>>Kind of like "anti-globalist" hippie kids whose parents are tax attorneys
with >>401K plans.
Henwood wrote:
>Eh? Students can only be authentic radicals if their parents are working
>class?
I now write:
Christ almighty, I knew my comment would incite such a response from someone. Carrol probably isn't shocked and amazed that this "someone" turned out to be Doug.
First of all, I was merely trying to draw a parallel, however poorly executed (and perhaps poorly conceived), between the absence of political self-reflexivity in a) Hitchens' critique of inside-the-Beltway toadyism (since he is part and parcel of that whole culture) and b) young idealist progessives' critique of so-called "globalization" (since in many instances their parents' affluence and liberalism has a lot to do with their social class location in the transnational capitalist division of labor).
Surely I reserve no role for myself as some Grand Inquisitor who should righteously determine who can and who can't participate in radical social movements. But the fact of the matter is, as the data you provide indicates, the movers and shakers in the youth wing of the "anti-globalization" movement come from upper middle-class households, from the liberal strata of the technical-professional salariat. While in principle I have no problem if a slice of the technical-professional strata decides to commit "class suicide" by leading and participating in movements that appear to contradict their immediate short-term material interests, I think it would be foolish to ignore that an "anti-globalization" movement anchored by disaffected upper-middle class kids has distinct ramifications.
For example, said leadership makes it easy to pigeonhole and dismiss critics of so-called "corporate globalization" as spoiled and ungrateful brats, a la Tom Friedman et. al. (the same accusations hurled at the New Left -- refer to literature cited by Pugliese). Admittedly, when such constructions of the "movement" and its motivations are issued by defenders of transnational capital, they are done so for purely cynical reasons. But the reason such constructions resonate with a lot of people (i.e. appear to be "common sensical" constructions) is because they are grounded in partial, refracted, distorted truths about the world (i.e. that's how most successful ideologies work). Kids from affluent and liberal backgrounds are freer to take political risks when they are young, and by in large they are sheltered from the harsher consequences of their "deviant" behavior than are their less privileged peers. When there is a discernible connection b/w a) the workings of a global capitalism which channels so much wealth and education into the hands of an elite fraction of the salariat, and b) the material comfort and cultural capital that allows the children of this elite fraction to take political risks with low costs, it is no mystery which there might be pseudo-populist baiting of "movement" activists as being spoiled and ungrateful brats. (Sorry for that butchered sentence).
Moreover, not only is movement leadership and participation dominated by children of the liberal upper middle-class problematic from a "public relations" or a "coalition building" point of view, perhaps more importantly it is problematic b/c kids reared in liberal upper middle-class families undeniably have a certain common perception as to what is wrong with so-called "corporate globalization" that is distinctively different from that of Third World workers/peasants or the First World working class (not that there is homogeneity of viewpoint among any of these social groupings).
I suppose this is an obvious point, but I don't have time here and now to develop it much further. Suffice it to say that not only is upper middle-class "anti-globalization" activism a politics of empathetic altruism (which can be viewed as either a good thing or a bad thing), but it is also unconsiously and subtly a politics of technical-professional class self-interest. Perhaps it is unkind of me or even heretical of me to say it, but I think there's something to the claim (usually voiced by neo-liberal apologists, or paleo-Marxist Prometheans like Heartfield on this list) that a certain (liberal upper middle-class) segment of the anti-globalization movement opposes the further incorporation of Third World land and labor into circuits of capital accumulation b/c they want the Third World to be preserved in some kind of imagined exotic splendor, free of the rationalized and predictable built and social landscapes of advanced capitalism. In other words, this is the "anti-globalization" politics of the First World eco-tourist who vacations by trekking around the Tibetan plateau. Instead of fighting to transform the heartlands of the empire -- i.e. the deadening physical landscapes of strip malls, theme parks, and subdivisions, and social landscapes of shopping, infotainment, alienating and time-consuming work, etc. -- into red-green paradises (hence obviating the need to "get away" to faraway paradises), this creature takes a stand against "corporate globalization" in order to preserve the escape hatch of the "unruined" Third World (and I should add only someone of a upper-middle class background has the financial security but perhaps more importantly the liberal education and cultural disposition to _want _ to do this). In other words, if one puts on his or her Freudian-Marxist thinking cap, I think it is possible to frame the peculiarly "modernist anti-modern" (for only moderns can be anti-modern) dimensions of the anti-"corporate globalization" movement as being about the _cultural_ politics of the liberal upper-middle class.
Am I on to something remotely plausible here, or am I just projecting my resentments about being a starving graduate student (and hence unable to travel anywhere) ?
John Gulick
P.S. If anybody sees me posting to this list in the next seven weeks, please shame me to no end -- I need to fininsh my dissertation _tout suite_.