Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> At 01:28 AM 2/17/00 -0500, Yoshie wrote:
> >Is it in the objective interest of the working class to include organized
>
> That is the heart of the entire debate. Who decides what 'objective
> interests' of the working class are? Kelley and myself argued against a
> view that pundits have a better and more rational view on that issue than
> the working class itself.
As Plato showed 2500 years ago you can always win a debate if you write an opponent's case for him/her. Here Wojtek states two absurd views, of which he prefers the usual academic one. Pundits have nothing to do with it except in the fevered view of academics who have no experience in organizing so much as a church outing to the mall.
We live in a bourgeois democracy. That means *no* group (including the ruling class) "speaks for itself"; rather various groups, organizations, and individuals propose themselves as the voice of a given group, which in turn (by various formal and informal means) ratifies or fails to ratify those self-elected spokespersons. At the present a cacophony of voices are claiming to speak for the working class. Some of those claimants are liars. Others may be right or wrong in their claims of what working class interests are. Tom thinks amnesty for workers is against the interest of workers. Steve thinks it is in workers' interests. Political struggle over years and decades will decide it.
Eventually the workers will in fact dispose. In the meantime anyone who thinks him/herself to have even a minimal sense of what the working class needs has an obligation to pretend to be a voice of the class and to compete with other voices to be heard. Wojtek assumes however that no one has any right to even attempt to formulate goals for the working class until he/she has been vetted as it were by academic blowhards such as Wojtek.
A union election is the simplest example. Does anyone honestly believe that the way a plant gets organized is that some day all the workers suddenly bolt from sleep, each in his/her isolation suddenly exclaiming, "Gee, we need a union!" This seems to be the model Wojtek and Kelley have in mind in their a priori condemnation of anyone's attempting to speak for the workers.
Actually, anyone on this list who claims not to know what is in the objective interests of the working class is lying. Wojtek obviously thinks he knows. All of us are probably wrong in many ways. Some of us are probably wholly wrong. Wojtek seems to believe the issue can be settled in academic journals or in a Gallop poll of the workers. In fact a multi-front struggle will decide it, and how "workers" or anyone else happen to be thinking today will be of very little relevance to that struggle. That of course is another reason why it is simply unprincipled to blabber on this list about the subjective consciousness of workers. It is constantly changing. It will change enormously in all directions in the future. And of course we all have our estimations of how that consciousness may change and in what direction.
Given the very nature of the e-list medium, all statements on it are statements about objective reality, even statements denying knowledge of objective reality. Wojtek's attacks on professors or pundits are themselves instances of pundrity. I rather think this list should be renamed Uriah-Heep-talk. Everyone is so 'umble and so insistent that everyone else be so 'umble.
I call that humbleness sheer terror of ever being wrong. It is safer just to snipe at others. I would be terribly ashamed unless 50% of what I think and say at any given time turned out to be wrong. Anyone always right is a moral and intellectual coward.
Carrol