> > It has been my experience that working with a variety of leftists
>> from a diversity of traditions (from left-wing Catholics and
>> Protestants to anarchists and Marxists, from feminists to
>> Pan-Africanists, of different races, nations, cultures), as well as
>> learning from the successes and failures of leftists in the past
>> from books and oral histories, has been on balance invigorating, for
>> all frustrations that necessarily come with political activism on the
>> left in Japan and the USA, that is political activism with few tiny
>> victories and many, many monumental defeats (for which, unlike
>> some leftists here, I do not blame my fellow leftists in Japan and the
>> USA -- in my humble opinion, most of them did what they could and
>> fought good fights, while making many mistakes like all human
> > beings). I wouldn't exchange it for anything. If I thought it otherwise,
>> I would just tend to my intellectual garden, like Candide.
>
>Michael Albert gave a talk at one of the Z Media Institutes (the audio
>file should be somewhere on the sprawling ZNet pages) where he said that
>US activist groups over the years had a decent amount of traffic from
>newcomers. Attracting new people, he said, wasn't the primary problem.
>The main problem was retention.
Speaking of retention, first of all, there is a problem of historical flows and ebbs (though I doubt that this is what Michael Albert was addressing). The Red Purges destroyed the Old Left; and the end of the Vietnam War (or at least the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam), the defeat of ERA, attacks and assassinations of radical black leaders, partial victories won through feminist, civil rights, and other social movements, stagflation and neo-liberal counter-offensives, and a host of other factors decomposed the left-wing upsurges of the 60s and 70s. We could say, in hindsight, that activists who had emerged in the era of working-class upsurges might have fared better when the political tide turned against them if they had known how to retreat with the least damages to their ranks. The common error, we might say, was that they were unprepared -- perhaps overestimating the strength of the left -- for capital's counter-attacks (an alternative interpretation is that they were unprepared to take the struggle to the next level at the height of the upsurge, underestimating the strength of the left, relinquishing their political independence and having their strength merely taken advantage of by liberals and social democrats).
>There is some popular curiosity to hear something new. But something on
>the contemporary US left (or activists or whatever) does turn people off.
>Not everyone, obviously, but enough to whither our base. Since Yoshie
>dismisses repeated first-hand experience from various posters as not
>factual in these matters, I'd suggest that the common sight of the
>revolving door of folks checking out a group and turning right around to
>slip out the door is the evidence. Of course, I've neither photographed
>nor cataloged any of this to form a case to be presented here...
I'd be interested in reading sociological research on the issue of retention in political activism on the left. Revolving doors aren't necessarily wrong if:
(1) newly minted activists check out some groups and (finding them inadequate for a number of reasons, having learned what they could but seeing there is no more to learn from them, realizing that the primary issue[s] they want to work on can't be addressed through them, etc.) quit them and join some other groups;
or
(2) activists -- due to the need to rest and breathe or reasons related to their work, education, family responsibilities, etc. -- drop out of activism altogether for a period of time, and come back later when they can.
(1) and (2) are not really problems of "the left," in my opinion, _except_ that, with radically inadequate child care, elder care, etc., many US activists, especially women, must confront (2) more often than they like, which left-wingers should do much more to address politically.
There is another problem, (3) the problem of retention due to the lack of enduring institutions on the left to which activists, new and old, can turn. In the USA, we don't have political parties, be they social democratic parties like SPD in Germany or, to their left, Trotskyist parties in France (which made the error of running no less than three Trotskyist candidates in the recent election that made international news). When you don't have them, revolving doors tend to revolve faster. In nations where left-wingers actually have political parties that win seats and offices, there are jobs and careers to be had because of party membership and political participation. Let's face it -- that's not a negligible incentive for staying involved. On the other hand, left-wing electoral parties that actually win seats and offices inevitably de-radicalize (the phenomenon of "Eurocommunism"). When left-wingers find themselves in a position to govern the nation on behalf of capital, they will say goodbye to revolution, sooner or later (and they actually help to manage politico-economic crises when social forces to their left do emerge -- e.g., France '68).
If you have a solution to (3), you tell us. -- Yoshie
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