> It is you who have been complaining that GLBT activists' demand for the
> equal right to marriage is not revolutionary
As I said to Joel, this hinges on what is meant by the word revolutionary, and as I keep saying, I think there are some non-revolutionary issues which _are_ worth pursuing.
> and that US leftists are
> spending too much time on what you contemptuously label marginal
> issues such as GLBT activism to help make the American working class
> revolutionary or some such nonsense.
What I said was: "the US left is not in a "revolutionary condition"and --- my personal sympathies for same-sex rights and unemployed rights aside --- it never will be as long as it spends so much time on issues which are marginal to the vast majority of wage earners." Perhaps this is too blunt.
I guess it wouldn't make any difference to say that I've spent a considerable amount of time being unemployed. Or that an friend of mine, who was in a long-term same-sex relationship, lost her partner to cancer. She was then confronted with her "in-laws" trying to claim custody of her partner's child. Fortunately she had already taken care of the legal requirements. And so on, ad infinitum. What I have been alluding to in this debate is the question of _emphasis_ and the economy of our various personal spare times, not an "either ____ or ____" situation.
> I'm simply pointing out that
> neither trade union activism nor GLBT activism nor the Nader/Camejo
> campaign nor anything else anyone is doing at this moment in the USA
> or Australia or any other parts of the world (with a few potential
> exceptions such as Venezuela) is particularly revolutionary or
> counter-revolutionary and that it doesn't make sense to apply such a
> yardstick since social revolution is not on the agenda in most parts
> of the world at this moment.
This reminds me of being given a leaflet by a member of a Trot group -- out on a recruiting drive --- at my uni a few years ago. It was full of slogans about racism, sexism, homphobia, etc. Not one word about class. So it's not just a problem of the US left. I was later told that the group in question did make occasional attempts at dialogue with unions, and some progress had been made, but it was a little like a married couple who had spent so long apart, that they no longer knew how to talk to each other.
> The answer is simple: when the oppressed care and begin to organize
> to address the oppression, help them do something about it. I
> discussed the question of the equal right to marriage here, to take
> just one example, because many GLBT activists have already put it on
> the national political agenda. The trick is to support it while
> pointing out the problem of tying benefits (such as health care,
> survivor benefits, etc.) to one's employment, citizenship, marriage,
> and other statuses.
Or we can put forward the idea of a society in which all of the above needs and more would be taken care of. And explain what the major obstacle to that is. And which class is the natural enemy of that system. And so on.
> Recognize resistance to the ruling class power where it exists, be it
> the resistance of wage workers, peasants, petty producers, colonized
> nations, students, or whatever, and see what you can do to help,
> especially if the resistance has a potential of becoming bigger and
> more militant.
I have to disagree strongly, because some of the resistance, whether it's al Qaeda or Patrick Buchanan, is more reactionary than the global ruling class.
> In most nations in the world, proletarians who have
> regular employment as wage laborers in the formal sector are a
> privileged minority of the working population (many are pushed into
> class limbos of the informal sector as petty traders,
> semi-peasant-semi-agricultural laborers,
> semi-factory-workers-semi-subsistence-farmers, etc.), and leftists
> can't postpone resistance to the ruling class until wage laborers
> become the majority of the population like in the USA.
Whether they choose to postpone or not, it doesn't mean that have much chance of achieving genuine socialism/communism --- there were very good reasons why Marx concentrated on the most developed societies, and these had nothing to do with the currently fashionable defamation of him as "racist", "orientalist", etc.
> >These revolutions have all failed or are on the verge of failure.
>
> A wrong yardstick. It's surprising that they lasted as long as they
> did, with little assistance to the working class of rich nations.
All I can say is, "speak for yourself". Or at least the working class of which you are a part --- and even then it's probably not justified.
> I didn't say that France is today more socialist than the USA or the
> UK. You missed the word "twice" in the quoted sentence above. I
> meant the Paris Commune and 1968.
Fair enough. Although France is hardly DR Congo, development-wise.
I would love to continue this, but I'm going to unsub as I will be very busy for the next few months. Feel free to respond off-list.
regards,
Grant.