Question: How do we win over workers who gravitate toward reactionary movements in times of declining economic security?
Radicals must not only maintain a rhetorical integrity to their ideas and be prepared to articulate them with their coworkers but also be studied in how these ideas were materialized in the historical context. It is not enough to dumb down positions with pictures of how life will be under a socialist heaven. This is what zealots do. They must be prepared with real examples of how these struggles were engaged in the past, lessons learned, and what successes looked like. But part of this study is a lot of self-reflection. Reactionary themes have metastasized within the Left for some time, and it has eased the Left towards a supposed Center, which is really the Right. The late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said one of her most lasting successes was the creation of Tony Blair’s “New” Labour, a right-leaning version of the former Labour movement. This can be said of the Left in general, not only since the 40’s but since Reagan. Communists will not successfully draw workers from reactionary thinking when some of them have reactionary sensibilities themselves. The white male factory worker archetype that has neglected Black labor, women’s labor, and notions of liberation, is in itself a reactionary creature.
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Lowell B. Denny, III, has a degree in political science from Washington University. His political education began with his membership in Queer Nation-San Francisco, spending two months of work and study in Cuba in the early 1990s, then three months hitchhiking around Mexico where he got to spend a day in jail, and now living in Hawaii where the sovereignty movement is strong. He has worked in publishing, retail, as a school teacher and restaurant waiter. He is a member of AFGE Local 1234.
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