===> It's soul-baring time for true and truer apostles of revolution.
Here's my reply to a guilt-ridden correspondent with several left
labor connections, currently sidetracked by family problems.
valis
Occupied America
-- Armed forces recruits are disguised defectors from capitalism --
I think most of us, even if lacking your credentials, are asking ourselves
the same question. It will be interesting if the majority of the public
continue supporting the strike even as the secondary effects bite more
deeply into their own lives. Since most of those 12 million daily UPS
packages represent store and mail-order purchases, to me the strike poses,
however fortuitously, the very large question of what a socialist America
would live for. It's not enough that labor be organized and sophisticated
to the point where it can take power in a fairly organic fashion: there
also should be no fantasy entertained within or propagated without to the
effect that the national consumerist orgy would not be interrupted or even
mildly degraded. Indeed it would be interrupted big time, therefore a
major shift in attitude toward the ever-changing, ever-improving baubles
that fill the malls must _precede_ revolution, not be one of its diktats.
(Germany might be closer to that philosophic space; most of the Germans
among the world's billionaires are listed as retailers, suggesting that
the Germans may be further along in both satiety and alienation.)
Of course that question connects in one jump with people's jobs, though
in the academy this remains largely a deferred issue, understandably.
Remember the New Yorker-type understated cartoon showing a bedraggled
form standing up at a spare, CP-like meeting (A large wall placard says
"Workers Arise!) to ask, "What happens to my unemployment check when we
overthrow the government?"? That's no joke, and if such conundrums are
simply swept under the rug the time is not ripe at all.
My line has always been, "Look, you have the choice between suffering for
something and suffering for nothing (the succession of system crises):
it doesn't sound like much of a pick but there's a world of difference!"
Until that clearly resonates with a flat majority, including 15 or 20%
of the bourgeoisie, we might as well spend our time reading escapist
fiction, the way I am this summer. Hey, chum, I'm just saying that the
American revolution has yet to be imagined, and few sane people will dive
into an opaque body of water.
