You're so right, we must beware of false friends. What I worry about is that we'll have folks on the barricades (should we be so lucky as ever to find ourselves on barricades) checking everyone's credentials: "Are you or have you ever been a member of the Republican party?"
There are many barricades. Bove (who was on my side of the tear gas at Seattle) is very likely an old-fashioned French rural chauvinist and champion of petit bourgeous small producers, but I'm sure there were a lot of them in the crowd at the first Bastille day. What shall we do, turn them away because they favour Occitan over French, because they think women should take a back seat, because they want the Algerians out of the country? Any enemy of corporate encroachments on local democracy and good food is a friend of mine, and sort the differences out later. -- Vive la bonne bouffe!
We all have our standards.
Joanna
At 13:56 01-07-00 -0500, you wrote:
>
>
>Joanna Sheldon wrote:
>
>>
>> >Lefty? From the info in the attached article from my local rag, Bove looks
>> >distinctly like an old fashioned French rural chauvinist and champion of
>> >petit bourgeois small producers v monopoly capital. But then these days
>> >maybe that's as radical as you get.
>> >
>> >Russell
>>
>> Not as pure of heart as the rest of us, is that it?
>>
>> The Left's obsession with cleanliness threatens to ensure that it will
>> never get a chance to get its hands dirty in that cooperative venture we're
>> pleased to call a revolution.
>>
>> morosely
>> Joanna
>
>Seeing potential or actual friends as enemies is easy to do, and leftists
have
>often done it. Seeing enemies as friends is *also* easy to do, and the left
>has done that even more often. (Read the accounts of the Shanghai massacre
>in 1928.) I know nothing of Bove so I'm not taking a position on him,
>but if he is indeed a "champion of petit bourgeois small producers v monopoly
>capital" then the problem is not that he is not pure enough, the problem is
>that when the chips are down he will be on the other side of the barricades
>or with the lynch mob hunting for leftists. Go back and read some of
>Chip Berlet's posts on populists.
>
>Carrol
>
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