Re: the noble savages of the left: country folk.
On Apr 21, 2007, at 12:51 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
If one does not believe that it is a problem of the left that it
largely exists in a navel-gazing isolated bubble, then, well, I confess I
do not know how to move one on that question. My evidence is the left. Our milleu, all around us. Yes, there are working people in Berkeley
and poor people in Boston.
There are poor people about three blocks from where I sit. The
nonsense you see when walking around Berkeley - dream centers and
nuclear-free zones (Berkeley! institutional home of a nuclear weapons
lab!!) - is still just blocks from the mutliracial working class of
Oakland.It’s not a geographical thing - it’s about social networks
and a shared, or a non-shared culture.
But I do believe leftists would have a better assessment of the balance of forces, which would better inform their approach, and probably lead to better organizing work, if so many were not
bunkered down in their enclaves.
Or you could say that they/we hunker down in our enclaves precisely
because we know what’s out there, and it’s not always very encouraging.
Doug- I confess, I regard the cumulative accomplishments of the labor movement and community organizations as greater than that of the
spartacists and pomo scholars.
I really don’t know what the contribution of community organizing has
been. In NYC, it looks like not much, but maybe I just don’t know
where to look. One of the reasons I wanted to write that activistism
piece is because I’d been thinking for years about the barrenness of
the Alinsky approach.
The Sparts put out a great paper. Their political contribution is
minimal. “Pomo scholars,” whoever they are, are often personally
involved in all kinds of political work, from the peace movement to
living wage campaigns. Don’t make me dig out that idiotic passage
from an Eric Alterman column where Alterman complains about the evil
pomo-sters, and then quotes Nelson Lichtenstein as saying they did
some of the best work on UVa’s living wage campaign.
Ah, but the labor movement. It did a lot in the past, and I can’t
imagine any improvement in U.S. political life without its revival.
But it’s mostly braindead and ineffectual now.
Doug