the left used to be about hope, optimism, the future. Now many of us are backward looking, romanticizing peasant agriculture or the horny-handed working class of old, quaking with terror over the risks of biotech, secretly or not so secretly rooting for an economic meltdown. It's a tough package to sell.
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I certainly won't claim to be a scholar of Marx but it's my understanding that one of his core ideas (and, if I'm right, one of the most interesting and exciting) is that we must build a more evolved form of modernity using the incomplete, exploitative and, ultimately, unsustainable one capital has made as our imperfect foundation.
To me, this means an acceptance of or, at least, an attempt to understand, the form of modernity we've now got so a better one can be fashioned.
But it seems that many people have concluded that since capital has brought modernity and many of its features are quite horrific, the only way forward is to go backward (which is, since the past has gone forever, really a step into the void).
I note for example, that at times when a list member like Dennis Redmond would mention video game culture in an attempt to describe an element of the contemporary moment, this was often ignored or dismissed as being unrelated to *revolution* or, in less ethereal responses, the basic ground work of fighting injustice.
And perhaps, in an extremely strict sense it is. But I think it's important to know the impact Sony's had on world culture -- to learn from that and see what useful and liberating things can come of it (if anything) -- instead of seeing only evil, mindlessness, the continuing slack jawed unglory of *boobus Americanus* and culture destruction.
There are many other examples of this I'm sure.
.d.