Friends,
I don't like cars much either, but at present I have to have one. If I lost it,
I'd be in a bad way. Sme too with the workers who are threatened with plant
closings. What are they supposed to do in the meantime? Sit back and enjoy the
cleaner air? Of course, we have to push for a world as auto-free as possible.
But in the meantime, we should fight for employment as a right and help workers
in struggles to keep their plants open or win some guarantee of decent
alternative employment or enough to live decently until they can get new
employment or just enjoy their leisure.
By the way, why is it special that a tenured professor gets involved in social
struggle? Or does some shit work like stapling up posters? If this isn't at
all common, doesn't that tell us something about what a wasteland is academe?
On another thread, I do not find either students or colleagues very interesting
on the whole. Most students learn what is needed to get by (precious little in
most schools) and this is what they do. For every story you can tell me about
involved students, I can tell you one about stupidity and apathy not to be
believed. But please don't get me started.
Michael Yates
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Apr 1998, Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> > Harvey was like Hamlet on the
> > question of keeping the Rover plant open. "To keep open, or not to keep
> > open--that is the question" was heard from his lips as paced the quad at
> > Oxford in the lonely hours of the night. And what was the big factor that
> > made him lean in the direction of not keeping it open? THAT THERE WERE TOO
> > MANY CARS ALREADY BEING PRODUCED IN CAPITALIST EUROPE!!!! As if this is a
> > problem for revolutionary socialists.
>
> On the contrary, it's the *central* problem for revolutionary socialists.
> Cars suck, Lou, and so do the companies which foist them on people.
> Producing a wasteful, ecologically catastrophic product which will
> ultimately raise sea levels, heat up the atmosphere and do the Goddess
> only knows what to our ravaged planet is *not* in the interest of the
> proletariat. Harvey at least had the guts to ask the right question, even
> if he didn't have an answer handy. Revolutions are not just about stirring
> speeches and head-over-heels commitments to this or that sacred cause,
> they're about rethinking the fundamental assumptions of market societies.
> Direct action without theoretical reflection regresses to the crude
> materialism of the media or marketing blitz (the fanciful notion, endemic
> to Trotskyists and Madison Avenue executives alike, that the product will
> ultimately sell itself); theory without the test of direct
> action regresses to the barbaric idealism of the neoliberal hegemony,
> which is all about imposing the ideological fantasy-world of the tiny
> employing elite onto the vast working majority, and to hell with what the
> latter really want or think.
>
> Or, to put it more concretely still, every short-term solidarity campaign
> with striking miners' unions is also part of the long-term campaign to
> switch to solar, and vice versa. No Greens without Reds!
>
> -- Dennis
