> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Well the folks I'm talking about are involved in union work on their
> own campuses, antisweatshop activism, anti-intervention movements -
> real gritty stuff, in other words. Eric Alterman, in a Wojtek-ish
> diatribe against postie politics, quoted Nelson Lichtenstein as
> saying that the strongest student support for the University of
> Virginia's Justice for Janitors campaign came from the theoryheads in
> English. When I was at the UVa English department 20 years ago, it
> was hard to tear folks away from their Dryden.
Many posties in my experience have been very good as activists, and many materialist Marxists around campuses are often the worst of the airchair non-actors. But the best activists in my experience are usually the good-hearted moralists - yes, the non-ironic sincere do-gooders - who from a whole variety of values and life experiences feel you just got to do something. In fact, not getting all the pleasure the theoryheads (in Doug's phrase) have from analyzing precisely how we are going to hell in the handbacket, they feel an overwhelming need to do SOMETHING.
BTW we had our first Workers Rights Project meeting of the semester and had a whole crop of new folks with labor experience as undergrads or in-between years, many having worked with the new undergrad sweatshop movement. A remarkable explosion of labor experience that is quite different even from most of those involved in the Project in past years, who only got really involved in labor as law students.
The favorite slogan I've heard from the undergrad sweatshop movement came after the Wall Street Journal accused them of being pawns of the AFL-CIO. The slogan became "I'd rather be a labor tool than a corporate whore." We're thinking about adopting it for t-shirts for the Workers Rights Project.
--Nathan Newman