It's a touchy thing to get into--- who works hard, who works right, who is to blame for our historic weakness as a class and movement.  I don't want to broadly indict college people for being college people.  And it is good to have a small bastion in at least one part of society for the left. But.  I do think it's not going overboard for us to work forward from a statement like this: "Leftists (less than 5% of the population at least) talk much more to each other than to the other 95%."  I would tentatively add to that statement the idea that this fact has more to do with our weakness than most questions of ideology and strategy.  Working forward from this, I usually maintain that if people are making choices about where to put their lives, time and energy, I encourage: -Don't move to NYC, the SF Bay Area, or any liberal college town. -Don't go to college except for a specific skill or trade.  All you need to study 'poly sci', 'labor studies', or history is a library card and a job.  Don't go to grad school.  Don't become a college professor. Maybe it reeks of presumption for a 26 year old to dispense such advice so freely.  But I don't think it's crazy for us to assume that as a movement, we have enough folks organizing in Berkeley, Madison, teaching lit crit at fancy colleges, writing books about whatever textual fad is popular among the tenured gibberish pros this year.  The elan that moved generations of earlier revolutionaries to build a core of radical autoworkers in detroit, move to youngstown to organize in steel in the 30s, do radical stuff like voter reg in missippi in the 60s, open a women's liberation center in dayton ohio in the 70s, even accept the draft and organize against the war inside the army... we could make our guiding light more than our current base in universities, sects and subcultures now. Like I said, I ain't against intellectuals.  Just ones who only talk to other intellectuals. Which is plenty of em.  No? J <div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Aug 1, 2006, at 3:12 PM, Jerry Monaco wrote: > We don't try hard enough.  We don't do the work. Really? I'm not sure of that. I know lots of left intellectuals who've gone to work for unions, as researchers and organizers. They work very hard. I know lots of antiwar organizers in NYC who obsess about the fact that the antiwar movement is too white and upscale, and they try very hard to diversify it. People try. It's not clear that the audience is there. Doug </blockquote></div>