Working For NY

[Terrance]

> > Why is the press and the academic publishing industry buzzing with all
> > this 1968 stuff again?  Kerry, Dean, Bush, where were you when the
> > communists and the militant radicals tried to destroy liberal democracy
> > in the US in 1968-1969?
> 
> This is the neocon pov -- the reality was that the government was breaking
> the law. If this democracy was liberal why were young men forced into the
> armed services, fighting a war that hadn't even been declared? The
> demonstrators were only disturbing the public order, the napalm bombs
> destroyed lives. Why were young people jailed for smoking dope while the
> much more dangerous drug alcohol was at the center of various social
> activities and rituals.

It's not a neocon pov. 

SDSers, motivated by guilt and hate of White
America, have wrongly attached themselves to Black militants and
artificially transposed to America the "exemplary acts" of Guevara's
rural guerrillas. SDSers, are unwilling to
work in White communities in the long, slow, and difficult organizing
process that is necessary in view of the unreceptive attitude of the
majority of the American population. 

Guardian, April 4th, 1970. page 9. 

While the Guardian applauded the move toward a revolutionary youth
movement because of its  Marxist-Leninist politics, it protested the
dogmatic stand of SDS leaders, many of them talking about
Stalin and the need for dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard
(Leninist) party. This kind of talk, the Guardian noted, was the
property of the SDS leadership, who were more and more without a
membership to lead. In less than a decade, SDS had abandoned belief in  
electoral processes and become a street gang that couldn't act, 
but simply reacted like children.






> 
> > Do we need more books on this subject? Do we
> > want them?
> 
> Yes.






> 
> > Maybe we do, but right here we've got Pynchon's Vineland and
> > we don't even open it up and read what's in it. It's not a sympathetic
> > portrayal of Lefty-America at all. It's a very harsh satire.
> >
> 
> Indeed it is, but for being too selfish, to easy to get by agent
> provocateurs. Like it was in reality the novel tells how the first guns in
> revolutionary hands came from agents of the state. The novel is telling how
> dangerously close to fascism America was at that time.

I've been trying to argue that VL is a novel about work. I don't think
you can make much sense of it unless you deal with the labor history. P
begins at Berkeley, 1967. Frenesi is in the valley filming farm workers.
After Rex kills Weed, he takes off. Before he kills Weed he tells Weed
that he is going to France. 

At the  December of 1967 NC meeting the SDS discussed its plans for 1968
including a concerted effort to identify with workers, to work-in, to
work with organized labor. 

What happened? 

P sez that the success of the New Left was limited by the failure of the
college kids and the working class to get together (not a quote,
obviously). 

What does he mean? How did that happen? That's what Vineland is about.