[lbo-talk] Identity vs. class politics

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sat Jan 27 14:10:01 PST 2007


On 1/27/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >> They basically lost.
>
> Ahem. That has been the history of the left, and isn't really relevant
> -- especially since the only lessons they can teach us are from the
> occasions when they were temporarily successful. One learns more from
> Fanshen than from the cultural revolution. Losses only teach the
> tautology that the strongest is the strongest.

As a matter of fact, the French workers lost the French Revolution (in the end), the June Days, the Paris Commune, and May 68, but all their defeats, not just triumphs, have been commemorated in high and low cultures, becoming the central part of not only culture of resistance of the French working class but also French national culture plain and simple!

The Americans don't have as good materials to work with as the French, but they have better materials than the Japanese (who, after all, have not had a single revolution in the modern era!). And yet, in America, when you lose, you lose, and you disappear from popular memory, unless you are Black, in which case at least the best of your folks will remember you well and many of them will at least hear of you.

On 1/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 27, 2007, at 3:13 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > On 1/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Jan 27, 2007, at 8:19 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >>
> >> > Americans never had "a class-based politics" independent of white
> >> > supremacy, so they couldn't have taken flight from what they didn't
> >> > have.
> >>
> >> Never is a slight overstatement. There have been moments - some of
> >> the populists, for example. Not all, for sure, but some.
> >
> > They basically lost.
>
> Yes they did. And I guess we should conclude that they will lose
> forever, that things are hopeless, and that we should only look
> abroad for hope, because, among other things, there are no racial
> divides outside the USA.

It is very much possible that we'll lose forever, and in fact the odds are better that we'll lose forever than that we'll one day triumph. That's a conclusion you may not like, but it's a logical fallacy -- "Appeal to Consequences" -- to reject facts and explanations just because you don't like their implication. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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