Who taught you to corrupt debate by inventing such lies? Hichens and Cockburn?
Point of personal privilege: Never, swine! I left my parents' modest home at age sixteen, worked at minimum wage until that became impossible, then at subsistence until I got married and had kids, then low-wage work in production until I moved to Mississippi, then again at subsistence for almost two decades (living on government cheese for several years), then til today as a free- lancer/NWU-UAW member and minor office holder. Today I'm 56 years old with no set-aside pension and qualified a decade hence only for the minimum amount af Social Security.
Do you think the Wobblies who rode the boxcars for their freedom and yours were privileged? The itinerant organizers of the CIO? The kids in SNCC? Were Sojourner Truth and Mother Jones privileged? What an outrage! You can't hitch or take a bus to D.C. or the Tidewater or across the line to Beckley to learn how to function, if you can't locate any local Lynchburg reds? You can't write a sentence in solidarity with Mumia and circulate it? If you can't, then quit insulting activists. Who in the hell are you to judge us? Our work not only has meaning, but a thousand times more than your creepy idea of beatified "struggle," and a million times more than your snobbish insults here. Did you ever hear of the White Rose pacifist martyrs Hans and Sophie Scholl, beheaded by Hitler for the very activity that you disparage? Useless indeed! If you represent the future of Marxism, all is lost. Fortunately you don't.
You are the privileged mountebank Marxist, who can't accept the sometimes difficult conditions of life and privation demanded of those you pretend to represent. You'll stand up for someone whose nearby job is threatened -- maybe, if someone will take your hand and show you how it's done -- but you won't be caught dead protesting the bombing of children in Iraq, and you'll insult and ridicule those who do. There is a word for your kind, but it isn't Marxist or socialist.
I won't hold my breath for Bill Lear to denounce your personal attack, but the standards of some scholars on this list are duly noted.
KL