Re: [Marxism] Camejo and Shawki/ISO and so it goes...

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm baffled by this statement, to be honest. If you could enumerate for me
anything of substance the US Left is doing, or has done recently, to offer any
meaningful resistance to the ongoing assaults by the ruling class at home
and/or abroad I would be grateful. My dismissal is based on empirical fact, 
along
with my experience of revolutionary/socialist organisations and the outstanding
work they are doing in Scotland and in the occupied Six Counties of Ireland.

There is absolutely no militancy here, nobody risks anything, and that in the
end is what it takes. I say it again, the organised Left in the US has
succeeded only in repelling workers, due in large part to an intellectual 
snobbery
responsible for substituting paternalism for solidarity....

Every leader I've
come across is not a worker, rather a professional intellectual, occupying a
sinecure on some university campus or other....
By concentrating on international issues, the US Left have ipso facto
abandoned the struggle at home. Calling demos around the occupation of Iraq 
while
ignoring the ongoing occupation of Compton and Harlem, etc., is demonstrative of
a subconscious chauvinism and elitism.

========

Well, you say you are "baffled" about why I would say your analysis is 
one-sided, and then
you go on making general assertions that are nothing but one-sided.

Forget about the "US Left" for a moment, whatever that may be. Heard plenty 
about them.
What are the workers _themselves_ doing? Very vague references about solidarity 
and so forth
were made - solidarity in what, exactly? Point to me one case where the 
mythical proletarian
heroes are themselves fighting imperialism abroad or capitalism
at home en masse - after all, if the "US Left" is to be derisively dismissed as 
a bunch of petty-bourgeois,
then it should be quite easy to forget about them and focus on the "truly" 
revolutionary
working-class's own militancy.

Where are the workers "risking anything" in political action? What "meaningful
resistance" are they offering up to the status quo? Union militancy? What 
strategies have
the unions prepared over the past ten years to cope with free trade and 
outsourcing and
privatization? Their numbers are dwindling and their political clout 
diminishing. The last
hurrah was probably SEIU's Stern saying a Kerry victory would stifle needed 
internal reforms
before he was quickly whipped into line. The level of action and planning in 
the unions
in relation to the existential crises their members face is nothing to write 
home about.
Let's not kid ourselves here.

This nonsense about how the US left has abandoned class struggle at home 
because they
favor international issues by default completely ignores how this situation 
came about
in the first place. Maybe you haven't noticed, but the real chauvinism problem 
in America
is the one that's been drilled into your fantasy heroes, who eagerly support 
and enlist
in the very wars that comprise the international "issues", as you lightly 
phrase the murdering
of hundreds of thousands of people abroad. Those people abroad aren't getting 
massacred
by magical fairies falling from the sky - they are being killed by American 
workers, predominantly
poor ones and minority groups. So that is a tough, concrete, contradiction 
that's not
exactly easy to work around when it comes to domestic struggle. If you're 
anti-war, you're
a traitor, a commie, a towel head, etc. - and not goign to be liked by many 
workers in the
South or Midwest in particular. That's a concrete fact no amount of dissembling 
can cover up.


So you see things are not as easy as just waving the hand and sniggering at 
left activists.
The fact of the matter is that you are operating on outdated concepts and 
outmoded formulas.
Reality is not so simple as you would like it to be. You substitute real 
analysis of the concrete
realities of the political landscape with two caricatures: (1) some nebulous, 
vaguely-defined
group of people who you contemptuously dismiss and deride,  namely the left 
activists, and (2)some
magical, untapped group of workers ready to spring into pro-socialist action if 
only
the (1) knuckleheads would stop being so snobbish. These are caricatures 
because they are
not based on any economic or historical analysis, but a bunch of adjectives and 
castigating
of personal subjective traits at (1), mostly betraying nothing more than your 
own frustration.

The fundamental problem lies in your total inability to grasp what the face of 
working America is.
When you complain that "Every leader I've  come across is not a worker, rather 
a professional intellectual,
occupying a sinecure on some university campus or other," well, I hate to break 
it to you, but it's not
Manchester England 1860. In Marxist terms, the proletariat consists of a lot of 
professionals,
salaried workers, skilled labor, intellect workers, that whole section referred 
to as the middle class in
non-Marxian terms. The group of workers that the world proletarian evokes - 
steel mills, coal mining, auto
manufacturing - has rapidly diminished through automation and outsourcing. The 
protests and social movements
are mainly led by and composed of these middle-class people. I'm not sure why 
you want to punish them for it,
what are they supposed to do, stop existing? Even academics are workers, not 
just unanchored boogeymen
on whom you can blame the passivity of other workers.


The cleavage of the "proletarians" into "working class" and "middle class" 
has consequences that cannot
be ignored by any serious person. The middle class is more receptive to ideas 
that empowered movements over
the last 40 years, namely, gay rights, women's rights, minority rights - social 
ideas. The working class
views the middle class with some jealousy and the middle class views the 
working class with some contempt. All
of this comes out when the name-hurling begins, ie. "limousine liberals", and 
"redneck", which the right-wing
has used extremely skillfully to aggravate the antagonisms. So now we have the 
phenomenon where the working-class
votes Republican because of religion and "cultural issues" where it agrees with 
the right - down with the fags,
the niggers, the uppity women, to distill the thing to its essence, and not 
waste time 'changing the names of things as though
it changes the things themselves.'

All I am saying is you can't blame all our problems on middle-class people, as 
if they're supposed to feel
guilty that they're middle class in the first place, and as if they can move 
things forward when the
working class itself isn't moving forward. The divisions between the two camps 
are real and substantial,
even though obviously in the last analysis their economic interests should be 
one and the same. The funny thing
about politics, though, is that it isn't about "in the last analysis", it's 
about figuring out how to make the
last analysis relevant in the eyes of the agents who are supposed to end up on 
the same side of it. And you don't do
that by whining and ranting about professors or whoever else you feel like 
projecting your inability to grasp the
crux of the matter.




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