[lbo-talk] Vicious Circle (Publishing on the Left)

R rhisiart at charter.net
Tue Dec 7 19:55:28 PST 2004


At 07:05 PM 12/7/2004, you wrote:
>martin mschiller at pobox.com, Tue Dec 7 16:45:44 PST 2004, [lbo-talk]
>Publishing on the Left (Marketing Dork & Unemployed Pride):
>>On Dec 7, 2004, at 1:17 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>>>Everyone knows there are very few revolutionaries in the U.S. Why is
>>>that, and can anything be done about it? If you don't address those
>>>questions, who cares what you think?
>>
>>I thought that everyone knew that there are very few revolutionaries in
>>the us because there is no clearly articulated compelling strategy for
>>revolution. Everybody just rolls their own.
>
>Leftists in the United States have neither a mass social democratic party
>nor any organization to the left of it that amounts to a "political
>party". Leftists in most of the nations that have mass social democratic
>parties built them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
>but American leftists, in part because they were repeatedly defeated by
>the white supremacist elite in the South, missed the boat.

also, in part because their agendas were co-opted by the duopoly if they had enough wide spread support; because they were the target of often violent discrimination; because they tended to be short sighted regarding involving racial and ethnic minorities, most often using them rather than involving them when they did pay any attention to them; and for other reasons.


>As an old saying goes, opportunity has to be seized by her forelock --
>behind she is bald. Since American activists and organizers have neither
>a mass social democratic party nor any political party to the left of it,
>they are practically forced to go on their own, developing myriad
>associations focused on discrete issues and identities (many of which do
>not last very long); and since there are so many one-issue and
>one-identity associations that come and go, it's hard for them to get
>together and work out a common long-term political agenda and strategy and
>tactics to advance it. That's a vicious circle.

it's a downward spiral.

R


>>I thought that's why there was an effort on this list to articulate a
>>humane slogan for the left recently, in order to attract the attention of
>>a popular audience - against the time when there's some news of
>>revolutionary import to pass along to them.
>
>If you add up audiences of all efforts of individuals and organizations on
>the left, from tiny to relatively big, they would probably add up to
>something like the size of "a popular audience," but the problem is that
>members of the audience are not all politically active, nor are the
>politically active among them consciously working together to advance the
>same political agenda. "Everybody just rolls their own," as you put it.
>--
>Yoshie



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