The main dividing line is still race. This is the issue that must be focused upon in all working class organizations.

Most people in this country, while they might not be happy about things, also are woefully ignorant about many things. Sometimes people can learn, but other times they have to be confronted.

I am sure that the experience of growing up in the heart of the working class and learning from my parents, and especially from my grandmother (who also worked on a barge boat as a cook and a servant for rich folks in Manhattan, Newport, Grosse Point, and Sewickley, all havens of the very rich), that life was not especially fair and always full of bad possibilities, helped shape my future take on life. Then what really transformed my thinking was the war in Vietnam and trying to be a good teacher.

Without an understanding of the issue of race and a willingness to confront it head on, the working class will not build its strength.

Capitalism is, in Mao's language, the main contradiction in the world today and so our efforts have to be focused on ending this system and making a new one.

The system has a way of convincing people that because they live in the USA they are better off than all other people in the world. This gets them focused on the wrong things, of course, but it has been a tried and true way of deflecting class struggle, something I don't think Marx didn't fully anticipated. The education system, and the whole culture really, has a lot to do with how these feelings are transmitted to each new generation. When parents say their kids were heroes when they died for nothing in Iraq, you can see the power of this.

You have to get out in the world and meet folks on their own turf, something which a lot of urban radical intellectuals seldom do.