re VL is about work (Frenesi at the college of the surf)

Terrance lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Wed Jan 14 06:55:24 CST 2004


The college KIDS claimed that the American Worker was at best, bought
off by the
System and, at worst, part of the problem. 

You gotta love Frenesi, Working hard, blue eyed, long legs and mini,
filming the farm worker strike. 

So why did she end up at the college of the surf? 

Sasha says the War (W.W.II) changed everything. 
But she's wrong. W.W.II was only the half of it. 
The Wars (W.W.II &  Cold War) changed everything. 
Frenesi is born a little after W.W.II and she grows up (not exactly a
red-diaper baby) in the Fifties and on the fringes of the political
struggle in Hollywood (Cold War). 

And she hated the political fights (brought home by her parents from the
job, in the neighborhood, at school, in her home) the paranoia and
surveillance, the fakery and phony names. Her mother and father were in
and out of work and they blamed other workers (scabs, company unions and
so on) for their unemployment and they fought and acted like the worst
kind of kids and the kids (not knowing why their parents were betraying
their friends or being betrayed by them), being typical kids, leaned to
act like the worst kind of kids too. 

None of these kids was doing any analysis. 

The great paradox of the American labor movement is that it is (what is
left of it) and has primarily been, especially since the 1920s, a
working-class movement outside of the broad stream of socialist thought.
Put the rhetoric aside and AMerican Unionism is and always been a "pure
and simple" economic unionism. A conservative tradition that even the
Marxist leaders of the Left-wing unions embraced, a business unionism
that accepts private property and the market as fundamental, and largely
beneficial, pillars of economic life. Capitalism, while fundamentally
desirable, had to be tempered by more humane institutions capable of
minimizing the negative effects of unrestrained individualism and
extreme concentrations of economic  power. The labor movement in the
United States was one such institution. 

But the Kids were convinced that labor was part of the problem.



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