>Before I get to the anthropic principle, I want to endorse what Doug said about the Christian Left, having had the same experience during the mid to late 80s in Los Angeles. Moreover, I would expand his comment to include my experience during the Nuclear Freeze.
>It is almost unbelievable to me that I am finding on this list the same kind of happenings that I always seem to find whenever I look into Marxist politics. Because of my dear father, I always try to give Marxists the benefit of the doubt. And, every time, it's the same. First, Louis and others expressed themselves with what I have found to be typical Marxist uncouth. Then Louis "split" from the list having done his damage. And, in the aftermath, a fine man, Rakesh (whom, if I remember correctly, survived a consideration of his own excommunication from the list when Doug solicited private votes up or down on his presence) decided he couldn't take it and left. I've never encountered a group of Marxists where this kind of nonsense was not happening, and I believe it has something to do with Marxism itself on a very fundamental level. As such, I struggle against concluding that Marxism's role in the movement for justice and freedom and all the rest has been overall very negative!
and pathological. Marxists could indeed learn a lot from the Christian Left. <anthropopic principle part snipped>
As a non-Marxist myself, I don't think I would confine this to the Marxist left. I think there is a large strand of the left, by no means limited to Marxists who tend to behave in this fashion. I think this actually comes from a problem I mentioned in an earlier post. My view is that the left tends to alienate working people by paying too much attention to the interests of those between labor and capital -- the "new class" or "co-ordinator" class. (I briefly defined this as a class between labor and capital which tends to monopolize the conceptual and empowering work -- who without taking away the power of the owners of the means of production to make key decisions still manage to do most of the day to day decision making, and perform other control tasks such journalism, teaching, designing the means of production.) I will go farther and say that there is a coordinator bias on the left, that leading figures in the left tend to come disproportionately from a coordinator background. (There structural reason for this, and I don't know if it is avoidable.)
So where does sectarianism come in? Well dominance through verbal humilation, and the other tools of sectarianism are particulary suited to people from a coordinator background. Sure a worker can have the talents as easily as a coordinator, but coordinators are a lot more likely to get a lot of chances for practice in their day to day lives.
-- Gar W. Lipow 815 Dundee RD NW Olympia, WA 98502 http://www.freetrain.org/