> You are making an inference about Ruy's politics which is inaccurate. He's
> a friend of mine, so anyone can take that any way they like. (correct
> spelling:
> Teixeira. He's of Portuguese extraction, fyi.)
>
> For Ruy the attention to white workers serves the purpose of forming a
> complete notion of class. It's not that he sees them as some crucial
> vanguard of change in and of themselves. They are conspicuously absent
> from Democratic voting rolls, but that goes to the Democrats' failure to
> address class. Ruy's point is that the
> Dems have traded white workers for "suburbanites," and pocketbook class
> issues for their stands, such as they are, on things like choice, gun
> control, and
> affirmative action. I think there's a lot to this, as could be gleaned
> from my posts.
>
> Ruy is pretty data-driven. I don't believe his results are biased by his
>
Max:
I think you misread what I said. I didn't suggest that either Piven or Cloward, on the one hand, or Teixeira, on the other hand, saw these respective groups as a vanguard. Rather, they see them as the target constituency which should be the object of outreach. Perhaps I should have been a little clearer on that count.
Unlike you, I would not identify myself with either strategy en toto. I think that the Cloward-Piven focus on poor folks is primarily based on a flawed 1960ish notion of 'the people'; witness all their work on poor peoples movements. It is, at best, a very incomplete notion of a left social base. But I also think that the old class v. identity problematic at the root of Teixeira's strategy is also rather limited -- not so much for its focus on economic 'class' issues, as for its negative approach to questions like choice, affirmative action, gay/lesbian rights and gun control. It sacrifices the broadly democratic aspect of left politics for a too narrow class focus.
For what it is worth, I know all of the parties to the debate, having worked with them in NAM and DSA. From my own experience, they are all pretty decent folks, although I wouldn't claim to know any of them as well as Max knows Ruy.
And I think we should always be suspicious of how research is shaped by political agendas. I am not suggesting some sort of crude determination, some sort of intellectual dishonesty, but the notion that anyone is simply "data driven," as if we don't start from selectivity frames on what data is significant or from interpretative frames on how to read data [just look at how different polling firms reached different results from the same data these past months], is just not sustainable, IMHO.
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 lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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