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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Wojtek,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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? </FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>