Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 22:57:35 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: P.B. Proyect squirms some more


>. Even if the MR was
>still Maoist, you wouldn't get anybody there to buy into your creepy
>position on the trade-union movement. I could just imagine some of those
>old-timers who got their teeth busted on picket-lines in the 1930s
>listening to your bullshit.

Yes, Louis, but  whom did Sweezy and Baran herald as the new revolutionary
subjects in *Monopoly Capital*? The industrial working class?  or the Third
World, minorities and students? Could we have here a reductio ad absurdum?

However,  while I am completely unconvinced by MIM's  mindless attempt to
redescribe classes in (absurd) racial categories (and there is also the
all-important problem of how this only attentuates the class consciousness
of minority proletarians), I don't think the question of an international
transfer of value, the historic creation of a labor aristocracy on that
basis and the political problems posed by such a class strata can simply be
dismissed.

For example, the politics of bribed leaders and their coopted followers
must be taken seriously. Moreover, the fact that some American workers have
enjoyed world-historic levels of prosperity, without epochal struggles, has
implications, I believe.

This prosperity may have also predisposed some of them to the erroneous
conclusion that further progress should also come easy if not through
racist measures of exclusion than simply perhaps by voting for a new party
candidate who promises to advance "their" interests: a Buchanan or a Perot
or a Lamm.  Even progressive parties may indulge this prejudice of
'spoiled' Americans.  Without such illusions challenged, I simply don't see
how workers will be prepared to advance themselves and and in the process
go about creating  a truly democratic free association of producers,
instead of voting in some fronted fascist candidate.

Rakesh




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