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Eli wrote-- "So according to your theory immigrant workers have no interest in public transportation, public health care, public education, etc.?" That's not what I said or wrote. I responded to your linking public transportation, public healthcare, public education with GOOD liberalism. That's what you wrote. That you wanted to work with appeal to liberals who thought those were good things--- and that those things logically then are products of good liberalism. What you have done Eli is abstract "things" from their social relations-- public transportation good, public healthcare good. But it's not public transportation or public healthcare we get. We get class-based transportation; class-based government healthcare. And what does that liberal "public" transportation get us? Masses of debt which eats away and eventually devalues completely public transportation. And it gets us public transit agencies that lobby against the right to strike. And the publicly funded healthcare? Lots of money for the healthcare industry. Eli speaks as if somehow that connection between government, a liberal capitalist government and healthcare, mass transportation is a dominant factor. Well, it might be a dominant factor if your goal is to have the US model itself along the lines of France, with very good public healthcare and absolutely stellar mass transportation. Even that's an abstraction-- is your goal to have the US bourgeoisie model itself along the lines of the French bourgeoisie? You produce two statements from two leading lights of US liberalism expressing their disaffection with Obama and from that you make this gigantic leap to 1) mass disaffection with liberalism as a whole 2)identification of government funding mass transit, government funding of healthcare as the critical issues that will lead liberals to the cause of socialism. Yet you are ignoring exactly what this government or any government of liberals funding of mass transportation or healthcare means or brings-- it means more money for the bourgeoisie. I think Marx had it right when he proclaimed that the first principle "of our party" is "not one farthing for this government." Marxists don't abstract a service, a social need, from the struggle against a specific class and its specific organization of property and labor that exist in opposition to those needs. To New Tet: You voted for Obama just to show that a black US man could fuck-up just like a white US man? I understand the sentiment, but it's only that-- a sentiment, an indulgence. Let me ask you how's that working out for you? Do you think you've accomplished the goal, and we have a black man who has proven himself capable of fucking up as much as a white man? And exactly what will that, has that accomplished? You HOPE there will be a zero-sum effect? That for every reactionary, we get a radical? Doesn't work that way, comrade, not even a little bit. If it did, the revolution would have taken place a long time ago. How's that working out for the working class as a whole? Would you recommend doing it again-- I mean after all there have been a lot more white US men fucking up in the White House than our first and only so far black US man-- not to mention all the white women, black women, Hispanic men, Hispanic women, gay white men, gay black men, gay black women, gay white women that might demand equal time in the White House, and make equal claims on your vote? Isn't all you are really doing is playing a variation on the old "Let's make it worse, so it has to get better" ploy? Card check was dead months ago. ________________________________________________ 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
