Chris Burford:
> How can capitalism be denuded of its working class?
Gordon Fitch: In fantasy.
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Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
I think, though, that there should be one [a political party] that a sizable number of leftists in the States can join. At least I wish there were.
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kelley posted from Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks:
Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analyzing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.
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Please excuse the bricolage device, I know it's dated.
But the above all point to something my first _Dialectical Investigations_ question points to. In the last paragraph of the first chapter Ollman writes, "In Marxist terms, one doesn't advocate class struggle or choose to participate in it (common bourgeois misconceptions). The class struggle, representing the sum of the contradictions between workers broadly defined and capitalists, simply is, and in one way or another we are all already involved." This complicates the organizing picture. How much organizing happens on behalf of, rather than through, the class struggle. That is, how much organizing is motivated by a kind of heroic bourgeois sentimentality, or moralism (from whatever class)? Does it really matter, as long as the organizing happens? And will organizing run on any "mystical consciousness" eventually prove too weak?
What strikes me about the gap between critique and organizing ideology is the role fantasy has in filling it. I think it's a form of denial to dismiss fantasy as a secondary concern in this instance. To disparage fantasy is, in this way, to deny a cohesive force behind movements or political parties. Maybe what I'm getting at is, how is fantasy mobilized when a group identity is politicized, or political?
What are the hazards, what is the "mystical" fantasy, and what is the "reformed" fantasy? As an example, I think of the lingering protectionism, a species of Americanism, in the labor movement. Is this a mystical consciousness, with its racial and nationalistic overtones--a fantasy obscuring real common interests and thwarting organization?
Alec
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