the class struggle is alive and well ...

John Gulick jlgulick at sfo.com
Wed Dec 20 14:16:01 PST 2000


... here in Santa Cruz County the class struggle is alive and well. Neither orthodox leftists nor post-modernists have the mental equipment to recognize this. The former hold on to antiquated notions of who is in the working class, what they would regard as an ideal world if only the veil of bourgeois ideology was stripped away, and what forms of action and organization will get the job done. Post-modernists deny that the working class conceives of itself as such, and even call into question whether, in these so-called post-industrial times, the working class objectively exists. (OK, I'm caricaturing a battery of complex of positions in order to make a polemical point).

Here in Santa Cruz County one notable segment of the working class is white, male, aged 20-35, born and raised locally. They drive around in big-ass jacked-up trucks with halogen lights and "Bad Boy club" decals, work part-time temporary jobs in construction and landscaping, and are into various and sundry "rad sports" -- surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, ATV'ing. The big "political" campaign of late is intimidating and beating up the burgeoning yuppie population (Santa Cruz being just "over the hill" from IPO ground zero) who are taking over their favorite surfing and ATV'ing spots with their longboards and mountain bikes. Another favorite pasttime is cruising downtown in their modified trucks and harrassing liberal upper-middle class college students, who are readily identifiable by their imported Guatemalan clothing and "free Leonard Peltier" buttons, and symbolically connected to the extortionary rents that landlords charge in these parts.

This is a much more typical form of the class struggle in the U.S. today, as opposed to the population at large getting up in arms about a semi-fascist hijacking of a formal democratic election. The class struggle is alive and well, although it is a far cry from the Wobblies' defense of a proletarian work-and-live culture at the turn of the century ...

John Gulick



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