> Is the left afflicted by a poverty of ideas and
> longterm strategic thinking? Liza Featherstone and
> Christian Parenti think so. They argue that
> activistism, a type of hyper-pragmatism on the left,
> is tied to a deep-seated anti-intellectual tendency in
> the US. They've co-authored a call for activists to
> take ideas seriously -- something the right did
> decades ago, facilitating the ascendancy of the
> neo-liberal project.
Yaa, that's what we need. "Get off the streets and picket lines and into meetings and conferences!"
In the US (and elsewhere, to some extent), Noam Chomsky is probably the most influential intellectual alive in the left today. He does not go to socialist scholars conferences, although he does go to rinky-dink towns in Montana to talk to college students, lefty groups and on community radio stations. He also says there is not that much to think about. People for the most part recognize their problems and just need to organize together to fight unjust authority, especially in the workplace. He also says white collar radicals who think they have some important political thinking to do are just fooling themselves and have some kind of Leninist syndrome.
I volunteer for a local anarchist-oriented infoshop, but one of the main reasons I do so is I see it as a place people can make contact with other like-minded people. They can come in, drop off flyers or pick one up, put a consignment pamphlet on our rack or buy one, browse or buy a book, or talk to people in the store about what is going on. I see it as being a nexus for human contact being more important than information people might get from a book Proudhon wrote. We sell Homage to Catalonia, and I picked it up and read it, and enjoyed it, and probably learned something useful, but I learn useful things talking to living people about what is going on now locally, not just from dead people about what was happening in 1936 in Spain.
If there's any front line of workers struggling like this it is strike and picket lines. There was one under Grand Central Station in front of the Oyster Bar for months. Where was there any picket line solidarity other than from other locals? All the soi disant radicals were probably too busy upstairs in Grand Central's Hudson News browsing the magazines they carry there - Z, The Nation, The Progressive, Science and Society, Mother Jones, Anarchy, International Socialist Review etc.
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