Speaking of underdeveloped politics, this country is the world's capital. And so Moore has to be seen in the context of the general underdevelopment of left politics in the United States, the only politics that matters. The left-liberals at the Nation Magazine, Mother Jones; the mainstream greens; the black liberation movement; the trade unions, are all in various stages of disarray. Mostly, there has been a horrible capitulation to the Clinton administration. Even Moore has found good things to say about Hilary Clinton. This is what annoyed Cockburn, in addition to his life-style and refusal to work with grassroots groups.
On the other hand, the "principled" leftists are pretty insignificant. I of course exclude all the "Marxist-Leninist" groups who live in their fantasies. But the various groups like Solidarity, CofC, magazines like the Progressive and MR, exist on the periphery. They don't seem to be able to connect with the people at the bottom who are being victimized by the capitalist system.
One of Moore's accomplishments is that he has been able to strike some kind of chord with everyday people. This is something you can't take away from him. In previous decades, there were radicals and revolutionaries who had this kind of skill, from Eugene V. Debs to Malcolm X. It has become a lost art. What interests me about Moore is that he has this knack and it largely has to do with his sense of humor.
Yes, it's true. He has become tainted by his very success. Capitalism corrupts. On the other hand, we should not lose sight that he was the founder of the Flint Voice, a newspaper that attracted a broad working-class base. Ben Kamper, author of "Rivethead", was a co-editor. The plain truth is that these guys had closer connections to the workers than all the "working-class" Marxist tendencies in this period who were "colonizing" the factories.
Moore told the People's Daily World (who the message was obviously lost on):
"First of all, I think humor is a very effective means of communicating a message to people. I think we've all seen that too many people are turned off by the sort of soapbox kind of reaching. That stuff's good when you're preaching to the converted, but when you're trying to convert, for whatever reason, wherever we're at now in 1995 in America, it doesn't work very well. So I decided to use my sense of humor as a means to affect change, to get people thinking about the issues."
This is a big problem, isn't it?
One of the things that most typifies the "hard" left in the United States is how boring and humorless it is. When Malcolm X spoke, he knew how to ENTERTAIN people. One of the reasons rappers sample the speeches of Malcolm X is that he was witty and captivating. Think about left discourse either on the Internet or in print media. What a contrast!
Doug sent me an internal bulletin of the Spartacist League. I simply couldn't get through it. It made my hair hurt. And what about the left-liberals? Can anybody find anything to read in the Nation nowadays that doesn't put you to sleep? How about this for a sample paragraph? This is Jonathan Schell complaining about how press coverage of Paula Jones is turning people off to politics:
"Another, more worrisome reason for the public's disengagement from politics is structural. If it ever was true, as former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill famously said, that all politics is local, it no longer is. Politics, once an activity rooted in neighborhoods, unions, wards and civic associations, has migrated to television--the almost exclusive battleground of political campaigns. (Even unions, when they want to flex their political muscle, turn to TV advertising.) For ordinary citizens, politics has become mainly a spectator sport. It's amazingly easy to live in the United States today without giving a thought to public affairs. You can drop out of the whole business as easily as you can hit another channel on the remote. And when the political show is dull, people drop out in droves."
For christ's sake, what's dull is this prose and the banal thought it expresses. All these pundits like Schell, Stephen Cohen, Eric Alterman, and Michael Kazin are good for nothing but putting people to sleep.
Knock Moore all you want, but I'll bet you a dollar that there wasn't a dull moment at the Remy Martin event.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)