> >From Cooper's piece:
>
>"Hicks' more diplomatic tone is a special challenge to the left. It's the
>left, after all, that lays claim to independent and critical thinking. It
>should welcome Hicks' polemics as one more invitation to reflect and
>rethink. Not to run up a white flag and surrender to the right, nor to whip
>out a sledgehammer and try to beat Hicks -- or Horowitz for that matter --
>into the ground. But rather to rise to the debate and confront some of the
>thornier issues raised by Hicks' apostasy. Must the narrative of the left
>remain rooted in victimization? Can race politics be transcended without
>abandoning a critique of racism? Can the left, in short, get past the dusty
>cant of the last 30 years and conjure a proactive vision with popular
>appeal?"
>
>> http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/27/cover-cooper.shtml
>
>Good questions not only for LA leftists (whose world I briefly inhabited in
>the mid-80s), but for members of this list -- especially the last question.
I'm all for asking tough questions, and I'm a big fan of Cooper's, but really. This guy is hanging out with Horowitz, a really low form of life. To accuse the left of being thickheaded and then going to join Horowitz is like cutting out a chunk of your own brain. I wish Bob Fitch would commit some of his stories about Horowitz at Ramparts to print.
But that aside, this "victimization" thing is a bit of a canard. What, and whom, are we talking about exactly? If you believe that capitalist society is based on exploitation and systematic discrimination, is that a discourse of victimization? Most leftists I know believe the people who get the short end of those social processes should organize and fight back. Is that victimization too? Just what is the "dusty cant"? We give up talking about imperialism too because it lack appeal? Do we overlook Dennis Kucinich's pro-life position because that's dusty cant that limits our appeal? And what are the centerpieces of this lustrous proactive, popular vision? Higher wages, better social protections? What leftists (and who are they/we, exactly? The Nation? lbo-talk? The Spartacist League? The AFL-CIO?) don't talk about those? What about the incredible growth in activism and consciousness among young people, lots of it around economic and class issues? And how would talking to Horowitz help matters? If he didn't have all that right-wing money behind him, his audience would be smaller than ours.
Doug