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Everyday forms of popular resistance
Monthly Review, Nov, 1988 by Don Nonini
This hardly indicates widespread support for the government's militarist support for contra attacks against the Nicaraguan people, or for the Pentagon's and C I A's more overt forays during the Reagan years against Third World revolutionary movements. But is this a selfish and privatized form of protest, indicative of a lack of real concern about what the government is doing? I say, by no means.
It is necessary to emphasize that the various kinds of ideologically grounded organized opposition accessible to progresive intellectual (e.g., Marxist study groups, Third World solidarity groups, progressive labor unions, or political parties) are simply not available to most of the U.S. population. Those of us not privileged to be "mental laborers"-even parttime-must often take a much more personalized and shortterm, and far less analytical, view of things, than would be theoretically "ideal."
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There is usually no time or opportunity for critical or theoretical reflection or commitment for most eighteen-yearold men when making a major decision about their lives-one that will often lead to opposition by their families and even their communities. The facts are that many of these young men come from working-class backgrounds and from ethnic minorities where joining the military at an early age is a culturally approved first step to moving out of poverty-because "it is one of the few options for mobility. These young men are refusing to play the game.
It would be wrong to condemn the actions of such young men who have decided not to register with Selective Service as being selfish, privatized, or lacking critical class consciousness. They are more often than not making difficult, brave, and often lonely decisions, while lacking opportunities for being "socialized" into the ideological commitments and communities available to leftistt intellectuals in this society. Working People and th "Underground Economy"
Let us consider another arena of resistance-the so-called underground economy" in which people exchange goods and service for cash, or by barter, leaving federal and state taxes unpaid. The concept of the "underground economy" 's derived from the view of the IRS and of academics servicing the business community, and as such is an inappropriate one when considering popular resistance and evasion, since customarily illegal activities such as drug dealing, pornography, and prostitution are included under this rubric along with activities which themselves are legal but go unreported to the IRS. Surely, this kind of activity occurs throughout the different classes of the country's class system, but is most prevalent, and is a most effective means of tax evasion among the working class, poorer blacks, and other minorities, rather than among the more affluent elite-technocrats, professionals, and wealthy property owners. For the latter, economic transactions are constrained by the size and visibitity of the corporate economy, and federal and state tax codes are biased in their favor anyway.
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