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----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 2:07 PM Subject: question re:post-war shift from economic rights to pseudoconsumer rights
> [bounced for an address oddity]
>
> 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
>
>
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