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Gary MacLennan wrote: it seems to me that what is happening is a general degrading of people's morale... The big question is what will the workers do? No one knows the answer. The workers, I repeat understand they are supposed to tighten their belts and "Work for Britain" or the equivalent. ........................................ I am reminded again that, If this system of predatory capital accumulation and expansion no longer works for the great majority of us, and more and more billions of people on the planet are dis-served and impoverished under the system of capital accumulation and it isn't getting any better for them but palpably worse - - then why on earth would any working person think of capitalist, barbaric, dystopian solutions as real and the prospect of annealing, socially-based solutions as frivolously utopian? One reason (and it's cause for circumspection and humility among us who are over forty or fifty), is that most of those now living, who were born in the last forty years, have seldom or never seen success from acting together as insurgents against capital - one might only have seen the collapse of the Soviet states, the reversion of China, Vietnam, and possibly to some extent the modification of the long, direct-in-their-face Cuban experiment, to capitalism of one sort or another; or recall that the last massive protest, ten million or more worldwide against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, ended without accomplishing anything meaningful as a result of our efforts and outrage; to the present truculent smashing and containment of small groups of protesters against the US's middle eastern wars and at the political conventions; the increasingly mechanized, automated and computerized surveillance and remote-controlled destruction across the planet; the absence of workers' strikes and work stoppages and sit-ins and sabotage; all have jobs to keep, debts to pay, offspring to protect. The directors of the capitalist enterprise have really pulled off a long wool-over, if now somewhat in disarray; and that's all been hard on the collective identity, and the wind has becalmed and temporarily left the collective sails. We didn't see or have a part in the trembling of Europe and the general euphoria at the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, the mid-19th century revolt against slavery, the paralysis of the great powers after the 1st World War when Russia and some of its eastern European neighbors joined in the Soviet state; those under fifty did not see the stand down of capital in China in the 1940s, the incomprehension and anger in the time of Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and the Kennedys when Cuba had its revolution just off-shore in the late 50s, the fear of the Johnson and Nixon coteries at the fierceness of the Vietnamese resistance and the massive protest against the Vietnam War, the great civil rights marches and rage in the ghettos and the liberation of Algeria and numerous African and Asian colonies, all in the 60s, the breaking forth also of righteous anger in France, the US, the rest of Europe and elsewhere in 1968, or the retreat of US imperialism from Vietnam in the 70s; and those workers' strikes and work stoppages and sit-ins and sabotage which the working class heartbreakingly undertook in the 19th and the 1st 70 or 80 years of the last century. There are still some outposts of resistance in the last forty years - the change in South Africa in the 90s, Cuba, Venezuela, the resistance in among other places Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Nicaragua and Somalia. But not enough to sustain a feeling of our collective strength. That's not, as we say, the end of history. Our faith in a species that has been so astoundingly creative and resourceful throughout its history is fully justified - and not simply because the privileged captains of capital have with ingenuity overcome so many of their barriers to predatory accumulation. They're not in the least more ingenious: they've just have had an easier and better learning curve because they wield the power and therefore can more readily learn the ways. We who are or who align with workers live, we learn, we scratch our heads, study, tack, fulminate, gesticulate, innovate and maneuver, charge and fall back; just look at how much more we understand, thanks initially and mainly to Marx and Engels, all the time about the system to which we are subject and how it operates, as we accrue experience and a lengthening history of struggle; that experience and knowledge permeates broadly and is not lost in the working out of our destiny and common welfare. Remembering that it took several years for protest to build from the mindless late 20s into the 1930s, and all of the foregoing great history of struggle, can we really seriously doubt, dear llst members, facrissake that the time of those who bear the load is very soon to arrive again. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
