the class struggle is alive and well ...

Peter van Heusden pvh at egenetics.com
Thu Dec 21 01:28:45 PST 2000


On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, [iso-8859-1] Daniel Davies wrote:


>
> --- John Gulick <jlgulick at sfo.com> wrote: >
> >
> > 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.
>
> hrrrrmmmm .... going around in gangs beating up
> students because they're "spoiling the way things used
> to be" seems to me be rather more than semi-fascist
> itself.

[as usual, the stuff below is not entirely digested, and I'm not sure that I even know exactly what I'm saying]

Here in Cape Town the 'Coloured' (mix European - African - Khoi-san people) people rather colourfully refer to a certain type of generally English speaking white as a 'soutie' - from 'sout piel' which means 'salty dick'. In other words, someone who stands with one foot in Africa, and the other in England, and their dick hanging in the ocean.

I guess to some degree I am seen as a 'soutie' (though I try to not act like one), and the suburb I live in, Observatory, is becoming more 'soutie' every day, through a process of gentrification. While running around beating people up is quite a questionable occupation (and reminds me of the worst of Class War or Red Action in the UK), I agree with John that this needs to be seen as working class action. Right next to Observatory is the suburb of Salt River, and the dividing line - rougly Rochester Road - is an old Apartheid era Group Areas Act boundary. As a result there is a quite different culture on the Salt River side of Obs.

If the 'left' takes seriously the idea that the working class can compose itself as the negation of capital (that hideous social relation), then I think we need to also take seriously dynamics like John describes. In a situation where capital was associated with colonialism, the term 'soutie' implies not just a culture, but also a relation to capital. Beneath the cultural conservativism of disdaining 'souties' there lies a hostility to the social relation of capital, and an evocation of the 'independence' of the poor and their areas from 'official society'. As recent struggles in South Africa have shown, this is a rich source of rebellion against capital.

Of course, in John's example, you need to factor whiteness into the equation. The image of a wave of gentrification being linked with students with Leonard Peltier buttons is, of course, disturbing. As the Race Traitor people have often argued, too often, when the crunch comes, whites have chosen to be white rather than working class in the US. (In Cape Town, there is a disturbing dynamic where Coloured people follow the old Apartheid era racial hierarchy and choose to be Coloured rather than working class or Black - its a complex topic). Ultimately, however, I wonder how much the students feel superior to the 'obviously' racist, sexist (or semi-facist) whites who are beating them up, and how much this seperation plays into the inability of everyone to get beyond the current logjam.

Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B



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