Re: Wierd

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman wrote:
>
>
> If I am correct, then the next few years could be a greater opportunity
> for organizing than anything we have seen in a long, long time.

Michael, how much organizing was done in 1930-33?

How much organizing was done 1974-84?

There has been an upturn (probably not as vigorous at the local level as
the big demos -- Seattle etc -- indicate) during the last 3 or 4 years,
i.e., after a long recovery and when it became more 'real' for the
working class as a whole.

Certainly the huge upsurge of the '60s was associated with boom times,
not with recession.

If you are correct, my prediction would be that the opportunity for
organizing would be severely constrained for at least two or three
years. It is either during a recovery or after a _long_ recession (5
years or more) that great opportunities for organizing appear.

>
> Shouldn't we drop the Brenner/Wood thing and move on?
>

Probably -- but that 'thing,' I believe, is precisely about the
possibilities of organizing. Wood clings, perhaps futilely, to the
marxian conception of the potential role of the working class (including
what moralists and Weberians insist on calling the "middle class") in
revolutionary struggle. Her opponents (like the weathermen in the '60s)
despair of the working class and believe that only moral revulstion at
imperialism and terror of energy exhaustion can trigger resistance. In
other words, they call into question the possible existence of a
revolutionary class within capitalism. So, really, the "Brenner/Wood
thing" is about organizing in the next decade. Do we concentrate on a
moral lashing of capitalism, or do we explore the conditions under which
workers, as workers, can or will take up the struggle against
imperialism, racism, sexism, etc.?

Carrol