Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
children. For them the flavor is so sweet. Euro-Amerikans<br />
don't even really care too much about each other. Lower<br />
taxes are more important than food for their own elderly.<br />
This is a diseased culture, with a mass political consciousness<br />
that is centered around parasitism.<br />
The mere recognition that there are rich and poor,<br />
or even that corporations exploit people - any idiot can<br />
see this - cannot constitute class consciousness. The long,<br />
long history of unionism in the coal counties shows this.<br />
Class consciousness implies a participation in the class<br />
war. While such a consciousness certainly can involve<br />
fighting for better wages, it cannot be limited to or even<br />
centered on this.<br />
The Euro-Amerikan "left" has completely<br />
mystified the question of class consciousness. They see in<br />
every labor strike, in the slightest twitch for reform, examples<br />
of proletarianism. Some "socialist scholars" (a<br />
self-awarded title, to be sure) conduct almost anthropological<br />
expeditions into the settler masses, seeing in<br />
every remembered folk song or cultural nuance some profound<br />
but hidden nuggets of working class consciousness.<br />
Others, who have spent years as working class "experts,"<br />
find proletarian vision in every joke about the bosses told<br />
during coffee breaks. This is not politics, whatever else it<br />
may be.<br />
There is nothing mystical, elusive or hidden about<br />
real working class consciousness. It is the political<br />
awareness that the exploiting class and its State must be<br />
fought, that the laboring masses of the world have unity in<br />
their need for socialism. The Red Army is class consciousness.<br />
An action for higher wages or better working<br />
conditions need not embody any real class consciousness<br />
whatsoever. Narrow self-interest is not the same as consciousness<br />
of class interests. "More for me" is not the<br />
same slogan as "liberate humanity."<br />
Lenin wrofe on this: "Onldv when rhe individual<br />
worker realizes that he a u nwrnber of the enfire working<br />
class, otrly when he recognrzcs flre.facr that his petty dayto-day<br />
struggle aguir~st itrdividual employers and individual<br />
government officials is a struggle against the entire<br />
bourgeoisie and the enfrre governmenf does his struggle<br />
becoirle a class struggle."(24)<br />
This famous and often-quoted passage set forth a<br />
clear threshold - by which the coal miners or any other<br />
significant grouping of Euro-Amerikan workers do not in<br />
a scientific sense have any real working-class consciousness.<br />
Much more than this, however, is the reality<br />
that practice is the proof, that the actual struggle reveals<br />
more than any theoretical criteria. Lenin pointed this out<br />
at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International:<br />
"We cannot - nor can anybody else - calculate<br />
exactly what portion of the proletariaf is following and will<br />
follow the social-chau\~inists and opportunists. This will<br />
only be revealed by the struggle, if will be definitely decided<br />
only by /he socialist revolution. "(25)<br />
We have lived through two decades of the most<br />
tumultuous politcal struggle on a global scalc. The Afrikan<br />
masses broke through the colonial repression in massive<br />
urban uprisings during the 1960s. The Chicano-Mexicano<br />
Land struggle revived in the Southwest. Armed selfdefense<br />
became a popular concept. Wounded Knee lit a<br />
signal fire for the Indian Nations. Socialist ideas and international<br />
solidarity took root in the new insurgencies. The<br />
Puerto Rican revolution brought an armed struggle once<br />
again to the front door of the Empire. The answcr to their<br />
actual consciousness, to what class awareness the Euro-<br />
Amerikan workers had, can be found in what side they<br />
supported in the wars to overthrow "their" U.S. Empire.<br />
The August 29, 1970 Chicano Moratorium anti-war protest, attended by 20,000 persons.<br />
154