comments on recent threads

kelley oudies at flash.net
Wed Nov 24 05:58:04 PST 1999


i dig you a lot michael but i can't for the life of me figure out how you can assume that people on this list aren't involved. or rather, how you can suggest that some here aren't as evidenced by your apologies to the subbed activists in your closing.

At 11:18 PM 11/23/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>I want to commend Yoshie for her fine posts on many of the recent
>threads: sexism the BRC, etc. Maybe I have a special sympathy for a
>comrade who is the child of a factory worker,

then you should probably have sympathy for eric and me, as well as a number of other listers who don't run about authenticating their positions by way of their identity. but i'm not so sure that having sympathy for someone because of their identity is necessarily such a good thing. i do it myself but the epistemological conundrums involved therein are enough to make me pause and question my identifications: there is no access to truth simply by virtue of a 'standpoint'

but I think she has been
>right on the mark. Especially when she tells us to do some political
>work ourselves.

i've read yoshie and rakesh for over a year now. i've not read once from either of them about their organizing activities. nonetheless, i do not presume that either aren't activists. moreover, i do not expect them to type about it. afaict, yoshie and rakesh both type lengthy quotes and reference scholars pretty regularly.


>Why not use our talents to educate others?

there are people on this list who *are* being educated. we can imagine there are many many people reading who get something out of these debates that they simply cannot find where they are. more reasons why these debates should be had. i and others who post get appreciative mail from lurkers all the time about what we type. it is educative work in many ways. consider paula's recent comments to Katha. writing and arguing in public forums is often a life saver for workers coming to some sort of political consciousness in ways i can only hint at, but it certainly enables you to feel sane when, very often, all around you are people telling you that you're wrong.

or participate in
>organizations etc.? Get down and dirty. It just won't do to just read
>books and give impressive citations and the like. You have to meet the
>people, get to know them. Teaching workers and now prisoners has
>changed my life. So has helping to raise four kids, cooking, doing
>household chores, including cleaning toilets. Sometimes when I hear
>people on these lists pontificate (of course, I have done this too), I
>think that come the revolution, they will still be talking.

it is an email *disucssion* list so by definition it's about people sitting around talking. you can't see what they do when they aren't typing. that doesn't mean that they aren't doing anything.

whenever you say this michael i'm deeply offended because i feel like i have to whip out my activist street cred to impress you. i don't do it be.c i don't think i have to prove anything to anyone. i know what i do and have done. it's also troubling because i work my tail off to be able to get to the point of being able to pontificate and learn and read and make arguments-- something i wish all workers could do and have time for.

positing one as more important than the other doesn't seem especially helpful. coming to some sort of leftist consciousness is deeply bound up with mastering the ability to think in different ways than you've been used to *and* it often enough involves being able to articulate yourself through the kinds of academic arguments that we engage here

I'll be
>making sandwiches and doing the rest of the shit work that needs to be
>done. I remember at the last Socialist Scholars Conference, someone at
>the Monthly Review book table spilled a cup of coffee. None of the left
>scholars standing around did anything. I ran over to a large closet,
>found a janitor, borrowed a mop, and cleaned up. Earlier, I helped the
>staff set up the table. I did not notice any other intellectuals doing
>the same.

my experience with leftists activists is much the same. they sat around and waited to be served and cleaned up after too. women and men alike. i watched it happen while working with them and while waiting on them. the issue, ultimately, is about the blindness to the world around you that comes from white skin and class privilege and probably has little to do with how much of an activist you are.

i don't mean to attack you, but it seems to me, and it's clear from rakesh's response, that the post made some invidious comparisons. furthermore, as i've mentioned before, it is rather interesting that the folks who typically pound away about activism are men. that could just be a function of the fact that men far outnumber women in many of these contexts. i don't know.

nevertheless, i tend to see activists' claims about what constitutes adequate activism as rather gendered and raced. that is, the demands placed on folks to be activists often presumes a generic person with few responsibilities other than going to work every day. in other words, the model of activism bandied about is not unlike the model for any profession:

that of a white man, established in his career with not much to take care of but himself. that model of activism has little place for people who are often responsible for the bulk of childcare, for the bulk of the emotional labor and kin work involved in being a mother/wife, for the care of the infirm relatives or simply for the hour long phone calls from distressed relatives, for helping out financially and otherwise poor relatives, and for just plain dealing with the strife it causes when your relatives don't understand the activist involvements.

if you're having a hard time understanding what i mean, think of the film Norma Rae. that film captured the kinds of judgments from friends and family one must deal with in order to be an activist in ways that resonated with me that i cannot capture within the limitations of language. activist women, then, deal with challenges to the gender identity in a way men do not have to deal with.

yes, i know that plenty of folks do it all. indeed, i've often been considered one of those folks who juggled all these demands --and i lived on 2 and 3 hours a sleep at night to do so. i'm in my thirties now and i'm burnt out. i do what i can but right now i am taking the liberty of not getting involved and i think i have darn good reasons. i don't think i or rakesh or anyone should have to defend our decisions in that regard. for me, having to defend them is not different than having had to prepare for a custody battle last year: my lawyer told me that i'd be asked why i got involved and why i carted my son to protests and so on and so forth. in other words, my capacity as a mother was called into question because i wasn't the ideal model good mother who devotes her energies solely to parenting. i think that's effed up, but it is, nonetheless, a widely held belief. and, obviously, it is encoded in the juridico-legal system so it's not just about bad beliefs, but also about structural gender inequality.

i think it's also problematic to expect graduate students to be politically involved. killing a dissertation is a pain in the behind and drains you emotionally in all sorts of ways. not even to mention the fact that diss advisors regularly chatise grad students for such activities because they see them as distracting them from their goal. [and they're probably not wrong about that]. indeed, it is the case that you sometimes pay for your activism because your patrons are not convinced your 200% dedictated to the diss and so are less willing to fight for you when it comes to obtaning those scarce poorly paid adjunct positions and assistantships. i'm fortunate enough to have diss advisors who think the world of me, but i know that many grad students are not that fortunate

kelley



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