[lbo-talk] Re: Re: Identity vs. class politics

[Jim Straub]

The proposition that "there has never been any class-based politics in the
US without white supremacy" is partly obvious--- in that white supremacy has
been written into the DNA code of our nation since conquest and settlement,
and is a challenge inherent in anything anyone does politically in this
country--- and partly an example of brushstrokes so broad they obscure as
much as they reveal.  After all, the New Deal and postwar Dem liberalism
were not exclusively working-class; southern and western capitalists
supported both as an attack on the northeast elite, and liberal middle-class
support could be described as decisive given that the working-class was
still fairly divided right and left.  And, while the popular front became
progressively more compromised as it reached power on a national level, the
fact is that very working-class, very ant-racist mass movements at that time
occupied substantial heights of power in some cities and regions.
Certainly, Vito Marcantonio, the Minneapolis Teamsters, the national
meatpackers union, 1199 in NYC (a descendent of whom I work for today in Las
Vegas), the mass socialist counterculture in parts of the west coast, upper
midwest and NYC, and so on, represent class-based politics in which white
supremacy and patrarchy were challenged (if not abolished in the utopian way
we monday-morning quarterbacks would have liked).  At least, Meridel Le Seur
thought so, and she was there.

But the mass establishment of progressive and critical values, in a context
of workers winning battles and accumlating power, has always been a
regional, not nationwide, thing in the US.  And no doubt there were any
number of racists and sexists in any of the above organizations and cities.
But if our question is at what times has the struggle been best advanced,
the ideas moved the furthest, power challenged best, I believe we are better
off looking with nuance to particular examples, rather than sighing that
it's never happened adequate to our wishes or to complete victory.

After all, the task is not to assemble a laundry list of reasons why we
always lost, and why we will always lose.  To assemble such a list would be
very easy.  Rather the task is to overcome these challenges with our words
and deeds.

Lastly, the United States is not France.
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