Re: [Marxism] re: Some comments on Stan Goff's post

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Anyway, the question that begs itself here is why didn't the New Left
movement spread? I do remember reading one account of students going to
Appalachia, the poorest part of white America, with pretty abysmal
results."

I don't know why it didn't spread to the white working class - maybe
because there wasn't a major radicalization going on in this sector. 
But there were certainly radicalizations going on amongst blacks,
latinos, American Indians, and other proletarian constituencies. 
These groups formed their own organizations that came to have pretty
sophisticated Marxist/nationalist or more vanilla radical nationalist
(I'm thinking of SNCC and such) analyses rooted in their own
communities.  My point was about the failure of the broader, older,
predominantly white left organizations like the SWP, SDS, etc, to
really unify in a deep way with the more proletarian
social-nationalist movements of the period.  I think that was the
major failure of the New Left and has influenced just how deep the
reaction went through the 80's and 90's and today.  Jesse Jackson and
Al Sharpton, the two most prominent left black leaders, are both
connected to the church - what does that tell us about the history of
the New Left?

This is not to say that it would have taken privileged college kids
from Harvard to save the black movement or whatever - but that a huge
section of the left of that period with a whole lot of intellectual
and cultural capital missed a deep connection with their natural base.

I agree with what you wrote about the black community and think it was
well put in this last post.  But I took what you wrote in the previous
email to mean that the black community should not be viewed as one of
the most progressive sectors of U.S. society, because of corporate rap
music, drugs, gangs, apathy, etc.  By the example of the white woman I
meant to point out that we need to view this in relative terms.  You
are totally right to emphasize that this country has the most
reactionary political culture on earth.  So we need to identify the
sections of the population where we are going to put political work
based on two criteria a) the social weight of the layer in question -
what power do they have by virtue of their social position in the
machine b) their consciousness and what that says about their
potential to wage dedicated struggles that corrode the power of the
system.

My point is that the black population in spite of all that you say
still ranks very high in terms of where our energy should go in this
period.  Who else ranks much higher?  In spite of the qualities you
are listing there is a latent consciousness sprinkled throughout the
black community about who the real enemy is, their real status in the
society (possessing very little stake in U.S. capitalism), and the way
real change happens - there is still the legacy of the Montgomery bus
boycott, the urban insurrections, black power, etc.  Additionally the
black community is strategically placed as a predominantly proletarian
group living in important urban centers.  Like the DRUM masthead said,
one class conscious worker is worth a lot of politicized students. 
Trotsky talked about black workers playing a vanguard role in the
American revolution - I think it is likely that at least in the next
wave of struggles, in spite of the problems you listed, the black
working class, the black informal sector, will play a leading role
along with latinos.

So I wasn't trying to be politically correct by saying what you said
wasn't exactly productive.  I meant to say that we need to size up the
radical potentials of the various sectors of U.S. society in relative
terms, because the people in the U.S. are all we've got and we need to
decide where to put our energies when we intervene in the class
struggle.

That said I agree that we shouldn't flagellate ourselves about our
past failures, but just look at these as a guide for where we should
head in the future.
Josh

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