class

[Carrol Cox]

For political purposes, what people think at any given point in time
(i.e., what they think now) is not really very important. The question
is always "What will a given sector of the population think _after_ some
specific event?" Not, for example, "What do people think now about the
Brown students' action?" but "What will that part of the population now
passive but potentially actively on our side think after a year of
highly visible actions focused on the subject of reparations?" Even that
is too general. But it is the kind of question someone in a planning
group might come up with as a first step in exploring what the question
should be. It moves towards, very roughly, making reparations an issue
that activates people.

And not, surely, "What class do people think they are in?" but "What
class would (say) 20% of the working class think they were in after five
years of growing mass activity around a given set of issues?"

One of the great changes capitalism brought about was to make absolutely
fundamental to human life the fact that the world in which an act's
consequences play out is a different world from the world that existed
before the act. Now this was clearly embryonically present in a number
of pre-capitalist class societies -- and in particular in the one I am
most familiar with, ancient athens, where recognition of it shows up in
reactionary thought and feeling, most dramatically in Sophocles. If only
Oedipus had not tried to avoid marrying his mother he would not have
married her. His act changed the world from a world in which he would
never know Jocasta to a world in which he married her. If only my
grandfather had not raised so many strawberries in 1939 [i.e., if only
he and all the other strawberry growers had not raised so many] he would
not have had to feed 300 crates of them to the hogs (because the price
offered was less than the cost of the packaging).

For the academic (as academic) and for the journalist, only the present
(or past) exists; for the political activist only the world transformed
by her action (i.e. the future) exists.

The title "One Nation" is an obvious lie.

Carrol