> At 11:34 AM 11/14/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >kelley wrote:
> >
> >>work with and radicalize "the struggles and wishes of the age..."
> >
> >I'm all for that, but to do that you've got to confront the deliberately
> >antidemocratic structure of U.S. government, something most liberals and
> >leftists refuse to do.
> >
> >Doug
>
>
> well, the best i got for now is to work at the local level. i'm convinced
> that large scale, coordinated social movements are not realistic right now,
> but it's coming. as individuals we can only do so much. you can reach
> people with the newsletter, books, etc. i can work on the local
> "neighborhood watch" which is, around here, about the closest we've got to
> community oversight of the police. there i can raise questions, etc.
Hm. I'm interested in things like this. In South Africa, post 1994, we've had 'community policing forums' which are meant to put a check on the police. They've basically been toy telephones. There have been various attempts to set up some kind of community protection systems in the townships from time to time.
I don't think that such things - in poor working class areas - are necessarily a bad thing. The big problem for me, however, is how do you ensure that such structures don't start imposing an image of 'the good community' and acting in a reactionary fashion - pretending that the problem comes from 'outsiders'? How do these structures maintain solidarity?
In suburb I live, which is a bit of a mix, but politically controlled by the fairly well-off 'middle class' (particularly estate agents and other local businesspeople), I think the neighbourhood watch, which has gone so far as to hire its own security guards, is a bad thing, protecting gentrification, and essentially its a weapon of class warfare, where the 'middle class' try and keep their suburb 'looking rich', even if they are more heavily indebted than heavily capitalised.
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