>chucko wrote:
>
> >Do I sense some jealousy here?<
>
>funny, that's exactly what i was thinking. and, 'flat-footed' is an
>understatement.
No kidding. As Judy B said in her Rethinking Marxism talk which pissed off so many people:
>What the resurgent orthodoxy may resent about new social movements
>is precisely the vitality that such movements are enjoying.
>Paradoxically, the very movements this continue to keep the Left
>alive are credited with its paralysis. Although I would agree that a
>narrowly identitarian construal of such movements leads to a
>narrowing of the political field, *there is no reason to assume that
>such social movements are reducible to their identitarian
>formations.* The problem of unity, or more modestly, of solidarity,
>cannot be resolved through the transcendence or obliteration of this
>field, and certainly not through the vain promise of retrieving a
>unity wrought through exclusions, one that reinstitutes
>subordination as the condition of its own possibility. The only
>possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but
>will be *a mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive
>ways,* a practice of contesation that demands that these movements
>articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without
>therefore exactly becoming each other....
Or, as Angela said:
>i, for one, welcome the tactical and political diversity. without that,
>movement becomes ossified.
One of the reasons I started this list was to try to do something about all these awful splits - cultural/real politics, Marxists/postmodernists, class/identity, etc. - to which we can now add anarchist/Marxist. Do the masses of Seattle protesters, whether middle-aged Steelworkers or young anarchists, have what I see as a satisfying analysis of capitalism? No, they don't. But then I couldn't have organized anything like that action, or actions (since they were very plural). We all need each other.
Doug