Re: [Marxism] re: New Orleans: "It's the system." - are we missing anopportunity?

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx>]

"There are selfish academics. There are also selfish workers ...
Basically, the "pro-worker" adopts the "conservative" tone, decrying
radical academics as weirdos who specialize in making the rich richer.
There are also workers who
specialize in scabbing. Absolutely *nothing* within this framework  is
actually *useful* in understanding why there is no mass organized
socialist base in America."

The way you set it up it is not useful for explaining anything.  But
we are talking about totally different things here, you are
misrepresenting what I wrote.  In your previous post you were decrying
the fact that there is no group of socialists amongst the working
class black community of New Orleans - I pointed out that that can be
linked to the tendency of many far-left organizations, over the past
two generations, to privilege work at universities and within
intellectual circles and depreciate recruitment and organizing within
the working class.  Yes, there are many excuses for this - the
right-wing shift amongst workers starting in the 1950's, the increased
level of activity amongst students in the 1960's, the difficulty of
this activity while workers are on the retreat, but these are just
that - excuses.

Because the working class throughout the last five or so decades _has_
struggled in the U.S.  Maybe the problem is defining the U.S. working
class as "white" - a racist and incorrect assumption.  What was the
civil rights and black power movement if not a struggle of the most
oppressed section of the working class?  These struggles came under
Christian, Muslim, and then nationalist leadership in part because of
the absence of the traditional organized left (CP excepted) from these
communities.  When black people shut down major cities across the
country every summer between 1964-8 it was political black militants
often organizing the rebellions, who had no relationship to the
"socialist cadres" Junaid refers to who were at places like Columbia
and UC Berkeley organizing student strikes (and the problem isn't not
to organize student strikes, but to privilege work amongst working
people in struggle).  Why was it only the CP that had a heavy
infiltration of AFSCME's massive public sector organizing in the late
1960's, and SEIU 1199's organizing around the healthcare industry? 
Trotskyist politics are not irrelevant to the working class, but
Trotskyists have made themselves so by physical absence from some of
the main battles of the past 50 years.

These are all reasons why the left remains the domain of intellectual,
academic circles in this country today.  You want there to be huge
cadres of socialists able to connect with the poor of New Orleans.  I
am making an argument as to one of the causes of this situation.

You say that the primary obstacle towards rebuilding the socialist
movement is "hegemony" which is why your primary work is on a (great!)
website as opposed to within a Marxist organization.  Hegemony may be
the primary obstacle within the university system and in the more
"cultured" sectors of the society.  But I can report that amongst the
working class communities in Los Angeles that my group works with,
"hegemony" is the least significant problem.  L.A. is 80% non-white,
and people know about racism, imperialism, class, exploitation, the
role of the cops if not the state and the court system.  They
certainly also do hold many reactionary prejudices no matter what
their skin color (misogynist men, Mexicans and Central Americans
hating each other or bashing blacks, white workers as often generally
racist, etc, etc).  But there is no layer of ideological obfuscation
between workers and empty bank accounts, broken strikes,
less-than-minimum-wage incomes, evictions, and police brutality. 
There is the raw fact that people are scared, unorganized, divided
amongst themselves with petty prejudices, and have not seen a
successful struggle in more than a generation.  Forces outside the
left - unions like SEIU that organized the Justice for Janitors
campaign, "workers centers" run as nonprofits that have organized
around minimum wage issues among other things, etc, have found a few
new strategies to win small victories in a period of generalized
retreat.  I can say that the group I support, Labor's Militant Voice,
has found some ways of organizing people around community issues like
tenants rights that have led to some small victories - I am sure
people on this list can speak to other such efforts.  But the priority
is for there to be more of this, for the left, who really is the only
political sector that can offer real solutions, to be involved in
getting radical students out to poor communities, getting the anti-war
movement to orient towards actual workers (as opposed to getting
Central Labor Council's and union bureaucrats to speak at rally's and
sign petitions).

Another problem is that this is not only a period of retreat but of
social reorganization on a massive scale that has eroded the
traditional mass organizations of the working class (the unions, in
this country) and physically rearranged and recomposed the American
working class.  Since the 1970's whole working class communities have
been dismantled (say, Flint, Michigan), whole industries have been
dismantled, and a whole new labor force with a new mode of work has
grown up (the service economy, the immigrant proletariat) - separated
form the traditions of struggle and the traditional mass organizations
of the last period.  This coupled with the long period of attacks we
have witnessed has created a web of confusion, disorientation and
demoralization that contributed to the current impasse.

Junaid's image of the American worker seems to be a white guy with a
steady paycheck in one hand and a beer in the other, sitting in front
of a big-screen TV with a big truck sitting outside.  In the most
important American cities, in the most important sectors of the
American economy, sellers of labor power are non-white, and just as
female as they are male.  Also - we should see housewives, street
vendors, small business owners in working class communities as part of
the working class - not as sellers but as _reproducers_ of labor
power.  These communities, in places like New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, etc., the economic, social, and
financial capitals of the country, ARE the U.S. proletariat, will be
the bases (and "vanguard" if you will) of the coming struggles, and
are hardly under the thumb of "hegemony" (a term which I think is
problematic in the first place).  You only need to go talk to people
to find out that they know all about exploitation.

Anyways.  Junaid turns the problem of a working class orientation into
an imaginary debate where workers and academics bash each other. 
That's just sort of ridiculous and doesn't merit much of a response.

And just to respond to one final thing.  Junaid wrote:
"I still find it hard to believe someone with your intelligence is
utterly incapable of seeing that class exploitation is interweaved with
the "world of nations, religions and ethnicities" - a world that does in
fact exist and cannot be wished away by invoking class."

I still find it hard to understand why you think that I think this.
Josh

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism