I'm grateful for your responses to my earlier comments on the Labor Party (USA). You chose electoral politics to focus on, and provided some insightful material. So, naive just wouldn't be in my vocabulary if someone asked me to describe you at this point in our distant relationship.
And the words cynic and pessimist seldom enter my brain when I think of most activists or most honest progressive left scholars who have come to understand, at one level or another, social-economic motion and class struggle. Temporary depression that comes from frustration, or even giving up altogether, surely are common responses to the realization that making substantial changes in the present institutional order is almost a task beyond comprehension and won't be realized in our lifetimes. That can be friggin depressing, and I suspect most of the left are so smitten.
But of course we've known the broad trends of capitalism for a long time. Those on this list are observers and scholars of the current phase of things (many with a strong sense of history). And so I can ask, "is anything comin down that doesn't make sense from a Marxist perspective?" Aren't things playing out just about as they should in the U.S.A. (and the world) in the absence of a strong working class resistance? How can there be pessimism about unfolding historical material processes that are ordained by nothing more or less than some natural order of capitalism?
What disappoints and frustrates me a lot is the relative absence of attention to the resistance - the other side of the coin. Just as capital is human managed, so can be labor's (working class) resistance. As capital is understood with scientific method, so is the process of labor's resistance, and I don't mean just the unions. We should be talking more about building this resistance, step by step, using the huge reservoir or experience and reason that's already been accumulated. I think most of us have a fair handle on the world, but we're reluctant to search for the practical ways to change it. Perhaps certain of our analytical skills are disabled or on hold. But It is, after all, just a process of organizing and struggle that takes patience and sacrifice. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040310/4bffd37c/attachment.htm>