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New Times, New Opportunities Sam Webb, National Chair, CPUSA National Committee Meeting, March 29, 2008 (http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/928/1/147/) "We don’t want to dispense with the categories of class and class struggle for sure, but we don’t want to turn them into frozen, lifeless categories either. Class and class struggle should be understood as dynamic processes and open-ended categories and not simply as a fixed relation to the means of production that inexorably gives rise to class struggle and consciousness. Employed properly, class categories give us clues to attitudes, tendencies, predispositions and behaviors of political actors, whether one individual or a social group. But they don’t inscribe on these same actors a mental mindset and an irrevocable course of action. To claim they do leaves out the larger political, economic and cultural processes in which class formation takes place and turns Marxism into a dogma. To illuminate this point further, let me mention three examples. If Frederick Douglass, the great African American abolitionist leader, posed more or less the same set of questions to Lincoln in the late 1850s and early 1860s and ignored the wider political environment and the interaction between that environment and Lincoln’s shifting views, he might well have remained with the wing of the Abolitionist movement that refrained from electoral politics, was deeply suspicious of the Republican Party, and attached little significance to Lincoln’s victory in 1860. Or if William Z. Foster posed more or less the same questions to the “Blue Blood” aristocrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt just prior to the 1936 elections and disregarded the new dynamics of struggle taking shape at the time, including Roosevelt’s understanding of these dynamics from his own class viewpoint, he might have argued against our participation in the massive coalition to reelect Roosevelt and New Deal Congressional candidates. Or if Martin Luther King posed more or less the same questions to Lyndon Johnson and overlooked the convulsions going on in the country and Johnson’s capacity to change, he might not have supported his election bid in 1964 – a landslide victory that undeniably and significantly contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, immigration reform and the War on Poverty. In asking only narrowly constructed questions and in not considering the fluidity of the political terrain, the overall logic of struggle and the facility of the individual to change in each of these periods, the people’s movement would have cut itself off from openings and opportunities to secure historic victories in each instance. To employ a similar methodology today with regard to Obama runs the same danger." Further at: http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/928/1/147/ -------------------- Dogan Göcmen http://dogangocmen.wordpress.com/ ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
