[lbo-talk] DSA Youth

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Feb 22 17:30:44 PST 2004


Lance Murdoch wrote:


>On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Chuck0 wrote:
>
>> Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> > This afternoon I did a workshop on the state of the global justice
>> > movement at a Democratic Socialists of America youth conference. We
>> > chatted about agendas and organization, or the lack of both. Several
>> > points came up that deserve wider circulation:
>
>I've read some YDS discussions on mailing lists. Here is what I imagine
>the conversations to be like in person:
>
>----
>http://listhost.uchicago.edu:443/pipermail/yds-theory/2002-August/000224.html
>
>Now, as you read Deleuze, it sounds to me as though liberation is purely
>negative, i.e., liberation is defined in terms of what we are free from,
>which for you seems to be capitalism, modernity, platonic thought, the
>state, all that "is", etc. What is troubling in this is that this sort of
>negative freedom can never exist because at least some sort of restriction
>is required in order for us to even experience a functional selfhood. And
>it is this functional selfhood in you and I that desires liberation in the
>first place.

No, it was nothing like that. It was mostly ordinary folks speaking plain English. I doubt that more than 15% of the attendees had even heard of Deleuze.

What was your point in speculating about something so wrongly?


>I'll leave these intellectuals to help prepare the revolution by
>continuing to argue about what or who is and isn't really Deluezian,
>I'm too busy giving solidarity to local (and non-local) labor struggles
>to help in this important work...

Congratulations. You're a very important guy.


>In New York it seems like there are more anarchists originally from the
>South and rural areas than from urban or suburban areas. I remember in
>Richard Linklater's low budget movie Slacker, the wise old man in Texas
>was an anarchist, not some DLC lackey.

You have some offbeat sources of information. They don't seem too accurate though.

Doug



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