``Chuck's co-workers are not actively involved in struggle yet, so while he can influence them on the war, his more abstract explanations (any proposition which _links_ various phenomena is to that extent abstract) doesn't "take" -- they just roll their eyes. If they get involved in the anti-war effort, or if the general excitement of the anti-war effort generates various concrete struggles (even for a cleaner washroom -- as in the old "is your restroom breeding bolsheviks?" ads), _then_ they might suddenly become very interested in what Chuck has to say about the systematic oppressions and stupidities & atrocities of capitalism...'' Carrol
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I read this at work, but it was too busy to respond and it really needs better than than a quick off reaction.
First, two of these guys are my friends and in some sense that in itself stifles my apostolic urges, even though it inspires my diatribes. Odd. And it also makes me think I can learn more about people from them, than they can learn from me about the cynical manipulations of political and economic power.
I had certain limited (white, middle class) privileges growing up that they didn't have. On the other hand, my family started off near the bottom and rose to near the upper middle class stratosphere over the course of growing up. So for example the kids I first became friends with in downtown LA were poor and not white, while by the end of high school I was going around with mostly rich kids living in the Hollywood hills---all white and all rich.
That spectrum say from Exposition Park to Laurel Canyon in LA demographics has stayed with me. Either by chance or taste, I am not sure which, my best experiences were all from the earlier and poor neighborhoods and friends, while all the worst and nastiest experiences came from the richer neighborhoods and richer friends. By the time I was in college, I had developed a papable hatred of the near rich and an idealized sympathy for the poor. I would call the latter an extremely romanticized world of images and feelings that amounted to an obligation or fealty of some sort toward boyhood friends lost in the gritty nostalgia of LA smog, traffic, industrial warehouses, rusted chain link fences, and vast boulevards ending in blood red sunsets. Hell.
The point is the guys I work with now are as if the grown men from those memories and it is an endless amazement to me, that after making myself literate, putting my way through eight and half years of college and university, working in political movements blah, blah, blah, here we are working together in almost the same general sort of dynamic of differences that I remember from childhood. In other words I feel at home at least with this particular Oakland branch of the working class.
If I want to experience the maximum of alienation all I have to do is visit a high bourgeois dinner party with the university and professional crowd. This reaction got so bad by the mid-Eighties that it actually contributed to giving up alcohol in anything but the most trivial quantities as part of an anger management program.
This is a round about way of explaining that I have a far more advanced form of class hatred than my working class shopmates. I loath those above me and they don't. They admire them. While this self-knowledge is useless and even self-destructive for all practical purposes, it does provide some historical and cultural insight into revolutions in the past.
To use old terminology, it would be nice to believe that the disaffected bourgeois, that is its critical intelligencia could form a professionalized vanguard with the proletariat. While some part of my experience makes this idea intelligible in that I can see how such a development works, another part of my experience tells me it only replicates the hierarchy of power---without the equalizing effects of perforced democratic institutions. As Trotsky put it:
``The barracks regime cannot be the regime of our party, just as the factory cannot be its example. These methods bring about a situation that the party organization will replace the party, the central committee will replace the party organization, and finally the `dictator' will replace the central committee ... The committees will do all the `directing' while `the people remain silent.' ''
While all the above is mostly rambling, hopefully you can see the connections. I have a serious ambivalence toward advocating anything beyond common sense reform within a working class context.
I have seen and lived the process of central committees and leaders taking the place of organized popular movements. Finally small cliques and leaders did all the directing from above. That was the encapsulated ready-made of the disability movement in the 70s. Similar developments were followed across the spectrum in many social movements of the period and it amounted to their essential failure. While they needed something like that process of producing leadership and central committees to get legislation passed and reforms enacted, once political reactions set in, they had no power to stop the impending reversals. Part of the reason was there was no popular movement left to muster, having been replaced by poorly funded organizations bogged down in institutional commitments and more or less completely alienated from their base. In short they were co-opted by their limited successes.
Chuck Grimes