Marx on free trade

Oiboy27 at aol.com Oiboy27 at aol.com
Sun Sep 26 20:06:42 PDT 1999


In a message dated 99-09-26 20:27:06 EDT, mbs writes:

<< Whatever the drawbacks of manufacturing work, the potential pay premium

seems to be enough for workers to figure out where their best interests lie.

As things stand, the Dems are abandoning these people to Buchanan. Let the

centrists babble about education, having eight different careers in a

lifetime, or improving service sector jobs. Let the greens vent about

alternative technology. Lefts can fantasize about revolution in the

periphery. Buchanan is going to be speaking directly to workers who

understand that is all hooey, and there is one guy who wants to *protect*

the jobs they want, the jobs their fathers had that enabled them to make a

life from the humblest origins.

>>

mbs, I salute you. I am overjoyed to see that someone is addressing what I perceive as nonmasturbatory leftism here. I think your observation is pointed and accurate and as obvious as it may seem to people such as you and I, it yet needs to be hammered home. The American left's current abandonment of the workers (in this case, obviously, American workers) in favor of increasingly bizarre "identity factions," or freakish syphilitic philosophers whose ideas cannot possibly sustain a huge and complex civilization, or the plight of the endangered titmouse, is a continuation of the downward spiral that the American Left assumed when it wantonly embraced the 1960s "counterculture". The result was the dissatisfaction that got a previously primarily Democratic voter-base to identify with Nixon. I view the task of the responsible and realistic Left to support, create, or improve a system in which wealth is shared more equally and people can raise children to live safely and with hopefully ever-increasing chances to flourish mentally, culturally, and physically. In my opinion, the task of destroying and replacing society is far less wise, and far less possible, and far more susceptible to sabotage, than that of improving it. I doubt too many people with children will ever disagree with me on that.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list