andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >
> > in other words, yea, we want people to have dignity
> > and nice comfortable lives, but doesnt all this
> > stuff, directly resulting from struggle, usually
> > conducted in the past, conservatize people? has
> > labor been totally co-opted? how the hell do you
> > approach a person working 40 hrs a week with a house
> > and two cars and benefits and talk about revolution?
>
> Well, leaving aside that no one has a clue what it
> would mean to talk about revolution today.
I've never heard of simply walking up to someone and talking about revolution. That question belongs in a third-rate comic book. Under present conditions there is no way to see a distinction between the practice of serious reformists and revolutionists: both are focused on building mass struggles of various kinds, as conditions permit or dictate, with those who are ready, at the given time, to participate.
> what are
> you saying? That leftists shouldn't struggle to
> improve the lives of working people because it will
> deradicalize them? The worse the better? We want them
> hungry and ragged? Obviously there is a tension here.
There is one perspective that self-conscious leftists should bring to any of the struggles they participate in -- the centrality still of racism in the u.s. Again, on the social terrain as it now exists it is hard to find a handle on anti-racist struggle, but the question must be always in one's head.
> However, it's also true that
> if Americans had what they had in Sweden, we'd think
> the revolution was over, and we'd won.
But of course we won't have anything like what they have in Sweden until racist barriers and institutions are destroyed. And of course that struggle is becoming complicated by the presence again of large (and I think growing) populations of non-English speaking residents. But then in the 19th and early 20th centuries the core of u.s. radical groups was to some extent among non-english speaking workers.
Carrol
> It wouldn't be
> bad to get that far, don't you think?
>
> jsk