On Apr 20, 2007, at 10:12 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
> 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.
Point 5 I can enthusiastically support.
But the rest, well, there are some problems. The "college towns and hip metropoles" are surrounded by lots of what you seem to think are "real people." As I remember New Haven, it was a classic old northeastern city filled with poor people. As I remember Charlottesville, it was surrounded by people who worked in construction and in farm implement stores. The Brooklyn zip code containing Williamsburg, the national capital of hip, is almost half Latino and full of poor people. Soho shares a zip code with Chinatown, which is also full of poor people. It's not as if the problem is massive spatial mismatch.
And it's not as if some of this hasn't been tried before. In the late 1960s, Bob Fitch and Bob Avakian (among the co-founders of the Revolutionary Union) moved out of Berkeley into a working-class town to organize the masses, and the strategy flopped. Some of that Berkeley crowd moved to Detroit and started Labor Notes, an effort you sound contemptuous of. In the 1970s and 1980s, the SWP tried industrializing, and it flopped. Maybe there's a problem when people parachute in from outside, in both the geographical and social senses.
With 3, you've hit a pet peeve of mine (and my activistism co- authors). The American left has long "prioritized" results over thinking. That's the culture of community organizing as well as the labor movement. They haven't worked very well, have they?
Doug