Hey, Melvin
Nice to hear from you!
I enjoyed the "interview of Michael Lebowitz" very much for a
complex of reasons, that boil down to turning 54 this year
only 54! With all that wisdom?
and attempting to be more honest with myself, especially in history
recollection. I simply could not stop thinking about Michael's
father as an individual and personifying the circumstances of many
men of his generation. How did his dad react to being unemployed . .
. in and out of short term jobs and the likes?
Good question, the kind we shouldn't forget to ask. Let me just say,
though, that I never anticipated I was going into a family biography.
The interviewer asked, can you tell us something about your
background and how you developed? The long version or the short
version, I asked? The long. OK, I'll just babble and you can decide
what you want to use.
To answer your question, my father was a quiet person,
definitely not a fighter, and when asked to be a shop steward, he
turned it down, I think because he didn't feel up to it. So, he went
in everyday, working at his lathe in a New Jersey company dependent
on arms expenditures, probably hating it because he wished he was a
draftsman. When (after years of distributing anti-union literature)
the company picked up and moved down south, a familiar NJ story as
Bruce Springsteen documented, he was devastated. Incidentally, the
other literature I grew up reading from his job was the union
newspaper (the IUE), where I learned the real enemy was not GE-- it was UE.
From 1960 on, I was first in Wisconsin in grad school and
then in Vancouver, so I was there in NJ only on visits. But, losing
the job and picking up worse ones here and there basically turned him
into a shell (while fueling my rage); a long-forgotten-about health
problem resurfaced which meant ultimately he couldn't work anymore.
(Luckily, one of his last jobs-- typing labels in a medical supplies
place-- was organised by District 69-- health workers, and he had a
good medical plan.) Basically, he never could see the system--
despite all my ranting, and blamed everything on himself (a not
unusual internalisation). After he and my mother sold the house and
moved to Florida (to a filled-in swamp surrounded by guards, a
seniors' complex), he voted for Reagan-- said Carter was a phoney.
I am not sure at all if the left and Marxists and various Marxist
groups can be accused of belittling or ignoring democracy and
democratic struggle - no matter how one defines it, given the fact
that the struggle of the African American peoples for democratic
rights dominated all of the 1960s and 1970s. And also the whole
antiwar movement and the impact of the environmentalist current.
I had in mind here explicit Marxist groups. Definitely, the
African American struggle dominated the 60s and 70s, and SDS was
unimaginable without it-- a group from SNCC was there at Port Huron
charging that initial SDS meeting, the process of organising support
on campuses for the struggle in the south became in fact a process of
organising SDS (and then, later, the police assassinations of
Panthers-- plus the war--- was at the core of the growth of
impatience about the pace of change that contributed to the
disintegration of SDS).
Mikes description of what he calls a one sided struggle of the left
and Marxists runs against my historical recollection and own
particular brand of Marxism.
Yes, we are into different brands--- in yours, there's a bit of
technological determinism.
Something else must take place as history change to make it possible
to overthrow a society economic and social order. This something
else is always a real revolution in the means of production. And I
believe our working class has intuitively understood this in front
of "the Marxists."
So, what about revolutions in the third world? (Obviously, I have
Venezuela in mind.) Impossible?
in solidarity,
michael
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
Residencias Anauco Suites
Departamento 601
Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
Caracas, Venezuela
(58-212) 573-4111
fax: (58-212) 573-7724
