Re: Rethinking Liberalism
On Apr 20, 2007, at 10:12 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
- Forced deportation of 50% of leftists from college towns and hip metropoles.
- Stringent rules on how much time of the day leftists are allowed
to talk to each other.- Internal culture that prioritizes outreach, organizing, results,
gains, base-building, moving individuals on issues, at the expense of
theory and fantasism.- Moratorium on discourses only relevant to or existent in left
bubbles.- No more puppets.
Point 5 I can enthusiastically support.
But the rest, well, there are some problems. The “college towns and
hip metropoles” are surrounded by lots of what you seem to think are
“real people.” As I remember New Haven, it was a classic old
northeastern city filled with poor people. As I remember
Charlottesville, it was surrounded by people who worked in
construction and in farm implement stores. The Brooklyn zip code
containing Williamsburg, the national capital of hip, is almost half
Latino and full of poor people. Soho shares a zip code with
Chinatown, which is also full of poor people. It’s not as if the
problem is massive spatial mismatch.
And it’s not as if some of this hasn’t been tried before. In the late
1960s, Bob Fitch and Bob Avakian (among the co-founders of the
Revolutionary Union) moved out of Berkeley into a working-class town
to organize the masses, and the strategy flopped. Some of that
Berkeley crowd moved to Detroit and started Labor Notes, an effort
you sound contemptuous of. In the 1970s and 1980s, the SWP tried
industrializing, and it flopped. Maybe there’s a problem when people
parachute in from outside, in both the geographical and social senses.
With 3, you’ve hit a pet peeve of mine (and my activistism co-
authors). The American left has long “prioritized” results over
thinking. That’s the culture of community organizing as well as the
labor movement. They haven’t worked very well, have they?
Doug