Thank you for posting Stan's essay. A couple of comments on some specific points Stan makes:
On Primary Contradiction
Stan writes: "The Marxist doctrinal belief that the working class represents the potentially liberatory force within the primary contradiction — a notion that is, in my view, plain mysticism posing as a 'scientific doctrine' — of bourgeois-proletariat, attempts to override the demonstrable fact that patriarchy is an older, deeper, and more durable 'contradiction,' that the most turbulent and transformative struggles of the 20th Century, while often under the leadership of Marixists, had a primarily national character, and that they were more often carried out by majority-masses of peasants, not proletarians."
The dialectic of capital-wage labor is indeed what makes capitalism what it is, and it is therefore the primary contradiction at the level of theory, but that theory does not imply that people can or must organize themselves in practice along the line of the primary contradiction which is an abstraction. In reality, all social movements under capitalism -- including successful revolutionary ones -- have been cross-class movements, with more or less eclectic sources of influence (from religion to feminism), and they always will be and should be. Theoretical tools developed in the Marxist tradition can merely help us understand and participate in social movements better than without them. In short, the tools are not meant for purifying cross-class movements into a movement of, by, and for "the proletariat" in the abstract.
So, Stan is right to reject the "doctrine" in question, except that I do not think that's a doctrine inherent in the Marxist tradition, though indeed it probably is the one that governs Marxist-Leninist organizations in the USA, none of which I have ever joined.
On the State
Stan write: "First, our conception of socialism as a blueprint for state power that addresses the questions rasied by dualism and industrialism only after some imagined political victory ignores what we haven't studied (or have selectively ignored as a 'deviation') from Ivan Illich to Alf Hornborg to Maria Mies. This inherently patriarchal, industrial, state-socialist 'theory' is as dead as my great grandfathers."
The state is necessary if you want to have modernity and civilization under class society, especially if you want women to enjoy the benefits of modernity and civilization. The primary effect of imperialism today is to erode and destroy the state on the periphery.
On Trade Unions and White Male Workers in the USA
Stan writes:
<blockquote>Second, the trade union movement is not the whole working class, and the trade unions in the US have chosen — more often than not — patriarchy and-or white supremacy and-or reactionary nationalism at almost every turn. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. There is a reason for that. An imperial working class has imperial privilege, and their livelihoods are lashed to the survival of a system designed for domination and war. As a friend — Joaquin Bustelo — recently put it:
"I can't imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a "class-for-itself" movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?
"That white male workers would try to decert their union because they don't want to be in the same collective as Blacks and Latinos, doesn't that tell you something? That's going on right now, TODAY in my area. And things like that have been going on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade for a VERY long time in the United States. ('Things like that' = white Anglo male workers identifying their interests with those of their nationality, gender and ruling class instead of with their class. But this isn't an exclusively white, male thing. You will find varying degrees and sorts of privilege –male privilege, 'legal' privilege, 'citizen' privilege, age privilege– among women, Blacks, Latinos, and so on, where it also tends to have a corrupting influence but that is a much more complicated discussion.)</blockquote>
Trade unions are not the whole of the working class, but where workers are trying to organize one, or where workers are trying to get what they want or defend what they got through one, it's our job to join them. Exceptions do exist for me, however, e.g., when top metropolitan trade union officials use money from the US government and its allied civil society institutions to influence the direction of workers' struggle in foreign countries, when US trade unions try to make US economy protectionist, and when workers of a dominant group (e.g., white male workers) seek to use their trade unions to exclude workers of subordinated groups.
Trade unions, at least in the USA, are not the main institution through which working-class people participate in politics and develop political consciousness, however, nor can they probably be. The bigger social institutions where working-class people are found en masse are schools -- from kindergartens to colleges and universities -- and churches, mosques, synagogues, and other religious institutions. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>