> >From the excerpt:
>
>"The two questions at the heart of this work are, first, how and why
>the critical or "Left" tradition became so impotent and irrelevant
>in the face of this, possibly the greatest crisis of human
>civilization, and second, whether we might not envision a new
>emancipatory politics to gather up the scattered energies and
>fractured remnants of the Left, give them a coherent form, and place
>them again on the stage of world history as a power to be reckoned
>with. These two questions have haunted me for the past twenty years,
>as I have tried to account for the painful failure of most
>contemporary social movements to succeed in dislodging dominant
>systems of power."
>
>The awful part is not the prose, which is bad enough. It's that the
>guy doesn't have any historical sense. For instance, "the painful
>failure of most contemporary social movements to succeed in
>dislodging dominant systems of power" means . . . what, exactly? On
>the one hand, why would anyone assume that their good intentions and
>hard work would entitle them to being part of such a disruption of
>the dominant systems of power? (Does that include patriarchy?
>monotheism? capitalism? racism?)--I mean, how many such
>"dislodgings" have there been in the last 2000 years? 3? On the
>other hand, you have to ask, did feminism fail? Queer politics? the
>civil rights movement? Methinks their assumed irrelevance is a sign
>of how well they succeeded.
Feminism, queer politics, and the civil rights movement have succeeded to the extent that goals of the liberal wing of the aforementioned social movements -- legal and cultural equality between men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and whites and blacks _of the same class_ -- not only did not contradict the necessary conditions of capital accumulation but may have in part served to facilitate their transformation in the transition from the New Deal/Great Society model to the neoliberal one. For instance, old-fashioned sexism, homophobia, and racism are far less functional to accumulation based on predominantly service sector industries than the new culture of post-everything multiculturalism -- itself a marketable commodity! -- is (an entertaining movie _The Full Monty_ illustrates this point very well). At the same time as liberal goals of the three social movements have become new norms of neoliberal capitalism, however, working-class members of critical mass bases of the formerly existing movements -- working-class women, queers, and blacks -- have come under intensified class warfare from above, without the same degree of support from their erstwhile allies: petit-bourgeois women, queers, and blacks, many of whom have benefited from the limited successes of the movements and now feel that they don't need the movements any more . . . or at least not as much as they used to.
Also, it should be noted that John Sanbonmatsu' involvement in grassroots activism was, according to his own words, mainly in the area of anti-nuclear/anti-intervention work -- the toughest nut to crack in the empire, for obvious reasons:
***** In the end, none of the movements I participated in over the years, however, won any outright victories. The nuclear freeze movement, it is true, did succeed in ameliorating U.S. nuclear war-fighting rhetoric, and it spurred the Reagan Administration to set the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) process in motion. The anti-intervention or movement, however, though it might have forestalled a direct invasion of the region by American troops, in the end it proved unable to keep the contras from destroying, forever, the early tender promise of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Despite some tentative steps toward democracy in the region, the overall balance of power in Central America between landed oligarchs and the landless poor has not changed. Nor has any peace movement of the postwar era forced any serious reevaluation or reform of America's imperial foreign policies.
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/pomoprincexcerpt.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>