Re: Abandoning the Working Class or Abandoning Context? (was Re: [Marxism] "Unions" & "Workers" are not the same)

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, plenty of straw-men in Junaid's post which serve as a kind of
counterpoint for a set of platitudes drawn from the insights of
post-WWII Marxism:
"Nor is it in dispute that 'milder socialism', ie .
Social Democracy, not revolution, ran its course in Western Europe ...
Nor is it in dispute that in the post-WWII period a massive economic
boom resulted in absolute increases in wages, living standards, and
wealth for a vast majority of Americans - at least, serious Marxists
like Baran and Sweezy did not dispute this.
Obviously, these realities have to have consequences for how we
understand the world from a Marxist viewpoint. You can't just cling to
old slogans and formulas in the face of historical realities."

Can you point to anyone on this list that disputes ANY of this?  If
not, why are you bringing this up?  Honestly, it's a bit
condescending, and even insulting if you imply we disagree.

Another thing:
"So for all those reasons, I say it's self-flaggelation - and
retrospective at that - to dump on the efforts of the left activists of
that period."

Are you referring to me?  I am not trying to "dump" on people.  That's
not the point.  The point is that there are Marxists today, on this
list even, and in other places, who discuss the "lessons" of the past
so we can be better armed to deal with the problems of the present.
Of course, effort isn't enough, you need to have a correct analysis of
the world.  It would be a disservice to those who've come before us
not to draw lessons from their sacrifices, in a way, that's all their
sacrifices are worth.  The activists of the last generation for the
most part have drawn lessons themselves.  To come back to the point -
it matters to what social layers activists orient their resources, it
matters what their positions and strategies are, criticism is not
"dumping," it's sharpening our mental weapons for the battles ahead.

Here's a great one:
"I think it would be a severe error, therefore, to
ignore the value of Marxist dependency theory, which explains how
advanced countries have accumulated capital by exploiting the poorer
countries and have depressed the level of development in the poorer
countries by orienting the latter's economies to serve the needs of core
capital."

Ignore dependency theory??  Please, someone, raise your hand if you
ignore it.  Who has proposed ignoring imperialism in any of its
manifestations?  Again, why are you bringing this up, clearly you
think someone is ignoring it, so make your views more explicit.
Junaid goes on to recommend a reading list:

"anyone who has read any history of US
intervention in the Carribean (La Faber's 'Inevitable Revolutions'), or
just the relatively short historical period of US imperialism under the
guise of anti-Communism (Chomsky's 'Hegemony or Survival'), to take but
two instances, knows full well that imperialist countries have waged
ruthless economic, political, and military war of incalculable
proportions to destroy Third World societies over and over again."

This is like yelling slogans and moralizing to a crowd of believers.
I'm not on this list to be sloganized at about the ills of modern
capitalism.  What's the point?

Just one last thing, because I'm not going to respond to some of the
other sections of Junaid's post:
"What about the notion that the workers failed the activists? Well, the
real question is, did the workers fail themselves? Who really cares if
they failed the activists? Insofar as the workers' union leadership -
their direct, elected leaders - obviously thought that they had a pretty
good deal going on with the bosses, the workers were only acting in
their own short-term interests in purging elements too far left to be
acceptable within the framework of the social pact."

Some of this is what I was getting at in my last post, that you reduce
working class subjectivity to fundamentally liberal notions of
individual free agency.  If workers elect their union president, the
president must reflect their political views.  If these presidents
purged communists from the unions, the workers, therefore, must have
supported this.
I'm doing research on a foremen's union in the Detroit area in the
late-40's early-50's right now, and my experience has been that it is
not _nearly_ that simple.  The drama of Taft-Hartley and McCarthyism,
and cold-war hysteria cannot be mechanically reduced to material
interests - it was a decisive struggle, something many union activists
actually resisted.  Actually, today I was looking at a rally of
100,000 workers against T-H called by some of the most conservative
unions in Detroit.
Anyways, the real question, at least if we're thinking along the "what
is to be done" thread, is never whether the workers failed themselves.
 Because we are not "the workers," even if we are workers, we are "the
revolutionaries," the revolutionaries are the subjective factor, the
historical agent we have at least some facility over, the working
class is part of objective reality, like the weather, or the direction
of the world economy, or global warming, something we have no direct
control over.  Revolution in the imperialist core didn't occur in the
last half century - we need to look back, _from the point of view of
the revolutionaries_ and ask why not?  Asking whether the first world
workers failed themselves is like asking if history failed itself, if
a hurricane which fizzled out on a land mass failed itself, for one,
it's meaningless, and two, it effaces the subjective factor, and
without that, there's no point to our existence.
Anyways, one _new_ item from Junaid was that this discussion is going
nowhere.  He's probably right, if it continues as a back and forth
between he and I unless anyone wants to take up specifically any of
the questions any of us have raised.
Josh

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