Re: Reply to: Re: Reply to: Re: US Rail Cont

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 16 May 1996, Jon Flanders wrote:

>   In a sense yes. There are those who simply want a NY Liberal party on a
> national scale, which in NY means an extra ballot line for the Democrats; and
> there are those who have a more independent, less electoral notion of what a
> labor party should be.
>

Louis: I don't understand why so much effort goes into dissecting the
politics of various groupings in the LPA or what hidden agendas they have.
Isn't it obvious that the working-class is not a homogeneous bloc and that
organizations that are based on this class will reflect the various
material interests of subdivisions of the class?

A LPA member who comes from a primarily black and female union is likely
to have a different set of politics than a labor-skate who might be
trying to adopt a left coloration to outflank reformers in his union.

Those of us who are trying to find a class that does not have these types
of divisions will always be frustrated. When revolutions develop you do
not have the entire working-class lining up on one side of the barricade
and the entire bourgeoisie lining up on the other. The two classes operate
on each other and mediate between each other.

In the context of US politics in 1996, an LPA that drew thousands of
workers into political activity, even of an electoral nature, would be an
enormous step forward. When workers began to speak to each other around
election time in terms of "Who are you voting for? Oh, I'm voting labor.
I wouldn't vote for the party of the bosses.", who except the most rabid
sectarian would view this as anything but progress. My god, the way some
people on this list speak, it is as if it we were the July days in Russia
in 1917 and our biggest job was restraining workers from establishing a
proletarian dictatorship prematurely....



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