>Some "activists," specifically those who, as Ehrenreich puts it, those in
>the business of competing for "crumbs" of access offered up to liberal
>leadership deserve bashing. We might disagree on who those are, still, I
>would be interested if you are even willing to identify a single "leader"
>who you would categorize as a sell out. If you are not able to do so-and
>you know as well as I do that there are plenty-is an indication of a
>quasi- Stalinist worship of leadership and authority on your part, one
>which would probably find great resonance with many others on this list,
>but is one which responsible progressives are justifiably suspicious of.
In most organizations I have been in, I have been the biggest pain-in-the-ass opposition to the leadership that existed, so my "worship" of leadership is precisely the form I have specified: I think unnuanced denunciations are pretty useless. Are there sellouts? Of course. But it is rarely an either-or situation, but of honest compromises and occasional wish-fulfillment verging into incremental personal aggrandizement. And playing denunciation games is the real sectarian Stalinist project, looking for thought crimes.
My basic approach to politics is to assume the best motives of my opponents, even when I am denouncing their actions or strategies. Maybe they have bad motives, but it rarely contributes much to say so. Either the criticism of strategy holds up on its own, regardless of the motives of the leadership being criticized, or the criticism is weak, in which case no matter how corrupt the leadership, people won't trade something for even an honest nothing.
I'll denounce the policies of any number of organizations and their leaders, from poor union strategies by labor leaders to liberal compromises by NOW or the NAACP. But I generally avoid assuming bad motives, since criticizing bad strategy choices should be sufficient.
>In any case, the principle you endorse, that rank and file must always
>uncritically accept and defend the prerogatives of leadership of
>organizations ostensibly set up in their interest has proven to be just as
>demobilizing and counterproductive as the anti-organizational tendencies
>you identify.
Again, to repeat, I've written for LABORNOTES and support rank-and-file challenges to leadership in unions and any other organization, especially since that is usually where I have been in most organizations I've been a part of. What I was criticizing is unnuanced denunciations of other peoples' leaders, not because the criticism may be false, but because it rarely accomplishes much other than sowing divisions between different parts of the progressive movement.
>Finally, your personal history, which you repeatedly trot out here, would
>only be relevant if past associations of self-described progressvies were
>any kind of reliable guide to where their true loyalties rest. For every
>Noam Chomsky there are five "apostates" as they have been described on
>this list: take your pick-Norman Podhoretz, Donna Shalala, Marvin Olasky
>the list goes on and on. My sense is that you are much closer to the
>latter than to the former.
Which just goes to show how full of shit you are. Okay, I'm rewriting the rest of this sentence to edit out some of what I wrote, but you really should learn that biography is a far better guide to motives than what folks write on an email list. I have been doing left activism nearly nonstop for the last fifteen years of my life and consider myself, if anything, far more socialist than when I started. It is people like you looking for apostates and thought crimes that destroy the Left.
> Your decision not to vote for Nader, even in a state where it
>doesn't matter, is therefore a deliberate sabotaging of these
>non-electoral efforts.
No, my vote for David McReynolds is a statement that I think honest socialist third party work is a far better model than the Green Party approach has been. And its a statement of respect for a person who shows respect for other activists, despite his severe disagreements with them.
-- Nathan Newman