Class struggle

[struggle4progress]

Poll question: Class struggle

[catnhatnh]

1. It's coming soon...

and will be so elemental you will regret the light tone of your poll.You will recognize what it is about when a family member or friend becomes a casualty. This ain't a threat, just a prediction.

[readmoreoften]

2. Everyone I know is already a casualty of class warfare.

You mean the warfare might go in the opposite direction? Cool. Less pain for us.

[anonymous171]

3. It is the only true "struggle."

The race, social, religious struggles have all been but side affects of and distractions from the class war. ESPECIALLY the race issue.

[pork medley]

4. When Race Burns Class

An Interview With J. Sakai, courtesy of Solidarity and Kersplebedeb

Like many radicals who struggle as organizers, i had wondered why our very logical "class unity" theories always seemed to get smashed up around the exit ramp of race? At the time i'd quit my fairly isolated job on the night shift as a mechanic on the railroad, and was running a cut-off lathe in an auto parts plant. The young white guys in our department were pretty good. In fact, rebellious counter-culture dope smoking Nam vets. After months of hanging & talking, one night one of them came up to me and said that all the guys were driving down to the Kentucky Derby together, to spend the weekend getting drunk and partying. They were inviting me, an Asian, as a way of my joining the crew. Only, he said, "You got to stop talking to those Blacks. You got to choose. White or Black."

Every lunch hour i dropped in on a scene on the loading dock, where a dozen brothers munched sandwiches and had an on-going discussion. About everything from the latest sex scandal to whether it was good or not for Third World nations to be getting A-bombs (some said it was good ending the white monopoly on nuclear weapons, while others said not at the price of endangering our asses!). Plus the guy from the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in our plant area had recruited me to help out, since he was facing heavy going from the older, more established Black political tendencies ( various nationalists, the CPUSA--who had great veterans, good shop floor militants --etc). And, why would i go along with some apartheid agenda anyway? Needless to say, the white young guys cut me dead after that (though they later came out for me as shop steward, which shows you how much b.s. they thought the union was).

That kind of stuff, familiar to us all, kept piling up in my mind and got me started trying to figure out how this had come about in the u.s. working class. So for years after this i read labor history and asked older trade union radicals questions whenever i could. Finally, an anarchist veteran of the autoworkers' historic 1937 Flint Sit-Down strike told me that the strike had been Jim Crow, that one of the unpublicized demands had been to keep Black workers down as only janitors....or out of the plants altogether. This blew my mind. That's when it hit me that the wonderful working class history that the movement had taught us was a lie.

So i decided to write an article (famous writer's delusion) on how this white supremacy started in the u.s. working class. i didn't know--maybe it was in the 1920s?, i thought. So Settlers was researched backwards. i knew what the conclusion was in the mid-1970s, that white supremacy ruled the white working class except in the self delusions of the Left. "No politician can ever be too racist to be popular in white amerikkka", is an amazingly true saying. Settlers was researched going back in time, trying to find that event, that turning point when working class unity by whites had dissolved into racial supremacy. 1930s, 1920s, pre-World War I, Black Reconstruction, Civil War, 1700s, 1600s, i kept going back and back, treading water, trying to touch non-white supremacist ground. Only, there wasn't any!

continued..

[struggle4progress]

5. Sakai's article is interesting but seems to me to miss the point in several important ways

First, he seems to misunderstand the notion of "class." A "class" should be (at minimum) a group that, due to the structure of the society, shares certain realities and in particular has certain common material interests. The "class" therefore spontaneously evolves some "consciousness" -- ways of understanding the world and our role in it. This "consciousness" is not necessarily analytical or critical or fact-based, and it does not automatically assume a form useful for obtaining change: it is typically conditioned not only by history but by historical mythology; both social tradition and propaganda affect its form. Nor is a "class" necessarily aware, in its "consciousness," of itself or other "classes"; it may not recognize its own interests, let alone the interests of other social groupings, whether or not it shares these interests. A "class" always has some "consciousness," but that "consciousness" does not always accurately reflect realities

Secondly, he seems to misunderstand the notion of "race." From a philosophical point of view, every notion should be judged according to the uses to which it can be put. If one examines "race" in that light, one finds a non-scientific concept, used inconsistently, sometimes associated with certain physiological features, sometimes associated with cultural issues. A principle use of "race," as a lens for understanding the world, seems to be mystifying oppression. King Leopold, for example, did not say he was enslaving the inhabitants of the Congo for latex production but rather that he was bringing Christian civilization to the savages; American enthusiasts of Jim Crow, or the Afrikaaner proponents of apartheid, did not say they were establishing an economic underclass at gunpoint but rather that they were controlling (say) uppity n*****s or those Bantu foreigners; the Nazis did not claim they were stealing the land and treasures of Europe but rather that they were cleansing the continent of vermin. That the oppressors believe their own propaganda, or that the oppressed are forced to take into account the oppressors' belief in their own propaganda, does not make "race" a scientific concept -- though for useful analysis one must consider whatever social notions are current, whether or not those notions have scientific content

Thirdly, he seems to misunderstand movement history. Of course, it is dishonest only to remember the historical successes of the movement, since we might actually learn more by carefully examining past failures. The historical effort to construct social and economic democracy has always involved real people, who have always been conditioned by their own cultural experiences. In some cases, people manage to escape their context and conditioning, and in other cases they do not. The effort to eliminate "race-based" analysis nevertheless has a long history: generations of progressive organizers have worked to replace misleading and mystifying theories with useful ones -- an undertaking which can be somewhat subtle, since (for example) it would be one thing to encourage a "white" southerner in the Jim Crow era to avoid thinking "racially" and quite a different thing to encourage a "black" southerner in the same era to avoid thinking "racially," since the "racial" thinking of the one contributed to the repressive apparatus and the racial thinking of the other was a required self-defense against the repressive apparatus

On the other hand, if he is saying that "class analysis" can only be useful if it involves an accurate and non-ideological consideration of social and political contexts, then I completely agree