[lbo-talk] Rethinking Liberalism

Jim Straub rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com
Fri Apr 20 19:12:05 PDT 2007



> Ok, so what's your strategy for getting out of the left ghetto?

My favored strategy is literally, exactly, that: get the left out of the left ghetto.

1. Forced deportation of 50% of leftists from college towns and hip metropoles. 2. Stringent rules on how much time of the day leftists are allowed to talk to each other. 3. Internal culture that prioritizes outreach, organizing, results, gains, base-building, moving individuals on issues, at the expense of theory and fantasism. 4. Moratorium on discourses only relevant to or existent in left bubbles. 5. No more puppets.

Hey, we say a planned economy can work, let's set a good example with some serious planning of our own! Hah!

It would be a sort of pol pot year zero meets the popular front kind of thing... long trails of people being marched out of the bay area and madison, big piles of burning puppets and poststructuralist tomes all around....

I'm kidding. Well, maybe 70% kidding. 60%. In more seriousness I'd settle for rebuild labor movement by organizing two million new workers a year on industrial lines, use that to arrest the far-right drift and collapse in working-class share of wealth, and build groups like LA's Bus Riders Union, Providence's DARE, and let a hundred gardens bloom. Maybe really do the strict rules on time spent engaging with other leftists thing.



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