THE NEW LEFT TAKES OVER AMERICAN UNIONS

Paul Henry Rosenberg rad at gte.net
Thu Feb 18 11:52:55 PST 1999


sokol at jhu.edu wrote:


> At 09:38 AM 2/16/99 -0500, Max Sawicky wrote of Joel Kotkin:
> >Gawd what a loathesome creature . . .
>
> Perhaps, his sucking up to the market-schmarket crowd is nauseating. But
> that does not mean that all his arguments are rubbish. Au contraire, he
> makes a few valid points. Among them is his argument that the economy is
> woirking against the unions as we know them. He cites several reasons that
> need a serious discussion:

Yes, but he doesn't cite them that way, as subjects that merit serious serious discussion. He cites them as simple, quasi-natural facts of life that stupid leftists just don't get.

In this regard Kotkin is much like the anti-Clinton left in its virulent attack on feminists for not joining the rightwing crusade against Clinton.

The meta-trope here is to fix on a problematic situatuation, and mis-identify it as a simplistic, self-explanatory, contextless "fact" that leftists just don't get.

Because we get so little space or opportunity, the temptation is always to respond with flat denials.

But of course this involves a tacit acceptance of the anti-left assumption that non-contradiction is the natural state of affairs, and we can only attain legitimacy by presenting ourselves in a nutralistic non-contradictory mode.

Given this set of constraints, irony, sarcasm and other tropes--the more humorous the better--are more effective, honest, and liberating than direct counter-argument.

This leads to one final observation: the "politics of personal destruction" has served to give a bad name to sarcasm and the like. There's all the difference in the world between mocking the expression of hegemonic ideology and simply attacking individuals in place of making substantive arguments. There's been such a long unbroken flood of the latter it's no wonder that people can barely recognize the former at all.

-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net

"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"



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