"What differentiates American 'activists' and 'leftists' from most working people is good old fashioned American optimism: activist and leftists have it, working people, by and large, don't. American optimism is, of course, the flip side of American conquest and empire, which is to say that American activists and lefties--most of them hailing from an American middle-class brainwashed by the sometimes subtle propganda that is American optimism--don't really see power and for all of their apparent intellectual sophistication, organizing know-how and moral outrage, are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses."
He followed this swinish insult with crap that identified activism with reform, and that, "Organizers don't talk about capitalism because they know full well that many of the people will stop listening to them. Or, alternatively, organizers, viz. their middle-class comforts, are not interested in doing the really hard work required to make serious idealogical struggle in this country possible."
Thus he pissed on the bravest and noblest people this country has produced, particularly the Southern Freedom Movement, and most explicitly the veterans of SNCC who still are organizing poor communities and industrial workers in the Deep South toward a visionary socialist future. But activists are similarly involved in nearly every community of the United States.
Having spend 23 years as an activist in Mississippi myself, working with dozens of others who are still there dedicating their lives to a struggle that has been their concern since the fifties and sixties, all of us working at subsistence incomes among the people we were organizing, never twinging as we patiently discussed capitalism and socialism in the course of struggling for desperately immediate material needs, I cannot see anything but racism in Niles' post. Finally I see why Niles wants to deny that such a thing exists.
Like my former best friend and comrade of the sixties and seventies, Noel Ignatin (now Ignatiev) of Race Traitor (in those days Noel was an industrial worker; now he is a Harvard academic), Niles spews a glib and an ostensibly radical ideological line, laced with an occasionally clever turn of phrase, which on close examination becomes a pretext for abstention from struggle and dismissal of those who are engaged.
What "hard work" have you done Niles? And if you have done any, why are you moved to defame others who have worked so long and hard? Finally, why do you put the words "the cause" in quotation marks? If you have no convictions of your own, please leave those of us who do in peace. Find yourself another hobby.
Ken Lawrence