Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:36:53 -0600 (CST) From: Jayson P Harsin <jph419 at casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Hello, LBOers. Like some other young lefty lurkers on this list, I rarely post but gain quite a bit from you all in terms of an education/training. I have a question I'm sure some of you can help me with if you have the time.
I am working on a dissertation prospectus that analyzes shifts in American public discourse (and larger culture) from the New Deal to the Sixties, maybe further. In a sense, I am interested in a geneaology of "economic rights." Roosevelt's call for a "Declaration of Economic Rights" in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Speech seems to have mainstreamed a discourse (of economic rights) that hitherto larger clamored on the margins, on the tongues of Wobbly soapboxers, in Eugene Debs' oratory, in the testimonies of the Haymarket victims, etc(though there are different versions of this discourse in Progressivism and Populism, I realize). I'm particularly interested in how much of the mainstream rhetoric around economic rights clear 'til 1947 seems to be erased gradually and with enoromous effort in the nascent Cold War conjuncture around 1945-mid-Fifties. Of course, this is a major apparatus that is mobilized to terrorize lefties, linking economic rights discourse to communism, espionage (through surveillance, deportation, censorship, purges), and so on. At the same time, there seems to have beena post-war advertising blitz and much work culturally to divert attention to the society of consumption and the liberal economic reduction of citizenship to shopping. In a way similar to the economic rights that multinationals are claiming today, corporations seemed to claim after the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
Do any of you have suggestions on good work to read about this period, and particularly any arguments about shifts from economic claims on the state to rights to consume? I have already looked at a lot of the general ColdWar, Anti-Communism work, such as Chomsky's _Deterring Democracy_, Lafeber's _America, Russia, and the Cold War_, and theoretical backdrops like Marcuse's _One Dimensional Man_, and Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_.Feel free to email me off-list if you like. Gratefully, Jayson Harsin