I think this description collapses a historical process. At its origins, the civil rights movement was entirely focused on the end of de jure segregation and the establishment of voting rights -- 'process' questions, by Max's definition. It was only when these issues had been largely successfully won [although we were apparently a great deal more optimistic about the voting rights issue than we had a right to be], that the movement moved on to take up questions of poverty and economic inequality. But it was also at this point that the movement began to fracture [not necessarily because of that transition -- after all, as a social democrat, even Bayard Rustin saw it as essential to take up issues of poverty and economic inequality -- but over issues such as Black Power]; and it was also at that point that the larger social and political support for its goals began to dissipate. For these historical reasons, I think that a movement around the "process" issue of an end to all disenfranchisement would still have a much broader base than almost any economic issue: it is one thing for a Scalia to issue pronouncements ex cathedra that there is no right to vote; it would be an altogether different matter to try to make the case politically.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --
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