sakaisettlersocr

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