Re: paradox of class and leadership

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/15/06, Mark Lause <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm usually suspicious of generalizations, and there's not enough evidence
> to persuade me that leadership on the Left was historically more middle
> class and is becoming more plebeian.
>
> In the US, the Sorges or DeLeons always relied on working class figures in
> secondary and tertiary roles, and I think this mirrored the movement
> internationally as well.  Then, you'd occasionally have figures like Debs or
> Haywood.  Earlier, successful workers movements found themselves
> herded into
> multi-class formations with a middle class figure at the head of them.

It seems to me that there is no successful working-class movement that
has taken state power at the national level without in some sense it
being part of a multi-class formation.

> And
> after the 1940s, class becomes the invisible and unspoken reality across the
> political spectrum, including (oddly enough) on the Marxist Left.  But my
> impression is the leadership of the movement in the 1960s or 1970s was not
> more plebeian than it had been in the 1930s or earlier.  Quite the opposite
> in my own obviously limited experience among the mostly campus-based
> Trotskyists.

That all depends on what you think of as plebeian.  Today's plebeians
may not look like plebeians of yore, may have jobs that never existed
in the past, and so forth.
--
Yoshie
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