are still workers. They are not, as are cops and prison guards, declassed -- objective enemies of other workers.
> The working class is great in idealized form, rotten in real form.
Again, this seems like deliberate distortion. At any given time only a portion of the working class will be in motion -- and at a time of capitalist strength and left weakness such as the present the portion is very small. Only in Max's fevered imagination does any marxist on this list idealize the working class -- or call the actual working class "rotten." Empirically, as Adolph Reed recognizes, many workers are stupid. So what! We all have the right to be stupid. But organizers and militants, if they are sensible, will focus on those sectors of the working class who, *at this time*, are not stupid, or at least less so. Stupidity is a temporary condition.
> And somehow blacks and women are exempted from all said
> rottenness, as if they would construct fundamentally different
> trade unions.
Some day when you are rubbing elbows with AFL-CIO bureaucrats, ask Bill Fletcher about union organizing in Memphis in the '30s.
When the Normal Fire Department all got tossed in jail for striking back in the late '70s, some women I know carried a statement of solidarity for them around a local housing unit. Mexican and black women not only signed it (for an all white and all male work force!) but offered to circulate it themselves. Could you imagine such success for a statement of solidarity with black single mothers among a group of all white male unionists? (These were mostly single mothers signing the statement.)
Carrol
============
Max Sawicky wrote:
> Notes on assorted posts:
>
> Hoover's little catalogue (11/14, 9:12 am) neglects the
> most progressive strain of U.S. populism, which is
> labor-based and properly concerned with money and
> trade. Phillips is close to this in some respects,
> Hightower and Perot in others. Boyte is not. A
> survey of what passes for the U.S. left would
> reveal that the most consistently populist
> formation is . . . Americans for Democratic
> Action.
>
> Carroll cautions against messing with money
> but not production. But pops are prepared to
> mess with nearly everything. If the platform was
> money or trade-obsessed (the latter applying
> to Buchanan, neither applying to me), there
> would be more grounds for criticism.
>
> Katha responds to my gentle correction of
> her evident gross misinformation about populists
> and gold by tying WJ Bryan (and me, implicitly)
> to anti-semitism. Nice. Now I have a taste
> of what some black people feel like when they
> are called 'oreos' for straying from a white
> notion of orthodoxy.
>
> Defining the state as capital leads to either no
> politics (Heartfield), revolution in the sweet
> bye and bye (Carroll), or the endless critique
> of reformism and w/no proposed alternative (Doug).
>
> This gross inflation of unionized prison guards
> and other bad stuff associated w/unions bespeaks
> the fundamentally booshwah, anti-working class
> orientation of the speakers.
> In summary, populists offer the following points
> of superiority relative to some would-be marxists:
>
> they do not cede monetary policy to elites;
> they do not oppose free trade with futile,
> imaginary internationalist rhetoric;
> they do not fetishize "capital" in a way that
> narrows the working class;
> they acknowledge the legitimate role of enterprise
> in a social economy;
> they recognize trade unions as works-in-progress,
> not things that are essentially this or that.
> they are comfortable with a notion of class that
> encompasses race and gender, rather than
> being somehow co-equal with them;
> they would rather err on the side of pragmatism
> than on the side of doctrinal purity.
>
> Thanks for clarifying these things for me.
>
> mbs