Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 08:22:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Why Foucault is worth discussing


Vladimir, the labor movement of today does not look like the labor 
movement of the 1930s.

I just came back from a United Auto Workers picket line at Barnard 
College where my friend Catherine is one of the strike leaders. The 
UAW represents clerical and administrative workers at the college, 
most of whom are African-American and female. The college decided 
to make union members pay for part of their medical insurance. Their 
leaflet says, "Our membership is the lowest paid employee group on 
campus and our union health care plan cost far less than the 
management plan the College wanted to force on us. Yet Barnard 
wants to cut basic health benefits we depend upon for ourselves and 
our families! The College is demanding an immediate ten percent cut 
in its health care costs and is refusing to pay any more over the life or 
our out entire contract. Under these conditions, the plan would not 
work. We would be forced to accept benefit cuts or make up the 
difference in cost ourselves."

Now Catherine is not African-American. She is a graduate of Barnard 
College in fact and has been working there for seven years, because, 
like a large number of people her age, there are no better jobs to be 
found. In my department down the hall there is a recent Columbia 
graduate who works full time in the business office processing 
purchase orders and invoices. She has a degree in Literature.

All through the United States, there are thousands of people like 
Catherine who have become deeply involved in strikes of university 
workers. Out in New Haven, Connecticut there has been fierce labor 
resistance to the efforts of Yale administrators to phase out full-time 
jobs with contract labor. I was out at a big labor rally there a couple of 
months ago and was amazed by the broad support these workers had 
won, including a substantial delegation of coal miners from 
Appalachia.

Now Catherine is somebody who is very steeped in poststructuralism 
and post-Marxism. When I first met her four years ago, she talked 
about nothing except Derrida. Lately, under the impact of my own 
steady prompting and her experiences on the picket-line, she has 
begun to study Marxist ideas. Part of the impetus for this has been 
Derrida's own call for a return to Marxism. His latest book, while 
specious in many respects, is a rejection of the political conservatism 
of many postmodernists.

Is Catherine an anomaly? Not at all. The AFL-CIO has embarked on a 
Union Summer Organizing drive involving thousands of young people 
just like Catherine. Any recent college graduate is likely to have their 
heads stuffed full with this "postmodernist" crap. "Postmodernism" is 
bourgeois ideology that has been crafted to appear radical. It has been 
one of the main ideological obstacles to the advance of Marxism over 
the past twenty years.

The Monthly Review, in whose pages you have been published, thought it an 
important enough topic to deal with (and defeat) that it devoted a special 
issue to it several months ago.

When we discuss "identity" politics in the USA, we are looking at the 
political consequences of Foucault's theories. Instead of having people 
organize on the basis of class, we find that each group--Gay, feminist, 
black, etc.--defends its own special interests. This is an approach 
Foucault *fought for* in opposition to the class-based approach of 
Marxism.

It is absolutely incumbent upon Marxists to understand these ideas in 
order to fight them. This is not just the specialized turf of academics 
either. Did you pick up on Zeynep's description of the workers school 
in Turkey she works with? The workers don't only discuss the class 
struggle, they actually have discussions about postmodernism. I 
thought that was terrific.

Workers need to have all of their intellectual and cultural needs 
addressed. They are not one-dimensional. Perhaps Jon Flanders can 
recount some stories from his workplace that show the broad interests 
that rail workers have.

There is evidence by the way that workers from the days of Marx also 
had these types of intellectual longings. One of the books I want to 
discuss in the seminar/list I have proposed is EP Thompson's study of 
the making of the English working-class.

I want to conclude with Eva Broido's description of the Petersburg 
workers' clubs of the Russian Social Democracy which is found in her 
"Memoirs of a Revolutionary".

"The most important centers of party work were our clubs. In them we 
concentrated all of our propaganda activities: our propaganda was 
distributed from them, and there workers came to hear lectures on 
current affairs. There, too, our members of the Duma came to report 
on their work. Virtually all the organizational work was centered on 
these clubs--general and special party meetings were held there, party 
publications were distributed from there, there were the 'addresses' of 
the local district and sub-district branches, there all local news was  
collected, from there speakers were sent to factory meetings. And these 
were also the places where enlightened workers--men and women--
could meet for friendly exchange of ideas and to read books and 
newspapers. All clubs aimed at having good libraries. And eventually 
they also encouraged art, there were music and song groups and the 
like.

At first clubs were exclusively political, but soon their character 
changed. Propaganda meetings gave place to lectures and discussions 
of a more general nature, the clubs became 'colleges' of Marxism. 
Representatives of all club committees combined to work out 
systematic courses of lectures, to provide and distribute the necessary 
books and to supply book catalogues. And already in the winter of 
1906-7 the programs included physics, mathematics and technology 
alongside economics, historical materialism and the history of 
socialism and the labor movement..."

Louis Proyect



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