[lbo-talk] Four Hours, Once a Week

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Aug 17 13:03:14 PDT 2004


snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com, Tue Aug 17 12:31:40 PDT 2004:
>At 02:53 PM 8/17/2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>>There are immediate things that need to be done. People need affordable
>>>childcare, for instance. I see all kinds of churches offering inexpensive
>>>child care and free summer bible camps. Well...? Why not? Why let the
>>>dead guy on a stick worshippers monopolize this territory? (And it sure
>>>as shit doesn't have to be a full-time fucking job. That is one thing
>>>that annoys me about left workerism: the insistence that you give over
> >>your entire life to the movement, 24/7 slavishly "organizing". Please.)
> >
>>The obstacle is that secular leftists in the USA, on the average, have
> >become lazier, stingier, and more pie-in-the-sky than religious leftists.
>
>Dennis Redmond wrote:
> > The US Left continues to lead the world in its ability to generate
> > circular firing squads.
>
>Carrol Cox wrote:
>Are you or are you not a member of that firing squad?
>
>If not, then the people you criticize are not
>members of the left, for if they are, then you
>are firing at them, i.e. are a member of the
>firing squad.

You can't create anything on the left (or on any other point on the political spectrum) by spending neither time nor money -- that is just a fact.

How did Hugo Chávez win a landslide victory? Luckily, oil prices have gone up, and he, already holding the levers of state power, could spend money (take that, capitalists!), and the money was well-spent by tireless Bolivarian organizers: e.g.,

"Ms. [Evelyn] Uzcanga's role has been to spend up to 15 hours a day tramping along narrow passageways between ramshackle homes, talking to people, looking for voters. With her son Daniel - who is 5 and, coincidentally, somewhat resembles the chunky president - at her side, she would peer into doors and stop by shops, pulling aside people and peppering them with questions" (Juan Forero, "Chávez Loyalists Troll Venezuelan Barrios for the Undecided," <em>New York Times</em>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/international/americas/15venezuela.ready.html">August 15, 2004</a>).

Leftists in the USA are light years behind leftists in Venezuela; the latter are defending what they have already won and are poised to winning more; the former, first and foremost, need to create the ranks of organizers and activists willing to spend time and money organizing to break through "the corrupt two-party system favoured by the oligarchy" (Tariq Ali, "The Importance of Hugo Chávez: Why He Crushed the Oligarchs," <em>CounterPunch</em>, <a href="http://counterpunch.org/tariq08162004.html">August 16, 2004</a>).

BTW, anyone who has ever visited Columbus, OH knows that my partner, a leftist who is a Presbyterian, union man, and public-sector worker, is far more generous with his time and money than I am. Then, he does more housework than I do, too. Behind every female leftist there is a good man (or woman). :-)

Yoshie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040817/b0e17eb6/attachment.htm>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list