[lbo-talk] Re: Potter's Addition (RE: Reply to Kelley)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Apr 22 09:42:54 PDT 2005


Kelley:
> I guess Wojtek you sound confused about what you think the enemy is. I
> dunno. You know I love you, so I don't want to cause a breach, though of
> all the people on the list, you seem like the one least likely to let such
> a difference keep us from being friends and colleagues.
>

I think you misinterpret my arguments, or perhaps I am not expressing myself clearly enough. So let me clarify things a bit as much as I can.

I do not consider any class of people as my enemies - not even the "yuppie" or "corporate executive class" - let alone the working class or lumpenproletariat class. Such concepts are simply too broad and to abstract to my taste. I met people form each class - befriending some of them, ignoring or even despising other - so I cannot say with any intellectual honesty that people form classs X are friends and people from class Y are foes. It is far more complex than that.

Second, I never argued that lumpensproletariat (or anyone else) is to blame for their own fate or that such fate is determined primarily by their personal characteristics. All I was saying is that such characteristics should be taken into account together with structural factors. Most leftist mantras concentrate on the structural factors or worse yet, abstractions with no empirical meaning, and forget the human agency. My level of tolerance for abstract bullshit and text exegesis is rather low - as I discovered while majoring in philosophy as an undergrad. I prefer good old materialistic cause and effect explanations.

As I said time and again the object of my criticism was not the "trailer trash" or the service men (albeit this is not the social environment I would choose to live - even though I had had quite a few friends from those milieux) - but the people who romanticize these social groups for one or another reason. Quite frankly, I am bored to tears with most leftist mantras and received wisdom, especially those featuring 'da people' - they are stale unimaginative recitations of the receiving wisdom adding nothing relevant to political discourse or our understanding of human behavior. It came to the point that I do not even bother to open The Nation or Dollars & Sense to which I still subscribe out of loyalty and I dropped subscriptions to other left mags years ago - not only do they all sound like a broken record, but their fear mongering gets really on my nerves.

Finally much of what I am saying should be viewed in the context of my personal experience. I hate the United States - or rather what it became under Reagan and the Bushes (it was a very different country before that, but I do not have the first hand experience of it). I am astonished by the amount of creepiness that oozes from this land today. I've seen higher life forms creeping on the walls of shithouses than coming from the institutions of this seemingly democratic and civilized country. What happened?

I understand that some of it is like a bad marriage. At the beginning, you have high expectations and are all excited about your new partner, but then you realize that he/she has some less than desirable characteristics that you did not initially notice. At first, you try to ignore or rationalize them, telling yourself that it could be worse or that it would change. But it does not change and it becomes more and more annoying to the point that it is driving you crazy. It may appear as a rather trivial thing for an outside observer, but you've had enough of it, it clouds your entire relationship and you cannot stand it anymore. So some of it is like an old housewife's bitching - frustrated with her annoying husband yet unwilling to file for a divorce on the fear of losing her position, stability, and life savings and investments - and complaining to her friends how unhappy she is.

But personal frustrations aside, things seems to be getting objectively worse in this country and make one wonder where it will all end. So one would like to see some fresh thinking what is to be done. But what you hear is the mindless recitations of the received wisdom and the failure to realize that the people whom the left claims to represent are in fact on the other side of the barricade. That is not frustrating anymore, but hopeless.

Wojtek



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