>[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
I sez:
Your points are generally well-taken, but by no means was I claiming that rude boy surfers stomping on systems managers on their days off (not to mention tormenting the homeless) was the vanguard of class struggle. (Allaying DD's concerns). My comments were as much a facetious ethnography as a political manifesto. Basically just thinking out loud about one slice of the local working class, how they think, and what they do. Also just fleshing out for myself this abstraction called the "working class," or at least as I've said one local dimension of it. Really old-school leftists carry around with them an abstraction of the "working class" as male assembly line workers. More hip leftists think of the "working class" in all of its splendid multiracial, national, gender, and occupational diversity. But California is such a strange cultural landscape that few think of young white dudes with bleached hair, wrap-around sunglasses, tattoos, dirt bikes, and kidded-up trucks w/tinted windows as "working class." Also interesting how in CA at least a large bulk of 2nd generation immigrant youth absorb and transform the white working class dude culture, although of course shorn of its (white) racism. And my guess is that some aspects of mixed-race street tough culture in S.A. (dress, slang, mannerisms, etc.) is exported from the global culture industry metropoles -- L.A., London, etc. ?
Anyway, perhaps these are all banal run-of-the-mill observations.
Best of the season (but I'll refrain from saying "w/warmest regards"),
John Gulick