01a. In the past (and still probably in many areas of the world) "the people" has been a cross-class designation -- essentially a denial of class. It _can_ still be that (e.g. the weasel-word of Hardt-Negri, the Multitude). But in demographical terms, in the United States there is simply no significant difference between the agents pointed to by "the working class" and "the people." For practical purposes, in the U.S. Marx's prediction has come about, we have a two-class social order, workers and capitalists.
01b. One practical advantage in seeing the u.s. as comprised of only two classes is that it eliminates ungrounded speculation on who will and will not respond to left agitation. We really don't know in the abstract, and in the concrete we discover through practice.
02. The people (the workers) really are, _simply_, ignorant. They are not wilfully so. They are not maliciously so. They are ignorant of the fact that they are ignorant.
03. No political position ever has or ever (inside capitalism) will achieve the active and knowledgeable support of all, or even the majority, of the population. All strategies which do not recognize this are doomed to languish in contempt of people.
04. Passive support under present conditions is of no use to leftist politics.
05. The DP will always exert a reactionary pull on u.s. politics.
06. The issue now is the effort to force u.s. withdrawal from the mideast. Efforts towards all other goals of the left must emerge from and be linked to this struggle.
07. Principle 6 must be developed to differ sharply from both the apolitical one-issue strategy of the SWP in the Anti-War struggle of the '60s _and_ from the shopping-list strategy of CP initiated coalitions. (We did not learn how to do this in the '60s; we still don't know how to do it. Analysis of practice now must focus on developing a theoretical breakthrough here. That breakthrough will only come from thinking grounded in organized practice.)
November 7, 2004 (to be continued)
Carrol
P.S. Re "Obama's _story_ of why people are democrats: 'When a kid on the southside of Chicago goes hungry, that >bothers me.'" The answer is people are Democrats because picards like Obama have persuaded them that the DP is part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Mayor Daley is probably giving prayers of thanks that Obama will replace Fitzgerald in January.
P.S. 2, from Michael Hoover on Pen-L:
>>> cbcox at ILSTU.EDU 11/7/2004 1:21:39 PM >>>
Whining over evangelicals electing Bush is also silly. It took an awful
lot of the regular "secular christians" also to elect him. It's always
silly to ascribe an electoral victory (or defeat) to any one component
of the votes for the victor. There are 10s of millions of americans
which the left can reach before it has to worry about converting
evangelicals to secularism. Carrol
<<<<<<>>>>>
some dems think majority of under-30 voters going for kerry bode wells for future, potentially complicating matters, however, are two groups of young people not appearing on conventional "radar screens"...
harvard institute of politics study found that college students "in the middle" (which ucla study of incoming freshman has found to be consistently about 50% for several decades) divide almost evenly between religious and secular centrists... neither are said to be predictably conservative or liberal, for example, former support universal health care and affirmative action, but oppose gay marriage...
23% of 18-29 year old respondents to mtv 'choose or lose' poll who think of themselves as "evangelical" or "born again" Christians apparently corresponds to the percentage of all voters in 2004...
whether us "culture war" is as intense as media reports suggest is debatable, increased minimum wage in florida won with 72% while kerry got 47-48% in state, some of the 'evangelicals' must have voted in favor of wage initiative...
as is always case, dems did not generate sufficient working class turnout, majority of 80% of upper 33% income earner who turned out voted for bush, most of 40% of lower 33% income earners voted for kerry without him and his party offering them shit...
gee, what if dems had made increasing minumum wage and similar economic issues cornerstone of campaign, might there have been 5-i0% increased turnout among low income earners, if so, he'd have won...
this ain't rocket science or brain salad surgery folks... michael hoover