<div style="direction: ltr;"> <div style="direction: ltr; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">On 4/14/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <<a href="mailto:sokol@jhu.edu" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">sokol@jhu.edu</a>> wrote:</div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The point I am making is that the reason why US workers have not been in rebellion is not because they just don't give a shit or that activists did not do a very good  organizing job.  It is because the elites and fellow travellers had the capability of spoiling the organizing-for-rebellion efforts, and managed to counter-organize US workers, often with eager support of the grunts themselves, as church-goers, NRA members, patriots, consumers, proud white men and what not - anything but left-wing organizations.  It seems that they mastered this art of organizing so well, that they routed not just the left, but Democrats as well (gerrymendering, identity politics, fear mongering).   If Democrats, who had much larger organizing resources and experience on their disposal, have been reduced to impotence and disarray,  what makes anyone think that a "third party" or a bunch of protesters would do any better?</blockquote> </div> And here it is:  We should give up!?  Perhaps as some psychologists believe depression is just another form of realism.  In that case your depression about the US is simply realistic.  But let me state, the problem Woj, is not U.S. workers, it is you and me.  We have the privilege and more time than most U.S. workers.  Why aren't we working harder?  Why aren't we on street corners handing out leaflets.  I keep on asking myself this about the TWU strike.  Why didn't I go out and try to talk to people, as many people as I could? Why didn't I organize better....  Since the late 80s I have asked myself everyday: Why haven't I done better?  Now my experience traveling the U.S. as I used to do is much different than yours.  Most of those church goers could be on the side of more democracy, anti-racism, anti-war, better and more democratic economic organization.  The same can be said for many NRA members and poor white men.  But especially church-goers.  There are large number of church goers who are "left" and just don't know it.  Doing Central American solidarity work I met church goers who were appalled about U.S. policies in Central America.  But I must remind you, we in the U.S. are in the belly of the imperial beast.  And there are a lot of perceived benefits of our extraction of profit from the rest of the world.  We are also the result of a huge continental wide empire, which has "dealt" with its problems of geography, ethnicity, religion, and and race by divide and conquer.  We constantly have to overcome these problems and constantly have to start over again.  Almost by definition, large ruling classes start out with high level of organization, and "the rest of us" with low levels of organization.  What you are saying is that what organization there is among "the rest of us" is dysfunctional. But that only goes to show that we haven't worked hard enough.  Or perhaps it says we have been to jail too often, and broke too often, and bought off too many times to think that anything we do is worth it.  But I have to say to you that this kind of thinking seems to be a particularly middle class disease.  (I don't want to sound like a vulgar marxist here.  But after seeing people in El Salvador, whose families have been massacred, trying to start a coffee cooperative, and trying to get a nurse and teacher to start a clinic and school in their village, it is hard for me to take seriously the idea that we in the U.S. are just defeated. Jerry