Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 16:51:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Labor & politics: a rejoinder


        

Jonathon, Doug and Louis (P) can't have it both ways.  Either the workers
are potentially revolutionary or they are not.  And Doug, it *was* EH Carr
who, for me at least, authored the epigram in question (*The New Society*
London, 1951: Macmillan, p. 32).  I have never read Keynes, though I am much
attracted by his comment about people who are "generally the slaves of some
defunct economist".  In any event, Doug, don't go to lecturing me.

And of course Louis (P) is dismayed to find me entertaining "silly" thoughts
like the armed strike in Peru.  I, on the other hand, find "silly" his
pre-occupation with an era long past, one where an institution invented by
the Third International, directed by the Third International (which was,
after all, officered by those with an infinitely better understanding of
American society and politics than their American counterparts), and fed and
sustained by the Third International substituted itself -- quite
successfully -- for a genuine native American Left.  Its bogus competition
was itself incapable of doing anything except running up a blind alley.
There is a radical tradition rich in the history of our country, but it has
little in common with the self-serving fairy tales published by Monthly
Review Press and others.

It is, after all, sixty years or more since the matriculation of the modern
American labor movement, yet we are epochs behind social democratic Europe,
where, presumably, workers understand the class differences between their
employers and themselves.  The results, undeniably, are practically
identical; a workers' movement in full-blown retreat, coextensive with a
"Left" that is itself divided into a galaxy of minute, warring sects, unable
to attract more than an insignificant fringe of organized labor, clinging to
the brave illusion that their prescriptions represent the aims and interests
of workers.  This is the malaise I seek to diagnose and understand, and
perhaps the main reason I signed up for this show.

The workers will not get what they do not want.  If they want socialism, if
they in effect want to become a ruling class and abolish exploitation
--whether they are led by a vanguard party or not -- they will have to
employ those methods of force and coercion heretofore used only by their
opponents. What, pray tell, is so "silly" about that?

Louis Godena



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