On 2012-03-11, at 6:20 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> I see Marv's implicit claim here - that rejectionism, or purism, or
> principle, or whatever you want to call it, is primarily the domain of
> Richie and Whitie - bandied about quite a bit.
No, those are your words, Joseph, not mine - not implicitly or explicitly. The fact that revolutionaries are now found in and around the universities is the result of historical circumstances, not racial or class considerations. We know that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, an international socialist movement committed to the overthrow of the system (genuinely or nominally) was embedded in the industrial working class, which though predominantly "white" was emphatically not "rich". And from that perspective, they regarded both the Democrats and Republicans as bourgeois parties which needed to be displaced, although they differed sharply on the tactics necessary to bring this about, a debate which continues within small circles of anti-capitalist activists to the present day.
> It doesn't match my
> experience at all (homeless people in New York seem far quicker to say
> "Screw 'em all!" than their wealthier, typically paler neighbors), but of
> course anecdotal impressions are usually crap.
Hostility to capitalism and capitalists is not that uncommon, and not only among the homeless and non-white minorities. It is an ongoing feature of the system. This class antagonism has always been present in industrial working class communities, and is increasingly appearing in suburban white collar and professional neighbourhoods, whose residents are now feeling squeezed by the system. But this hostility has been mostly contained within the electoral system and, when it has escaped these bounds and erupted in street protest, it has been expressed in a rightward as well as leftward direction, as the experience with fascism shows.
> Levels of voter turnout by
> income would obviously seem to favor my approach, but does either one have
> any other empirical evidence going for it?
Yes, the working class of all colours in the big cities and university towns mostly votes Democratic, even in red states. All strata of urban workers see this liberal bourgeois party as defending, in however limited a way, their social gains and their institutions (unions and representative organizations of minorities, women, gays, environmentalists, etc.) against attack by conservative Republicans bent on rolling back both. The Occupy movement, led in many instances by young, white, professional men and women, is a thoroughly working-class movement, with its customary divisions between reformists and revolutionaries and their respective orientation to the Democratic Party.
>
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The question, of course, is whether the "small differences" between Obama
>> and a (chastened) second term Bush administration or a Romney
>> administration have "large effects". Depends on your standpoint. If you're
>> poor and powerless, non-white, or have liberal rather than conservative
>> social values, you'd be inclined to agree. If you're in politics to
>> fundamentally transform the system of power and property relations, you'd
>> say the differences are entirely inconsequential.