European Unions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Dennis wrote:
>
>>  > The American workers are very combative -- as we have seen during the
>>>  strikes.  They have had the most rebellious strikes in the world.
>>>  What the American worker misses is a spirit of generalization, or
>>>  analysis, of his class position in society as a whole.
>>
>>>  Yoshie
>>
>>And who, pray tell, will provide this much-needed "analysis" to the ignorant
>>workers of the US? Yes, you guessed it. Academia will lead the way! (Unless
>>there's a conference on "Marxism and Post-post Modernism: Drawing Radical
>>Blueprints for the 21st Century and Beyond." First things first.)
>
>Yeah, you hear academics quoting Trotsky on working class militancy 
>and consciousness all the time! I remember back in grad school, you 
>heard folks in the English department lounge talking about it all 
>the time. People laughed out loud when one student said he was doing 
>a diss on Tennyson's letters. He was roundly denounced as a 
>complicit tool of the aestheticizing bourgeoisie.
>
>Doug

Do you guys actually disagree with Trotsky, tough, empirically or 
theoretically?  It seems to me indisputable that American workers 
have gotten less than their counterparts in Europe, not because the 
former have been less militant than the latter, but because the 
former lacked "a spirit of generalization, or analysis, of his class 
position in society as a whole" (e.g., racism blocking class 
consciousness of white workers).  Decentralized militancy of American 
workers failed to win lasting gains in the form of universalist 
social programs.

Yoshie

P.S.  How did "academia" pop up in this thread, since neither my post 
nor the posts to which I replied mentioned it?