Is this a plea for exclusivity? Old slogans: An injury to one is an injury to all! I know that you agree with this.
Of course shouldn't we ignore the fact that one of the reasons for immigration to the U.S. in the first place is that it is the imperial metropolis and that millions of people are being harmed and thousands of people slaughtered from peasants in Columbia to the slums of Haiti, from the middle east to the far east? I suppose that your choice is a matter of relative importance. But if the anti-war movement in particular and anti-imperialist and solidarity movements in general, are not in favor full citizenship rights for immigrants, and are not in favor of more power to working class organizations then we who see the connections are not doing our jobs. Similarly, if the immigrants rights movement are not for workers power in the U.S. and are not anti-war and anti-imperialist then the connections are not being drawn. Personally, I am for full citizenship rights to all people who work in the U.S. But oppression of immigrants at home and political and economic domination abroad are essentially the same issue and have the same roots.
Unfortunately both the immigrant rights leadership and the anti-war movement leadership spend most of their time catering to various reactionary forces of the democratic party to draw the connections that must be drawn if solidarity is going to cast a wide net.
Jerry Monaco gave me a moderate amount of shit for dismissing the great
> white masses. Fair enough. I think they are dead meat, and nothing
> will revive them.
I don't even know what such unhelpful, racial phrases mean! "dead meat", great white masses? Criticism of the political orientation of the anti-war movement would soon reveal that the immigrants rights movement has the same orientation. (See below.)
But the economic and discriminatory crush of the USG and its corporate
> elite on Mexican Americans and their undocumented cousins is an all
> together different equation. We (mostly white lefties) keep whining
> about the lack of solidarity with the working class. Well, here is a
> working class movement, par excellance. Except, it is clothed in an
> immigrant identity movement.
Unfortunately so many working class movements in the U.S. have been clothed in ethnic and racial identity politics. This is something to some degree must be fought against.
Now is certainly the time to `see' this national working class
> movement in Marxist terms of labor, capital, neoliberalism,
> globalization and to see it as a potentially radical force. Latin
> America is ripe with sources for a radicalization of the US bound
> Latino.
Agreed to some extent.
What you might not know is that at the NYC protest there were a number of immigrant rights groups at Foley Square in the pavillion of tents and tables set up at the end of the march. I think in general the people at Saturdays march support the immigrants rights movement. And of they should be working toward making connections between the two groups. But why simply slag on the anit-war movement? I simply don't understand this kind of exclusive tearing down instead of trying to build up.
The fact is that both the immigrants rights leadership and the UFPJ have general the same political orientation toward the left-liberal wing of the Democratic party and an orientation to a general amorphous middle class politics. But so what? As you would agree, they are in many ways the same struggle. If they can't get together it is because of their Democratic party single issue orientation. In other words both the immigrant rights leadership and the anti-war movement don't get together because there is not a larger political context or political institutions to unite them. They both simply fall into the default political position of supporting their preferred section of the Democratic party and thus they limit their larger criticism.
Jerry
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
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