<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">From: "Jim Straub" <<a href="mailto:rustbeltjacobin@gmail.com"> rustbeltjacobin@gmail.com</a>> Date: August 1, 2006 12:29:23 PM EDT To: <a href="mailto:lbo-talk@lbo-talk.org">lbo-talk@lbo-talk.org</a> Subject: Re: SEIU (Doug Henwood)   What I find annoying about academic labor geeks is that most have a connection to real flesh and blood workers comparable only to the connection participants at a renaissance fair have to the real 16th century.  .... By actually talking with and being embedded in the lives of those they write on, authors like them manage to strike a better balance in the tensions involvede in understanding and respectfully analyzing and critiquing the actions of different social actors involved in their issues. </blockquote><div> Without getting personal, and referring to specific academics or writers, this is something I wholly agree with.  As Straub points out, it does not fit all academics, intellectuals, or writers, but the fact is that we, for the most part, are not institutionally or organically connected to workers except the ones we come into contact with in our daily rounds of consumption, etc.  Let me generalize.  An advantage that the religious right has over us now, an advantage that only traces back 30 years is that the Christian Right tries to be organically or communally related to the people they recruit and serve.  This was true of the very broad left through the 20th century, but it is rare in the U.S. left now days.  We don't try hard enough.  We don't do the work. The only way we can change a union or start a movement is to be _in_ it or to be connected with people who are in it and to help them out.How to do this and make a decent living, and still write the wornderful things that Doug and others write, I have no idea.  At least not under current conditions.  The way it used to be done was through institutional connections of some kind.  Thus Straub, as an organizer, and Henwood as a independent, non-academic writer intellectual would be associated through a social network - of some kind, - a party or union, or what ever.  And throught that institutional social network they would educate each other.  A mailing list just doesn't do it.  Unfortunately not even our on-going "institutions" are very well connected with each other.  </div></div>Gramsci anyone? Jerry