In a message dated 2/19/2010 1:57:51 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, rdum...@autodidactproject.org writes:
While other people are just as fucked up in their own ways, white people of this type have a peculiarly apolitical view of their own victimization. They can't see their situation as anything more than an individual problem, as lone individuals being abused by the system, as individuals who can only act alone, and who are victimized by bad people running a system that is supposed to work but who have betrayed something they thought they were part of and was supposed to be functioning properly. Comment I think you hit the nail on the head with a carpenter's skill. The unionized workers, white in particular, facing impending ruin have a somewhat different instinct and orientation. These workers who I interact with are very angry and gave Obama his edge in the election. They are also universally scared of the "system" but distrustful and harbor very different illusions. They generally have not lived under generations of reactionary bourgeois democracy with its extreme police violence and in areas like the deep South have been on the non-receiving end of generations of historic fascist terror. In places where the black areas of town merge into the white proletarian neighborhoods their is a profound impulse for unity. The specific problem is that these workers have a way of thinking things out. We - meaning the generation of communists who are basically seniors, need a way to speak with these workers on the basis of how they think things out in real time as the velocity of crisis increase and as they awareness is in flux. These workers who constituted the margin of victory for Obama can swing either way in the actual social struggle. I am not seriously concerned about the so-called Tea bagger and fanatics, who are divorced from the masses of proletarians without regard to color. I am concerned about establishing a polarity that serves as a gravity well for the so-called "political middle," as it exists in flux. The crisis has kicked the economic legs from up under the political middle as this section of the working class is hurled forcefully into the lowest section of the proletariat. The fragments of the remaining left are incapable of any dialogue with the proletarian masses. We are making headway, really, but the resistance and fear is incredible. Ralph, we have arrived in the undiscovered country. Strategy and ideology of the past is useless. We need to make perhaps 10,000 new mistakes. The pace and consolidation of Fascism in America is going to depend upon our ability to really influence and win people over to thinking different. The edifice of race has been cracked forever. Even the bourgeoisie is caught flatfooted. We might get really lucky. Hopefully we will not have to experience what the former Soviet proletariat had to endure.Our analysis is that there will be no recovery only restoration of profitability on the governments dime. Things are getting interesting. WL. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
