>On Behalf Of Michael Pugliese
> And since I'm sure that all that rant above will get the
> waters boiling
> some more, here is a side comment to add to Nathan Newman's (who I usually
> find to my right, but damn he argues his case so well!) of a few days ago.
> He expressed agreement with Old Left and Next Left/Gen X critiques of the
> New Left. (Yup I'm not saying there was one New Left, btw) of the
> New Left. Who are these GenX'ersof the Next Left
> (please banish GenX from the
> discourse!)?
The GenXers I meant were just young activists who resented the hell out of baby boomers always bemoaning the "lack of activism" by young people, while ignoring both the real activism happening and the changed economic pressures of sky-high tuition, debt and other realities facing many young activists, especially activists of color. When I was at Berkeley, I was always amazed at some of the leaders of the affirmative action movement, many of them young women of color working 20 hours plus per week plus spending time taking care of family problems, all the while fighting to keep their university from declaring them unfit to be admitted. While Max can argue for the seriousness of many New Left activists (and they were), there is an understandable resentment, even contempt by many young activists towards a movement that seemed able to drop out of the workforce for years and not expect to be completely screwed economically.
While not all young activists are hard-core union advocates, you almost never hear the contempt a Cockburn or others do for union leaders looking out for the wage interests of their members. There is an environmental consciousness among most younger activists without the antiworkerist attitudes that often laced New Left rhetoric. Even the "serious" activists Max highlights took workers seriously mostly for their abstract role as the engine of revolution, not for their more limited but vital-for-members role of protecting their wages in the here-and-now.
I was amazed during the 90s as strikes came in the Bay Area how supportive young activists were of union actions that they had barely been exposed to. I remember walking one picketline with a staff member friend of the local Hotel/Restaurant Employees union where there were a large number of latino high school activists walking the line. We joked that, unlike older activists, these young folks didn't know unions weren't supposed to be fighting militant battles. This was a commentary on the lameness of many unions over the years, but it was also a commentary on the anti-union attitudes of a lot of older activists who assumed unions weren't worth the trouble, while these younger latino kids "didn't know any better" and were out here fighting with the unions.
-- Nathan Newman