From: lasarm at transbay.net Subject: The Real Price of Thinkers NotThinking Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 15:30:53 -0700 (PDT)
I'm sitting here in my office at UC Santa Cruz and holding office hours. No students are coming, so I think I'll respond to some of the points in this article by Featherstone, Henwood, and Parenti (http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html).
"Take for example the largely failed San Francisco protest against the National Association of Broadcasters, an action which ended up costing tens of thousand of dollars, gained almost no attention, had no impact on the NAB, and nearly ruined one of the sponsoring organizations. During a post-mortem discussion of this debacle one of the organizers reminded her audience that: "We had three thousand people marching through [the shopping district] Union Square protesting the media. That's amazing. It had never happened before." Never mind the utter non-impact of this aimless march. The point was clear: we marched for ourselves. We were our own targets. Activism made us good."
Who said that the purpose of that demonstration was to have an impact on the NAB? (I presume they're referring to the 2000 NAB conference in San Francisco and the organized actions against it). The anti-NAB demonstration of 2000 was part of a growing mobilization against the media merging that has become endemic to our time. The demonstrators were not naive. They did not imagine that the President of the NAB would get down on his knees and apologize for opposing microradio. They wanted to raise awareness about the impact of the NAB and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 on the media.
And they did. Not as much as they wanted, but local talk radio shows hosted debates on the conference. The San Francisco Examiner, then part of Chron/Ex, ran an op-ed piece on the conference denouncing the death of local radio and criticizing the NAB (written by *moi*). That the demonstration had a harmful financial impact on Media Alliance (I presume) probably had just as much to do with the Alliance's finances in the dot-bomb era as anything else. But the actions were part of an accelerating educational movement against media merging that blossomed last year when the FCC proposed easing up on the agency's media ownership rules.
"Even in the case of Afghanistan, it turned out to be important to have something to say to skeptics who asked: 'What's your alternative? I think the government should protect me from terrorists, and plus this Taliban doesn't seem so great.' The movement failed to address such questions, and protests dwindled."
That is right. The movement failed to answer those questions. But why blame that on young activists??? The fault for that lay squarely on the shoulders of progressive / left intellectuals, who for the most part offered no compellingly put alternative analyses of how to respond to the crisis in Afghanistan, and who rarely communicate their ideas in ways that activists can translate into a popular program--unless you call complaining about "petit-bourgois populism" a way of effectively speaking to America.
"Activistism is also intimately related to the decline of Marxism, which at its best thrived on debates about the relations between theory and practice, part and whole. Unfortunately, much of this tradition has devolved into the alternately dreary and hilarious rants in sectarian papers. Marxism's decline (but not death: the three of us would happily claim the name) has led to wooly ideas about a nicer capitalism, and an indifference to how the system works as a whole."
While we're denouncing woolly ideas about a nicer capitalism, let's also give a haircut to hopes for a nicer Marxism. Cheezus, did anybody happen to notice what happened to millions of people under Marxist governments during the 20th-century?? No wonder people today gravitate towards what these three thinkers call "petit-bourgeois populism" (and Stalin called the Kulaks).
"We're not calling for leadership by intellectuals," Henwood, Featherstone, and Parenti conclude. But why not?? Intellectuals can't provide all the leadership. But they must provide a significant part of it. Henry George, W.E.B. DuBois, Upton Sinclair, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King Jr. all did that in their time. It is a statement of the failure of left-intellectualism today that these three denouncers of "activismism" offered up not a single contemporary equivalent to such historic figures.
This article should have addressed the failure of intellectuals, not activists, to offer constructive alternatives to the present. Thank goodness there are thousands of 20-somethings out there stamping their feet and screaming their lungs out. Most people I know sit around hoping that Bush will screw up, and are counting the months until they can do the one activist thing that they'll actually do: vote for John Kerry.
It is not the job of intellectuals to denounce activists for not thinking enough. It is the job of intellectuals to come up with useable alternative visions for the present and to present them in ways convincing to the activist masses. If they cannot do that, at least they can refrain from passing the buck.
Response to: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html
/ml