PEN-L message, Re: In the Ford plant-tation

In a message dated 9/12/2004 11:18:41 AM Central Standard Time, cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

>Sorry if this sounds fatalistic but I have never like it and will never like it. Local 51 (my local) had an extremely militant tradition.<

<<CB: And a big ass union hall for cabarets.>>

"No sense in sitting along in your room.

Come here the music play.

Live is a cabaret ol chum

Come to the cabaret."

Man . . . everyone liked Liza's version of Cabaret . . . but when Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes did their version . . . and you watch them perform it live on stage . . . was incredible. All the communists, socialists, radical and progressives always gave the best parties . . . cabarets . . . and this proved to be the most powerful of recruiting and organizing tools. At the cabaret all that ideological crap dissolves in a sea of celebration.

Not only is the all engulfing alienation of social life broken down . . . but this was the arena in which hard core Stalinists and equally hard Trotskyites woke up the next morning . . . turned over in the bed . . . and wondered what was the basis of their mutual deviations. :-)

Right now today the UAW would hired communists and socialists of all kinds to tackle organizing the unorganized. Not just the union bureaucracy (the more or less permanent administrative apparatus which spontaneously strive to survive and reproduce itself) . . . but individual union leaders at the top desperately need our energy, passion and ideological commitment. This is not entirely a subjective question in history or for today. In the post WW 11 period anti-communism paid off in the context of an expanding economy.

No one remembers the strike against General Motors when the company representative went in his pocket and pulled out a penny and told Reuther to his face . . . "Here is what we are fighting over Walter, a fucking penny and you will not get it."

And the Union did not get the penny . . . but Reuther was still the hero . . . because he further consolidated the UAW as a permanent fixture in history and later the capitalists would "come in to the law of wages" spoken of by the magnificent quote from Engels you earlier ran. In the context of an expanding economy the communists were fighting on impossible . . . not simply hostile . . . economic terrain. But then our job is to do the impossible and die trying.

Reuther understood his base in heavy industry and emerged from the skilled sector of auto. The skilled sector would be the last area to fall under assault by militant black workers. with the Ford Motor Company being in front of General Motors and Chrysler. I hate them mutherfuckers at General Motors more than at Chrysler . . . and you of course know about the mixed feeling about Ford.

For Christ sake . . . Malcolm X last major recorded speech was at Ford Auditorium in Detroit - 1965. Yea . . . I know Ford a capitalist . . . bourgeois rat bastard and all of that . . . but life is not even . . . and shit happens. I could throw up because the latest Ford calls himself a "Green" and its like . . . yea . . . money green mutherfucker.

History produced Reuther and Reuther rode the wave of history like a Beach Boy song.

Reuther told the workers "life is a cabaret . . . come to the cabaret" . . . and then he delivered and bought the drinks . . . OK. You can buy the drinks under certain conditions and get loyalty and compliance. Under other conditions the guy you buy the drinks for is subject to slap you . . . and then ask for a double.

It is not so much that all of us are a bunch deviationists . . . which we are of necessity as individuals (which is why we combine together on the basis of activity and not thought) or that this group did "such and such" and this individual had "incorrect political line."

Anti-communism and white chauvinism . . . its leading and specific form in the American Union . . . is based in the capitalist as a class as the ideological _expression_ of bourgeois property . . . but it is and was buttressed by a curve of rising wages. In history the militancy of our working class is based in European immigration . . . mutherfuckers fleeing poverty, starvation and fascism . . . as opposed to the shift from agriculture to industry passed on "indigenousness development." That is the fleeing of serf from the countryside into the city.

We have our own thing in America that is a specific development and the legacy of the Slavic workers will live forever. Big Steel and Little Steel shall ring through the ages.

History has fundamentally . . . not totally . .. eroded the basis of the actual economic factors that buttressed this ideology of anti-communism and white chauvanism.

This Million Worker March "thing" sounds wonderful to me and I have ever intention of attending . . . by bumming a ride. My purpose is not to simply protest but pass out communist literature. I am currently looking for material about classes and why taking a class stance on behalf of yourself and love ones is very important tot he future of America. None of that dialectic crap . . . but communist propaganda. My intention is to sell the literature because I generally refuse to distribute pamphlets for free. I love selling communist literature and hard hitting popular pamphlets attacking the citadels of capital in a language the workers love.

The rules of selling apply . . . you pass up those three "no's" to get to that one "yes" and if you have a captive audience and a small group of ten the first one to buy the literature creates the dynamic for 80% to buy the literature. This is my real element . . . cause I was not cut out for the trade union crap . . . or rather trade union . . . elected . . . grievances . . . leadership stuff.

The Million March as a concept is the Minister Louis formulation and see . . . we have to ride this horse until it drops. No one has topped Minister Louis yet and this is something to think about. The form of the struggle and association is still being generated on the basis of the previous configuration in the African American Liberation Movement . . . but we cannot make a form of struggle go away simply because we want to do something else.

We probably need to learn how to articulate the class attributes of equality.

A Million Workers March is just what the doctored ordered. And it is splitting the trade union movement because a "million" of anything can easily get out of hand.

The bourgeoisie going to do like they did with the "King March on Washington" and place some anti-Bush mutherfucker . . . pro-Kerry lobbyists . . . at the head of the march to swing electoral - not public, opinion into the two party framework.

So what.

If a Million workers is not a big enough sea to swim in for a communist . . . then you saying that you are a whale of a mutherfucker.

You did not go ultra left. This trade union question has broken every generation of communist since Engles . . . but Engels was clear and closed no doors to direction. Engels is in fact the first great General of the proletarian masses.

Marx is of course the master . . . the knee upon which all of us learn our theory in the class struggle. Engels a big dog. Marx of course . . . let the dogs out.

Melvin P.