winners and losers

Alec Ramsdell aramsdell at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 14 13:03:15 PDT 2001


--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Alec Ramsdell wrote:
>
> >Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> >> But otherwise, I'm proud to
> >> support only losers!
> >
> >Is it sympathy for the underdog, or principled
> >consideration of right and wrong that motivate your
> >support? Or are political ties that strong for
> you?
>
> It was mainly a joke.

Well, yeah, fantasies of success and loss are powerful in effecting political organization and support. But there has to come a point when success and failure have to be faced on a different level, gauged by some reality, for a political alignment as such. And since the left seems beleagured in many ways, if it even exists, how does one gauge its success beyond the level of individual structural components? (Income polarity, union membership, racial cross-section of the prison population, etc.) That is, if the left hardly exists as a coherent political party, how can one even think in terms of success and failure? Or is it just a helpful overarching abstraction (the Left) under which to measure various structural results?

Alec

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