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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br><br>I like that you assume that "the left" and "actually existing working<br>people" are two different, and presumably opposed, groups of people.
<br>The working class isn't left, and the left isn't working class.</blockquote>
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<div>Yes, I do. However, I am biased by my position in the United States, on planet earth, on the plane known as reality.</div>
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<div>No, seriously, not mutually exclusive, but not far from it. If the left, depending on how strictly it's construed, encompasses between 5 and 15% of the country's population, any way you slice it it's gonna be a small small minority of the proletarian masses. Alas, numbers do not lie (idealistic leftists who want to believe they're a mass movement do, though. Anybody here ever reported an accurate count of numbers at a demonstration?)
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<div>But more importantly than that, the left is fundamentally outside of the cultural mainstream of working-class america. Even those working people who do espouse something like the politics in circulation on lbo-talk find themselves so far removed from the mainstream of their community they have little ability to move those around them. That will change when we rebuild the mass center-left and shift the discourse in the country, and marginalize the ivory towerites and subculturalies and sectoids. There is much to be done. Best start now, with a sober assessment of the facts on the ground: the left and the working-class ain't the same thing. Earth-shaking, I know.
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">>Also, the working class didn't break the postwar consensus 'truce',<br><br>Sure it did, by demanding equal civil rights and an end to racism, by
<br>opposing the Vietnam war, by fighting for the right to be queer, by<br>refusing to be subjected by men, by smoking pot and not showing up<br>for work, among other things. Capital's "rolling back" was a<br>
defensive move in response to these forms of working-class militancy,<br>not an offensive preemptive attack.</blockquote>
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<div>That's funny, because my history book shows nixon winning in a landslide in 72. But as Pauline Kael said, "I don't know how, everyone I knew voted for McGovern." Not that rebellion wasn't breaking out all over, and certainly there's been an attempt to portray the us 'working class' of the 60s and 70s as a monolithic white reaction, which is wrong for a hundred reasons. But first off, it is a highly dubious proposition that 'the working class', or even a majority of it, was doing all those things you said.
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<div>And steelworkers sucking dicks or grunts hating the war or cashiers smoking pot did not actually spark the economic changes that gave us the minimum wage we have today. I believe the reaction against the (not quite revolutionary, but damn significant) social upheavals is much less tied to the economic changes we speak of. Doug, could you share with us the relative importance of blue-collar drug-use to tech changes in long-distance transportation and communication costs, in leaving the working person with what they have today? De-unionization to gay sex? The oil shock to militantly lazy rebels? I'm sure there are charts for these things somewhere.
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<div>No, I do believe it was capital that broke the 'truce'.</div>
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<div>Which was never a 'truce'.</div>
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<div>Nor a 'sucky truce'. Again: Newark. St. Louis. South LA. Dayton.</div>
<div>He who poo poo's massive material gains by the masses, is likely to tell them so with a morrissey quote.</div>
<div>Alright, that's being a bit overboard, I'm sorry. My point is, I disagree with everything you say about postwar working-class economic power.</div>
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