183Promises

ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R Young

Quiet Flows the Don: Keeping Promises in a Global Economy


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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES

by

T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute


And Quiet Flows the Don: An Editorial

Fri, 17 Oct 1997 06:21:08 -0600 (MDT)

I read the Don Quartet of Mikhail Sholokhov about once
every ten years. It is a social history of peace, war
and revolution in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe
during the critical years of World War I and the socialist
revolution thereafter.

Sholokhov uses a cossack village and cossack family with
which to trace the events which, over ten years, shook
the world. The key character in the Don series is Gregor
Melekhov. He comes of age during those years. Part of his
coming of age is an abandonment of the rich cultural history
of the cossocks with its ties to land, to Czar, and to
nation.

A key turning point involves a passage from Lenin in a
pamphlet Gregor read as a soldier on the Eastern Front.

In that passage, Lenin says that workers of the world have
no nation...that the war in which they kill each other is
a war in which capitalists are struggling among themselves
to see which set of national capitalists get which markets
and which raw materials.

True then, it is true today...national chauvinism is used to
support this or that set of capitalists. Yet, as capital
is globalized, national loyalities begin to fail as a way
for a given set of national capitalists to guarantee markets
access to raw materials and/or cheaper labor costs.

If workers can ever understand that nationalism becomes a
bitter poison in which one set of workers are used against
another set of workers in another country, we may have a
union movement which becomes truly emancipatory; once again
the architect of the revolution will become the working class.

The same is true of academics; of social scientists; of
sociologists.

We must transcend national loyalities and national preferences
in our analyses of crime, poverty, racism, domestic violence
and other social problems.

We must do the same for our analyses of social movements...such
as the Promise Keepers. In our analyses of PK'ers most of us,
especially myself, has thought only about the meaning of PK
within the national/cultural complex.

Some of us; Mort Wenger, Steve Rosenthal, Wendell Solomon and
a few others, have reminded us of the larger historical context
in which such movements arise...for that we must be most grateful.

Without denying the positivities or good intentions of the PK'ers,
we must first try to understand this movement...as well as the
outswelling of grief for Princess Diana, in this larger context.

And Quiet Flows the Capital.

In the past 50 years, the social sources of social problems have
been transnationalized. Yet the solutions to these same social
problems remain localized in self, family, county and province.

Indeed, part of class struggle today is an effort by Republicans
to miniaturize social policy...with a success which is bitter
to those who live at the margins of class struggle.

To their credit, PK'ers try to make the best of a bad situation;
without changing the larger situation.

I am not suggesting that males of the world should unite; that
PK must be also a transnational movement...it is of little use to
the human project that working class and lower middle class
men improve quality of life in their families if the familiies of
the poor and families with single mothers continue to deteriorate.

Pat Kasari brought that point out excellently well in her post
putting forth a feminist view on PK.

As she said:
Could you get the justice system to really enforce laws
that make men pay child support and protect women from abusive
husbands? We would also appreciate not losing everything we worked for most of
our lives when our husbands walk out after 20 years or so of marriage, taking the
pensions with them, and the judges make us sell our houses because
they are community property. Those of us with small children who are on welfare
would also like a better solution than workfare, because we don't want
strangers raising our kids while our labor is exploited by someone
who is taking advantage of the fact that we have to either accept minimum
wage jobs or starve. Finally, we would like some of that money, if there is
any left over, to help house those of us who, along with our children, are the
fastest growing population of homeless in the country. If you can
keep your promises to us by doing any of these things, the march will have
been an act of God, indeed.

A miniturized social justice system cannot do that; it takes the kind of global
vision that Marx, Lenin and Socialist Internationales bring to questions of
social change and social justice to do that.