Working For NY

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 1:26 AM
Subject: Re: Working For NY

>
> > > 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.

I say it is because it has never been the intention to "destroy liberal
democracy in the US in 1968-1969" but contrary to extend the democratic
rights and to get America back on democratic tracks again. Insofar I regard
your position in describing the history as you do as a neocon point of view,
because this is precisely how the neocon think tanks have tried to rewrite
the history of the sixties and seventies.

>
> SDSers, motivated by guilt and hate of White
> America,

I see, no neocon pov! Feeling a little bit guilt for what White America had
done to the Blacks isn't the worst thing I can think of, especially when I
remember Pynchon's descriptions, for example in Dixon's encounter with the
slave driver or Slothrop's Roxbury episode.

> have wrongly attached themselves to Black militants and
> artificially transposed to America the "exemplary acts" of Guevara's
> rural guerrillas.

Did you read what Che had said about the fight inside the US when he
addressed the youth of America. You can read it in Jerry Rubin's book. He
says something like: "You young North Americans are fighting the most
important fight because you're living within the monster."

The Black militants had become militant because the Black communities were
exposed to police violence on a daily level.

> 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.
>

Well, unions in the US aren't exactly unions as we understand it.

> 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.
>

Well, they were children more or less. Over here I remember them talking
about the "objective interests of the working class" -- whoever defines the
objectivity! Marxism is 19th and early 20th century, that's what they had
forgotten in 1968. Even our contemporary foreign minister has been a street
fighter and found back the way to the "belief in electoral processes."

Street gangs seem to be good American tradition too:

"New York is accustomed to gang warfare. White gangs: the Plug Uglies, the
Blood Tubs of Baltimore, the Schuylkill Rangers from Philadelphia, the Dead
Rabbits from the Bowery, the Roaches Guard and the Cow Bay Gangs terrorize
the city, loot, raid and regularly fight the bulls to a standoff."
Ishmael Reed: "Mumbo Jumbo." (1972), Atheneum, New York 1988, p. 18

>
>
>
>
>
> >
> > > 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've never argued against that point, in fact I think it's well worth
consideration. The student revolution had a self-perception of being in the
tradition of the early 20th century workers movement. There were even books
about that, attempts to bridge the gap:

Werkstatt Düsseldorf des Arbeitskreises Literatur der Arbeitswelt (Hrsg.):
"Der rote Großvater erzählt. Berichte und Erzählungen von Veteranen der
Arbeiterbewegung aus der Zeit von 1914 bis 1945," Frankfurt am Main , o.J.

> 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.
>

I agree to a certain degree to that last point. But Pynchon's assertion
doesn't put the blame on the radical students alone for being unable to
convince the workers. The working class (or let's better say to avoid
marxian terms: the blue-collar workers) too failed by not standing up
against the war that was killing their children. I think it's a repetition
of what Sascha says about WW-2:

"The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration."
(77.22)

It seems to be a good American tradition *not* to question the legitimacy of
the leading junta in times of war.

  Otto
"Mundus vult decipi--the world wants to be cheated"