> The fixation on consumption is more than simply not Marxist. I fail to
> see how it's progressive. Seriously, how is it in sync with your goals?
I thought this started out as a complaint about some kinds of activist groups driving people off by fretting over (or, worse, acting authoritarianly about) individual lifestyle choices. But now it seems to be a general critique of -- presumably, since the discussion is explicitly vague -- individual expressions of certain kinds of positions about, I suppose, what people eat, drink, wear, drive, watch, and otherwise consume.
Are you complaining about activist groups butting into your lifestyle choices, or are you taking the position that *no* individual choices have political consequences unless or until they reflect political choices made by "mass movements"? I see that you've said such groups are "not progressive", but that doesn't seem like much of an argument and, as description, it's both thin and vague.
> It's stoicism, an attempt to extricate one's self from the evils of
> "consumerism" through self-denial.
Wow, it's *not* any sort of Stoicism I recognize, at least, not in anything more than a *very* attenuated, metaphorical sense. Stoic self-denial expressed itself chiefly as a kind of pursuit of indifference to the point of celebrating apathy. Read Martha Nussbaum for a contemporary position heavily indebted to classic Stoicism -- of course, Nussbaum is a kind of liberal, so her taking ethical claims seriously is bound to anger *true radicals*. Or something.
But stoicism language simply isn't a very accurate description of the kinds of activists I think you're talking about; the last people to pursue indifference or celebrate apathy, they always strike me as more like the religious fundamentalists I grew up around than like stoics, at least in the sense that they too had trouble dealing with complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.
I don't think activist groups of the sort you're criticizing are very political in the leftist sense; rather, they're groups trying to express cooperatively (or not so cooperatively, as the case may be) the practical implications of a certain set of chiefly moral, as opposed to political (in the marxist sense, anyway) positions.
You may not share those positions: maybe you're wrong about that, maybe they are. That devil lives in those details. But to argue, tout court, that any such group is necessarily reactionary requires more than you've said here.
Perhaps I'm just not radical or not marxist (or Leninist?) enough to think that all moral discourse is merely a tool in the furtherance of class domination, a view which I regret repeating because it must surely be a caricature of an actual position I've simply misunderstood.
I'm skeptical that anyone really believes and consistently lives their life as if that were true, that is, as if morality were merely a mask for the operations of social power, and nothing but. Old Marx certainly didn't live that way, not if the Wheen biography is remotely accurate. (FWIW, I take Bernard Williams' reading of Nietzsche's meta-ethical critique of "slave morality" to be on point here.)
Kendall Clark