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

["M. Junaid Alam" <alam1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Addressing from bottom to top:]

" 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"

Well Josh, because you *wrote* it! I mean, I didn't manufacture the
quote. You did in your statement counterpose the existence of "classes
and exploitation" to the presence of "a world of nations, religions and
ethnicities." But anyway, moving on...the next quote I want to deal with
concerns historical reasons for why we are where we are, and the one
after that concerns present imperatives about what we need to do to get
beyond where we are.

" Junaid turns the problem of a working class orientation into an
imaginary debate where workers and academics bash each other."

Your whole definition of "working class orientation", your critique of
the *disorientation* of most socialists, *is* an "imaginary debate where
workers and academics bash each other."  You assert socialists are not a
big part of the working-class constituency because they are cloistered
in academia and removed from working-class culture. In my opinion that
is a superficial explanation, part of the symptom, not the core disease.
It is the "conservative" part of what I assert is a liberal-conservative
metaphor that has been misapplied to worker-academic tensions - that is,
the socialists are the ethereal academics, removed from reality, not in
touch with "the real working man" - cue Chevy truck commercial.

The issue goes much deeper than that. First of all, what kind of
"working class culture" would you have the socialist radicals cling to
on a broad scale? We already know that post-WWII, workers in the major
industries turned on the socialists - that is, those radicals who helped
them and struggle for all their gains in the first place - and left them
to the rabid dogs of McCarthyism. George Meany epitomized the union
leadership that realized it had secured a social pact with significant
material gains and had no use for any of this nonsense about "we have
nothing to lose but our chains." Indeed, many of the organized unions
actively fought *against* the Black struggle for union membership and
housing, particularly in the skilled trade unions,  especially the
AFL-CIO. The UAW stood alone in defending the Blacks and the labor
convention torpedoed every single one of its resolutions in 1958.
Indeed, it was the federal government that forced the unions to allow
Blacks into their ranks in some cases. (cf. Jill Quadagno, The Color of
Welfare).

So, having purged the radicals from the unions, and having fought
against the greatest justice movement in the country, the union
leadership found itself organically unable to deal with the inevitable
downturn post-73, and in the intervening 30 years, *the organized labor
movement has committed mass suicide.* It comprises about 12% of the
government sector and 8% of the private sector. It is a rotting carcass
which no serious, thinking human being would turn to for any kind of
revolutionary struggle. Just witness the disgraceful debacle in the
airline industry: union workers scabbing union workers. So really, it's
time to stop preaching the old line about "out of touch" academic
socialists; that's not anywhere near the core problem here, it sounds
like conservative populism in which "the workers" are painted as some
kind of freaking heroes. And no, minor exceptions and melodramatic cries
of "but the union leadership betrayed the workers" do not fly. Things do
not happen repeatedly because people are betrayed like in some kind of
soap opera; they happen because of material conditions.  The *core*
problem is that the organized American working-class fell into reformist
consciousness because of rising material conditions, which left them
ideologically bereft when the imperialist realities underlying these
favorable material conditions started to rot away. QED.

"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."

That's very true: in most major cities whites are actually a minority.
And we socialists have to recognize this and open the gates, or enter
the gates, and form bonds with these communities. But this still doesn't
change the issue of White nationalism and its hegemonic power in this
country. After all, 80% of the population is white, Josh; statistics are
not "racist." You can't pull a Chavez here, working to gain support in
the darker-skinned poorer communities without ignoring the power of
white nationalism on an ideological level, because unlike in Venezuela,
the brown and black are not the majority. Indeed, they are a minority
around which the power of the White nationalism pivots, and obscures
class consciousness in favor of race hatred. Fear of Blacks and Latinos
is no small part of why 50% of voting low-income people vote Republican
(national exit polls: 2000). The Democrats, because they are more open
to minorities, are painted by the white nationalists as the pro-minority
party and conversely, anti-white.

I'm sorry Josh, but regardless of how silly you think my "image" of the
American worker is, that image makes up a significant part of that 80%
white majority. Whether it's right next door to me here in this
middle-class white suburb in MA, where one ex-cop and another working
cop own nice raised ranches or colonial homes with cute pools and huge
trucks and boats, or whether it's in some rapidly growing evangalical
exurb out in Arizona, with exurbs constituting the fastest growing and
fully Republican counties in America (cf: NYT Magazine, March 27, 2005):
the whole country ain't LA, man.

Personally, my greatest aspiration for whatever American Marxist
movement develops - indeed, I don't think one can develop without
fulfilling this aspiration - is to stop pontificating in these broad,
airy, platitudes about "workers" in general, and to start locating,
within the existing American context, which layers, which sectors, which
communities within the working-class are potentially revolutionary and
target them - as Josh actually has done. I would rather this be our aim
than trying to pander to and bend over backwards to appease the white
nationalist-racist bloc in this country which constitutes at least 20%
of the national population. Fuck them. Let's find ways to get most
organized among the most oppressed layers of Americans in a
class-conscious way. So in some sense I agree with Josh. It's just that
I think a counterhegemonic, ideological, propaganda effort will still be
needed to make sure that there will be enough white Americans who will
overcome the Fox News type poison and come to see the clear common class
cause they have with these layers.


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