robert wood
P.S. As a side note, I've been troubled by the desire for an expressive causal system in a lot of the notes, the poor in New Orleans seem to need to be either poor or black, worker's at Wal-mart are either workers or women, when in reality those structures of exploitation and domination are complex and overdetermined. This has something that has come out time and time again with my various experiences in workers' struggles, whether the HERE Local 17 strike in 2000, or the attempts to in-source service workers at UCI. I suggest we follow the Marx of Capital who begins by looking at the way that value creates a logic of infinite accumulation that makes structures of exploitation and domination necessary. The exploitation of capital, that multi-headed hydra, should be our focus.
> shag- Not sure if you want me to produce transcripts or what. I can only
> give you my observations. There aren't moments when people pause and say
> "and now a distraction from the class struggle" or a red warning light or
> anything. It is more what they don't say or what they choose to say.
> Like
> I previously stated much of the talk over the last six months on Dailykos,
> commondreams.org, tompainedispatch, moveon.org and other Internet sites,
> along with CNN, Bill Maher and Rachal Maddow ect. has focused on the tea
> baggers, ranting by Sarah Palin, the racist march on Washington ect..
> They
> have focused much less on the roots of the economic crisis (the people are
> too dumb to understand anyway), the political connections between
> Democrats
> and Banks, insurance companies, and big pharma. Let's take the health
> care
> debate as an example. Bill Maher was going off on the racist religious
> right and how this was the major reason we would not get a decent health
> care bill. He rightly placed some of the blame to on Obama for not even
> starting out with a good single-payer plan, but completely failed to
> elucidate why this was the case- the major campaign donors would've been a
> good place to start. He had janeane garofalo on the show too and she went
> on a rant about how racist the US was and how all of Obama's problems
> stemmed from the racism of the white (commondreams had an article a few
> weeks ago that made the same claim). I was waiting for her to go on a
> rant
> about how the two coast should secede from the Union. I mean in the midst
> of
> a huge economic crisis the very fact that most media and a lot of
> left-liberals are fixated on the teabagger/palin/racists rather than the
> class roots of the current major increase in exploitation of the working
> class is completely mindbogglingly. It is simply progressives grasping
> tightly to the delusion that putting a black man in the White House would
> shift everything. Now that it hasn't they simply claim it is the racism of
> the nation that is preventing him from doing the right thing.
>
> I know this is a huge oversimplification. I simply think it is what is
> politically needed at this moment to get those fence-sitting leftists (and
> probably only them!!) out of the house of Democrats/identity politics and
> into the class struggle.
>
>
> Dennis Claxton- Maybe you can inform the slow and green among us exactly
> how
> long one must wait before they can take the training wheels off. Not sure
> how to respond to paternalistic remarks, been a while. Being 'new in
> town'
> is actually kind of relative. I think I have been on LBO for about 5
> years.
> You would also need to define a rant for me. I am still unsure if that is
> what I did.
>
> Brad
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