On 10/15/06, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm usually suspicious of generalizations, and there's not enough evidence
to persuade me that leadership on the Left was historically more middle
class and is becoming more plebeian.
In the US, the Sorges or DeLeons always relied on working class figures in
secondary and tertiary roles, and I think this mirrored the movement
internationally as well. Then, you'd occasionally have figures like Debs or
Haywood. Earlier, successful workers movements found themselves
herded into
multi-class formations with a middle class figure at the head of them.
It seems to me that there is no successful working-class movement that
has taken state power at the national level without in some sense it
being part of a multi-class formation.
And
after the 1940s, class becomes the invisible and unspoken reality across the
political spectrum, including (oddly enough) on the Marxist Left. But my
impression is the leadership of the movement in the 1960s or 1970s was not
more plebeian than it had been in the 1930s or earlier. Quite the opposite
in my own obviously limited experience among the mostly campus-based
Trotskyists.
That all depends on what you think of as plebeian. Today's plebeians
may not look like plebeians of yore, may have jobs that never existed
in the past, and so forth.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
