Date: Thu, 14 Mar 96 14:44:15 GMT
From: Adam Rose <adam-AT-pmel.com>
To: lnp3-AT-columbia.edu
Subject: Re: Christain Right - anecdotally
Cc: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu


> > 
> > How many working class mothers educate their children
> > at home ?!
> > 
> 
> Louis: Adam may be trying to score a debater's point here,

Me ! Would I do such a thing ?

No, I wasn't really, I just can't believe that any serious reactionary
movement could have any core other than the urban middle class, self
employed AND corporate.

I was just supplying anecdotes to see if any Americans came in
with some real evidence to back it up.

> but the bigger 
> question remains: who are these folks from a class perspective. I just 
> read a piece in the NY based Village Voice yesterday on Buchanan. It 
> turns out that he received most of his votes from people making more than 
> $50,000 a year. This certainly belies the populist image.
> 

The British fishing industry is in crisis. The crisis is basically the
same as many other industries in Britain - there has been insufficient
investment in new boats, which means that the British fleet has too many
small boats, whereas the Spanish have fewer, bigger ones, which are
far more efficient at extracting fish from the sea. All the stuff about
tradition and conservation is just a lot of hypocritical rubbish.

Anyway, there is a considerable anti European, anti Spanish, feeling,
particularly in the South West of England. [ During the Spanish - 
Candian conflict over fishing rights, they flew the Canadian flag
in the Cornish fishing ports ]. There have been been some
quite big meetings, addressed by the more lunatic anti EU wing of the
Tories, and that well known friend of the people, Lord Norman Tebbit
of Transylvania.

What is the core of this movement ?

Well, I think the core of it is owners of ( or rather, possessors of debt 
for )  fishing boats, some of them quite large numbers of boats ( there
is a woman who owns half the Cornish fleet, who is portrayed in quite a
few semi fictional TV dramas ) , most of them owners of one or two boats.

They are classic middle and petit bourgeois, who have been sacrificed
by the government in the European interests of big capital. "You, 
Britain, stop the fishing subsidies, and we, Spain, will stop the
Steel subsidies".

So on the surface, this seems to contradict my "new middle class as the
social basis for fascism" theory. [ NOT that I am saying the fishermen
are fascists - far from it ].

Yet in another way, it confirms it. The core of this particular
reactionary movement is the traditioanl middle class. In the fishing
villages, the middle class owns boats. Yet in urban Britain, this isn't
true.

Again, this is from vague memory, but there was a particular Combat
18 Naxi thug from the East End of London who got found guilty and
given the usual light sentence, who I'm sure was either a semi
trained solicitor and did something on the city, I can't remember which.
I think it is reasonably well established that the real football
hooligans are actually trainee solicitors, part qualified accountants,
highish grade civil servants. - In other words, in the lower middle
part of corporate ( state or private ) hierarchies, perhaps
technically on the margins of the working class. Apart from anything,
they need reasonably high incomes to travel on the full fare normal
trains, rather than the heavily policed, cheaper special football trains.

This is milieu in which the Nazis try to recruit, although recently,
they have been knocked back by the ANL, and the fans organisations,
who have by and large taken an excellent stand against racis
( incidentally disproving the idea that white workers are inherently
racist ).


I just think that if you think the new middle class is not a base
for fascism, then you must as a consequence believe that fascism
can never be a threat, which I think is a very dangerous conclusion
if you look around the world today.

Adam.

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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