Open Letter to G. William Domhoff

[Louis Proyect]

Dear Bill,

I hope you don't mind me writing you out of the blue like this, but scruffy 
sans-culotte Marxists like myself don't have much other recourse besides 
the Internet when it comes to answering Professor Emeritus types like yourself.

In the last few days you have come into my radar screen twice. I assume 
that you are the same Bill Domhoff wrote the classic "Who Rules America," a 
book that influenced me greatly when I was coming around the radical 
movement in 1966. With those kinds of credits, I was kind of at a loss to 
understand why you were the most vehement supporter of the lesser-evil at a 
debate on whether the Democratic Party can be reformed at last weekend's 
Socialist Scholars Conference.

Not having attended that debate, I now understand where you are coming 
from. On Denis Dutton's website "Arts and Letters Daily", which is sort of 
a Mandarin version of the Drudge Report that typically features links to 
articles extolling DDT, making Iraq the 51st state or sociobiological 
defenses of old men lusting after younger women, one of your articles 
showed up. Now I have to admit that I am suspicious when Dutton features 
somebody with leftist credentials. Typically, it is somebody like Meghnad 
Desai who wrote "Marx's Revenge", a Verso book arguing that if Marx was 
alive today he'd be raising a champagne glass to the IMF.

So when I saw that the link to your article that was in the same box as 
links to Fareed Zakaria and Michael "Laptop Bombardier" Walzer, I had to 
admit some trepidation. What would you be doing in such bad company?

Now that I've had a chance to look at the article titled " Which Side Are 
We On?:
Redefining Who's Us and Who's Them" 
(http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=113_0_1_0_C), which appears in 
Jimmy Weinstein's "In These Times", I can say that Dutton's editorial 
grouping makes some sense. Letting the chips fall where they may, you write:

>>In trying to bring about egalitarian social change, however, it doesn't 
make good political sense to frame this picture of economic concentration 
and class domination in terms of one social class against another. Defining 
the "opponents" as "the capitalists" or "the rich" is a strategic mistake.<<

How very interesting. I was under the impression that people began to think 
in class terms because of war, unemployment, racism, and environmental 
degradation. When the malefactors tend to belong to what brontosaurus 
Marxists like myself call the ruling class, there is a tendency to think of 
the capitalists as the enemy. That appeared to be the way you once thought 
of them yourself, in your wild and woolly youth.

Most of the article goes along in this dreary vein and I certainly urge the 
people on the listservs I participate in to read it. I will limit myself, 
however, to one especially wrong-headed item that I have a personal 
interest in. Referring to Jon Corzine, you write:

>>But an attack on "the rich" or "the capitalist class," or worse, "the 
capitalist pigs and bloodsuckers"? Then what about, for just one example, 
New Jersey Sen. Jon Corzine, the multimillionaire banker who has gone 
beyond his class interests to advocate a sharply defined progressive 
agenda? This Democrat opposed Bush's tax cuts for the rich, wants an 
"activist" government, sees a universal health care system as a "basic 
right," and opposes the death penalty.<<

Since I was an employee of Goldman-Sachs when Corzine was the boss, I have 
a slightly different appreciation of whether or not he "has gone beyond his 
class interests". I was a 46-year-old computer programmer who was given the 
message that the firm wanted to replace me, and others like me, with 
younger and cheaper workers. I got the message and moved on. Others were 
not so lucky. After arriving at work one morning, 25 long time employees of 
the firm, who had given flesh and blood to make it profitable, were told to 
pack their belongings into a carton and were then escorted by security 
guards to a string of cabs in front of 85 Broad Street, never to return. 
Eventually I ran into one of them at Columbia University where he was a day 
laborer cleaning windows.

My only suggestion to you is to lay off the politics and society stuff, 
where you can only do harm--not that any firebrand undergraduate is likely 
to take your stumping for the Democratic Party and class peace too 
seriously. Why don't you stick with dream studies, an area, that until I 
did a google search on you, I had no idea you were so involved with. As the 
author of "The Mystique of Dreams", you earned one cover-leaf accolade: "A 
fascinating strand of the human potential movement of the 1960s." I guess 
we now know which exit you took off the main highway.

Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org